Thank you for your work on this! 

I appreciate y'all studying this and helping us learn more about what we can do to advance plant-based options, and I especially love that it is open access. I do have some questions tho. 

(A) "Despite widespread optimism, simply increasing the number of PMAs on restaurant menus may not consistently reduce meat selection." Is this a reasonable expectation of any new food ingredient? Are there studies that show just adding a new ingredient, any ingredient whether plant-based or not, to a menu would result in uptake of it? 

It seems to me, and I could be missing something, that this study might be studying the habitual nature of consumers, and less so their preferences about plant-based meat. A possible way to have controlled for this would be to have a new animal meat item and see how many people chose it. 

If your general model of consumers, or people generally, is that they are cognitive misers, it seems that model would predict this result regardless if the additional items were plant based or meat based. So the casual factor would be habit, not the kind of protein. That would still be informative for plant-adoption and be a large barrier, but it be saying less about plant-based preferences and more about just needing to do proper UX and marketing. 

(B) I saw y'all did awareness checks on what people thought the point of the study was, but curious why y'all didn't do an awareness check on whether they noticed if there was a plant-based option in the menu or not? Like how many people are taking the time to read the small grey on white text? And with steak or chicken, you don't need to because those are familiar and instantly understood. Without that, it is unclear to me, whether you are testing people's preference for plant-based options or their ability to notice new items. 

Hi Elif, my chaotic ADHD brain found it easy to follow because of how well structured it is,  thank you for taking the time and effort to write this!

I did have some notes on data the survey section, 

“In fact, national surveys in the United States show that most people believe it is “very important” (52%) or “important” (32%) to prevent farm animals from suffering (Animal Welfare Institute). Data from the Center for a Livable Future shows that 57% of voters support stricter regulation of industrial farms, and 43% support banning new ones altogether. Given that the share of vegans in the total population is still very small, these findings are striking. This suggests there’s far more potential than we might assume,  but perhaps not enough “thresholds” have been crossed yet for these views to turn into action.”

For the first figures, I believe you are referring to a 2015 survey that was not done by AWI but by Consumer Reports National Research Center, and cited by AWI (source). The latter by John Hopkin’s Livable Future Center (source) in 2019. 

I don’t think these are the highest quality surveys on this topic, and probably don’t reflect an accurate picture of American attitudes towards. 

In 2022, Rethink Priorities did surveys with a more rigorous methodological design (see here). In addition to them asking if they supported banning slaughterhouses, for example, they also had participants to explain their reasoning. They found that when asked to explain their reasoning only about 8% of people supported the banning of slaughterhouses, and in the control, where they didn’t ask them to explain their reasoning it was 20%. Rethink Priorities also pre-registered their study so that others could hold them accountable if they p-hacked or messed with the methodology to get the results they wanted. 

8% is far better than nothing, but it is closer to the percentage of the population that is either vegan or vegetarian. 

Adding this study to the paragraph with the other studies you included will give readers a more rounded perspective on what the literature says, helping them to avoid, what is in effect, the publication bias. 

Feel free to include welfare concerns. The UK government has been moving in that direction so regulations that require a welfare assessment could be impactful.

The reason why a welfare argument is not included is honestly a mess up on my end. 

Originally I thought the welfare argument, while the most convincing personally, is the least politically viable. I still believe that but another advocate argued it should be included and I ended up agreeing, and planned on adding it. I ended up forgetting to add it however.