To Meat or ‘No to Meat’: Do Consumers Trust Science Or Commercials More?

The study found meat consumers mostly rely on information from advertisement and not science, suggesting that public campaigns are needed to improve consumers’ ability to identify reliable information.

ALEXANDER HOLST: ‘A key issue for advocates of plant-based and cell-based meat has been the issue of how to get consumers to accept these new products. A better understanding of how consumers make choices about their food is critical, and this new study from Finland aimed to explore different motivations of consumers of red meat and plant-based foods, and whether their food choices are influenced by different information sources. The key results are instructive: Consumers who eat a lot of red meat have different motivations and use different sources to get information about their food than consumers who eat mostly plant foods…

Plant-based and cell-based meat products have the potential to radically transform human food systems; reducing the environmental damage from animal agriculture, improving the health of many consumers, and sparing millions – if not billions – of animals the suffering endured on factory farms every year. It’s in this context that researchers have been interested in improving our understanding of how consumers make food choices. In this study, the author tries to advance that understanding by analyzing differences in how consumers choose their food.

A sample of over one thousand Finnish participants filled out a questionnaire to answer questions about eight different aspects, including their attitudes, abilities, information sources they used, and food choices. The factors measured by the questionnaire include: Ability to evaluate information and motivation to seek new information; Caring for the environment and health as motivations for making food choices; Influence of scientific and commercial information sources on food choices, Consumption of red meat and plant-based food products…

The results support the hypothesis that consumers of plant-based diets and of red meat-based diets use scientific and commercial information sources differently. Consumers who eat a lot of red meat tend to get their information about food from commercial information sources. They are not as environmentally conscious as consumers with plant-based diets. Consumers with strong health motivation attended more scientific sources. In contrast, people who base their food choices on environmental reasons were more influenced by commercial sources…

The author notes that this last finding is in line with previous research that shows that environmental consumerism tends to rely on information from private advertisements… and  that “where there is a plethora of information, providing consumers with more information about the benefits of plant-based diets is not likely to be an effective strategy”. Instead, he suggests that public campaigns to improve consumers’ ability to identify reliable information might be more promising’. SOURCE…

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