Reducing Meat Consumption with a Mixed Intervention vs. a Self-Monitoring-Only Intervention
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2021-07-31
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en
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To reduce people’s meat consumption the effectiveness of a self-monitoring-only intervention and a mixed intervention was tested. Through a website of the Ministry of Environment Düsseldorf (MoED), meat-eaters who intended to consume less meat were recruited by offering support regarding this goal and randomly assigned to the interventions. In the mixed intervention a packet was sent to participants’ homes including an environmentally designed shopping bag, a vegetarian cookbook, tasters, shopping list, informational brochure, and mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII)-technique. Meat consumption of 89 participants was measured over 5 weeks (1 baseline-week, 4 intervention-weeks) with a daily questionnaire, that at the same time was the self-monitoring intervention. The self-monitoring-only condition was informed that they receive the packet after trying to reduce meat consumption on their own over 4 weeks. Data of 75 participants who met the exclusion criteria was analyzed. As hypothesized, both interventions significantly reduced meat consumption, while the effect of the mixed intervention was stronger. Implications for institutions, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed.
Human’s desire of eating meat causes problems for ourselves and the environment. Global meat production contributes to climate change, accounting for about 14,5% of the total CO2 emissions (Herrero et al., 2015). This is more than all cars, trains, ships, and airplanes together (Bailey et al., 2014). High meat consumption also harms human health. It can cause obesity, diabetes, pneumonia, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer (Papier et al., 2012; WHO, 2003). Therefore, reducing people’s meat consumption would have benefits for people’s health and is seen as an effective strategy to achieve climate protection goals (Davidson, 2012). As we will see next, important reasons why people consume meat are psychological. In order to tackle this problem, we will have a closer look at those psychological factors.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen