I am with this post requesting feedback from experienced EA:s engaged in research, funding, animal welfare and behaviouralism, Could this project be worth working on and if not - discuss alternative solutions.
Story: On some Australian long distance highways there are “Drive-and-Revive“ stops, where you get coffee and a snack for free, with the intent of drivers taking a rest from their long drives. The idea is that the cost on society to provide snacks is lower than the potential cost on society of someone having an accident.
Can it be so that the cost of supporting free plant based cooking education will be lower than the cost on society for healthcare on unhealthy eating, non human animals dying and the planet suffering etc?
Goal: Spread the plant-based diet (PBD).
Why: For the sake of the planet and its inhabitants.
Ethos: Be understanding and forgiving about how difficult the transition to a PBD is and use realistic incentives to encourage the change: peoples’ self interest. No shaming. Reward effort, not performance.
Problem: Transitioning to a PBD is hard and requires substantial behaviour change, which is challenging already for someone with bandwidth to do it, but much harder for someone with lack of time and/or finances. We can not expect anyone to go through these changes without help or without correct incentive. Some, but not all, aspects that require change are:
-Motivation -Planning -Shopping -Cooking -Flavours -Digestion -Storage
Project main activity: Use an existing or new movement to motivate and alleviate the transition to a PBD for consumer, group and societal levels. A backed-by-science curriculum gets developed with the help of psychologists, nutritionists, environmentalists, chefs, neuroscientists etc. It gets tested and reiterated. It contains actionable advice about how to go through the process of eating more plants, waste less, how to avoid future disease and the consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle.
- Teachers provide courses and coaching using the curriculum for consumers.
-Advisors provide free coaching on how to provide a PBD for groups like restaurants, catering, organisations and other corporations.
-Movement lobbyists and influencers meet with decision makers on societal level.
Price: There can be no cost for the participants - as that generally will be a friction point too large for them to want to learn. On the contrary - they should be rewarded financially or with food products to learn. Only when given a strong incentive can you motivate otherwise uninterested consumers to want to make an effort in PB living. Measures can be taken to avoid people taking advantage of the system.
Question: Could the project be cost effectively funded by donors, governments and potentially sponsors (like PB food companies etc), motivated by reducing suffering and cost on society?
In my opinion: I care deeply about animal welfare, but in my opinion it needs to be separated from the curriculum. Shaming people into stop changing behaviour is not effective. I can highly recommend listening to this podcast with psychologist and author Melanie Joy, in which she goes over how to communicate with non vegans, and how to contribute to the solution even though you are not able to become vegan.
Finally: I’m looking forward to tapping into the great accumulated knowledge of this forum’s participants. This is my first post, I’m an aspiring EA and not in academia, so I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from your feedback. Thank you.
Intriguing idea, thanks for sharing. In general think it's worth at least doing some tentative exploration all ideas to increasing the popularity of plant-based diets.
There seems to be an implicit assumption in your post that courses/coaching on plant-based eating will either increase the probability that somebody adopts a plant-based diet, or increases the probability that they stick with it. Has this assumption been tested, to your knowledge? It could also be that this intervention would mostly reach people who are keen on plant-based eating anyway, which is why I think it'd be good to test these assumptions in reality (pilot study or similar).
You might also get some useful feedback by sharing this idea with the RECAP group (https://www.recapresearch.org/join-recap) or Faunalytics, if you haven't already, as both of those groups have people thinking along these lines. I also mention this because - in my opinion - we should be focusing on whatever plant-based interventions appear to work the best. So, for this idea to be deserving of resources (in the long-term, after the idea is tested) it would also need to be shown that this idea works as well as, or better than, other plant-based interventions available to us. (Admittedly, I'm not sure what the best plant-based interventions are right now, but Faunalytics has loads of research on this.)
Thank you for your thoughtful comment.