The Humane and Sustainable Food Lab would spend marginal funding on research to end factory farming

By MMathur🔸 @ 2025-11-17T21:45 (+27)

Background on HSFL

The Humane and Sustainable Food Lab (HSFL) is a research lab at Stanford University dedicated to accelerating the end of factory farming. We are interdisciplinary behavior scientists, e.g., we evaluate how adding plant-based options to menus, changes to choice architecture, or documentaries affect dietary choices and attitudes towards factory-farmed products. We also do more meta-level work, such as meta-analyses and re-analyses of existing research, as well as evaluations of existing campaigns by nonprofit partners like New Roots Institute, Food for Climate League, and Greener by Default. 

See here for our lab’s philosophy and here for our 2024 year in review.

Our current funding situation

We are lucky to have ongoing support from multiple university and private sources, including Open Philanthropy. We also ordinarily have research funded by the National Institutes of Health. However, this year, as you might imagine, that has been a little more complicated than usual. The government shutdown also delayed a funding decision we’ve been expecting. 

In light of this uncertainty, we’ve scaled back a few projects, cut staff time, and delayed other projects that we’re excited about. 

Projects we’d devote marginal funding to

  1. A ‘True Cost of Food’ project that would work with Stanford Dining to formally incorporate animal welfare considerations into procurement processes.
  2. A big-data project assessing the popularity of novel plant-based options across a wide spectrum of American bars and restaurants using novel data from a commercial provider.
  3. An evaluation of how introducing a chicken-like analogue to the menu of a Northern California empanada restaurant affects (if at all) sales of meat and animal products.
  4. An ongoing evaluation of plant-based defaults at a medium-sized university in New England, focusing on whether changes to dining options create long-term norms changes (looking at both norms as in “typical” and norms as in “good”)
  5. An ongoing collaboration with New Roots Institute to draw lessons from their most successful university-based campaigns, aimed at the perennially thorny question of “how do cultures change?”

Questions or comments?

You can email me directly at mmathur [at] stanford [dot] edu. You can also give me feedback anonymously.

If you have particular research projects you are excited about and want to discuss budgetary specifics, please be in touch. We would be glad to hear from you.

If you would like to donate, you can do so here.