The Humane and Sustainable Food Lab is looking for collaborators

By Seth Ariel Green 🔸, MMathur🔸 @ 2025-01-28T03:28 (+21)

The Humane and Sustainable Food Lab is a research group at Stanford that tries to get people to eat less meat. We have a lot of interventions we’d like to run, and we’re seeking partners who can help us run them in real-world contexts. In turn, we offer rigorous evaluation and expertise in experimental design and implementation. 

If this is you, or if you know someone we should talk to, please contact us at mmathur@stanford.edu.

The problem: hypothetical outcomes in the meat reduction literature

For a recent meta-analysis, we read ~1000 studies that tried to reduce meat consumption. In those papers, hypothetical/intentional outcomes predominate: picture an online survey that ends with “if I were at a restaurant right now I’d order [X]” or “after watching this video I plan to eat [Y]”. A lot of these studies had interesting designs and novel theories of change,  but a study from our lab a few years ago found that intentions do not necessarily translate into real-world changes in consumption.

A second problem: a focus on university populations

As of December 2023, there had been 11 meat reduction studies featuring randomized evaluations, at least 25 subjects in both treatment and control, delayed outcomes, and observed (rather than self-reported) consumption data. Just two of those took place outside of universities. 

What are we looking for?

Champions at companies and institutions who are excited about reducing meat consumption and can win over stakeholders. 

Our mental model is that a lot of big companies/hospitals/government agencies have someone who is worried about their organization’s environmental footprint and/or insurance bill and who wants to cut back on meat consumption to deal with it. But we also imagine this person as bottlenecked by time, resources, and expertise. We have those!

We’d love to be connected to this person wherever you work or hang out.

What studies do we want to run?

We want to test the best ideas we read in those ~1000 papers using non-hypothetical outcomes in real-world contexts. 

Some ideas we’d be excited about:

1. Randomly replace a meat product at a big, centralized workplace cafeteria with a hybrid product, e.g. a mushroom beef mix. Is there a threshold where folks almost entirely can’t taste the difference?
2. What is the price point where a plant-based alternative is compelling?  Imagine placing Beyond Meat and ground beef next to each other with Beyond Meat costing 10% or 20% or 50% less. Where do meat-eaters cross over?
3. What about older folks? If we host viewings of “Lisa the Vegetarian” or the movie Babe at retirement homes and then have follow-up discussions between residents and college students, can we change diets?
4. Some hospitals are already cutting back on meat to reduce their carbon footprints. When people go home, do they eat more meat to compensate?
5. For patients who are leaving hospitals and are slated to receive at-home care, if we randomly assign them a plant-based meal prep service, what do their diets look like 6 months later?
6. Is resistance to plant-based dog food about lack of experience? If so, what happens if we supply some pet owners with a month of free vegan dog food, along with some educational materials, and check how many of them are still on vegan diets a month later? (Our ideal measurement strategy would start with buy-in from a retailer, e.g. compensation for participation would be in the form of Chewy gift cards whose purchases we could monitor.)

What do we offer?

We know how to design and run experiments, and we have a strong  track record of producing peer-reviewed papers. We’ll tailor the intervention to local contexts and are happy to talk about evaluating existing initiatives. 

A collaboration could also be an excellent way of meeting ESG goals.

Interested (or know someone who would be?)

Great! Please contact us at mmathur@stanford.edu. 

We look forward to hearing from you!