MEAT-HOOKED: Is it harder to cut back on meat than to quit smoking?
For two decades, researchers have studied the relative effectiveness of different approaches to motivate people to reduce their meat consumption. Their results point to a stark conclusion: that it is nearly impossible to motivate large numbers of people to reduce meat consumption through campaigns that rely on convincing them it is bad for their health, the environment, and for animals. Most people already know this — and yet they continue to eat meat. Rather, meaningful meat‑reduction efforts may need to incorporate strategies similar to those that produced the remarkable success of the anti‑smoking movement. These included taxation and price increases on cigarettes, restrictions on where smoking was permitted, and bans on cigarette advertising.
PSYCHOLOGY TODAY: In her book ‘Meathooked’, the science journalist Marta Zaraska argues there are striking parallels between our “2.5 million-year obsession with meat” and forms of drug addiction. The comparison is sobering. For example, between 1975 and 2025, the percentage of Americans who smoked cigarettes dropped from nearly 40 percent to 10 percent. During the same period, meat consumption in the United States rose from 170 pounds per person in 1975 to 230 pounds per person.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Gallup polls have found that the number of vegetarians and vegans in the United States has not budged—from 6 percent in 1990 to just 5 percent in 2023. In a 2014 survey of 12,000 American adults, researchers found that 85 percent of vegetarians and vegans eventually went back to eating meat. Yet in the United States, massive numbers of people who once smoked successfully quit. (I am one of them.) This pattern suggests that giving up meat may actually be harder than giving up cigarettes
American per capita meat consumption has increased 33 percent since Peter Singer published Animal Liberation, the 1975 book that jump-started the contemporary animal rights movement. The unavoidable fact is that campaigns to promote plant-based diets have largely failed…
For two decades, researchers have studied the relative effectiveness of different approaches to motivate people to reduce their meat consumption. These techniques have included manipulations of restaurant menus, “Eat Less Meat” pledge challenges, changes in portion sizes, and exposure to gory animal-cruelty leaflets and videos…
Their results point to a stark conclusion: that it is nearly impossible to motivate large numbers of people to reduce meat consumption through campaigns that rely on convincing them it is bad for their health, the environment, and for animals. Most people already know this—and yet they continue to eat meat.
Rather, meaningful meat‑reduction efforts may need to incorporate strategies similar to those that produced the remarkable success of the anti‑smoking movement. These included taxation and price increases on cigarettes, restrictions on where smoking was permitted, and bans on cigarette advertising. HAL HERZOG
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