Peter Thomas Ricci, contributing editor 2025-04-24 06:57:42
DANIEL ROSENFELD
TITLE: Post-doctoral scholar, UCLA
DEGREES: PhD and MA, UCLA; BS, Cornell University
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:
• Received a fellowship from the National Science Foundation
• Published a review paper on consumer attitudes toward cultured meat
INDUSTRY ACTIVITIES
• Consulting editor at Psychology of Human- Animal Intergroup Relations
• Presented at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association and the Annual Convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
• Authored a chapter in the book ‘To Eat or Not to Eat Meat: How Vegetarian Dietary Choices Influence Our Social Lives’
Dr. Daniel Rosenfeld, a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA, on the university’s campus in Los Angeles’ Westwood neighborhood.
DR. DANIEL ROSENFELD EXAMINES THE BIASES, BELIEFS AND CONVICTIONS BEHIND OUR PROTEIN CHOICES.
It can be easy, given the widespread — even overwhelming — prominence of animal protein to take the industry’s popularity for granted. But as Daniel Rosenfeld explains, there is nothing simple about the personal decisions behind a person’s meat consumption — or lack there of.
“There are many psychological consequences in making certain food choices,” says Rosenfeld, a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA who has been exploring the psychology of protein consumption for nearly a decade.
“When you change the way you eat — especially in a way that revolves around meat, or eggs or dairy in the U.S., which are central to many of our social structures, relationships, rituals, habits, norms and traditions and values — a lot of other people can react to that in either positive or negative ways.”
Rosenfeld continues, “Our sense of identity, morality, our gender norms — those things are all intersected with the foods we eat, especially when it comes to eating or not eating meat.”
In a conversation with Alt-Meat, Rosenfeld unpacks many of those intersections and details what they may mean for the future of protein.
Alt-Meat: One area you’ve studied is the moral implications of meat consumption. What has your research found about how meat eaters respond to moral arguments?
ROSENFELD: I like to think about the morality of eating meat in two senses. In one sense, you have the philosophical space, which I would call a ‘prescriptive argument.’ That’s where you can argue and debate whether it’s morally right or wrong to eat meat, and you’re arguing toward morally right or wrong answer that can be, supposedly, universal.
Then, instead of that philosophical prescriptive stuff, there’s ‘psychology descriptive,’ and that’s not saying what’s right or wrong or what’s logically supported or not — that’s just saying, ‘What the heck are humans doing, and how do they think and feel?’ That’s just describing the landscape of how morality works in our brain and our behavior. That’s where I lie. I don’t really go into the prescriptive philosophical. For me, thinking about the morality side of eating meat is a question of just psychology, and how do people form moral attitudes and form their own feelings and judgments about needs.
In that space, much of that conversation revolves around the idea of cognitive dissonance, and the general idea that people may have morally inconsistent views or behaviors when it comes to eating meat. This goes into the idea that most people are against unnecessary animal suffering, and they do morally care about animals and don’t want animals to experience harm or be abused or have their rights violated. But at the same time, people like eating meat, most people in the U.S. and the world do eat meat, and there’s a big industry around that. And you have to balance a lot of these different interests that go on.
In this area, there’s a psychological terrain where when people do eat meat and do care about animals, but then feel as though maybe their meat consumption is harming animals; that is psychologically uneasy for them to experience.
There’s a lot of research on this idea of cognitive dissonance, of what happens in the mind when people eat meat — especially when morality emerges to the forefront of their conscious mind. And that fills into a lot of attitudes that people have toward animals, and things like how much mental capacity do farm animals have.
There’s research showing, for example, that when people eat meat, they are less inclined to say that cows and chickens and pigs can experience pain or happiness. And there’s experimental evidence looking at that, where if you literally randomize people to eat meat or not eat meat, just within moments after eating meat, they change their attitudes about animals experiences and mental capacities.
Alt-Meat: Additionally, you participated in an overview of studies that evaluated how meat eaters may (or may not) be influenced to change their diets. What were some of your main findings?
ROSENFELD: When you change people’s behaviors, there are so many factors that go into that, and meat eating is no exception. Do they think that eating meat is good or bad? Do they think that eating less meat makes sense? That it has benefits, or not? You can change their attitudes in that sense.
But then, even among a lot of people who do say, ‘Yeah, eating less meat is good,’ or, ‘Eating these kinds of meats is better,’ they don’t actually change their behavior, and that’s where we realize that just people’s attitudes aren’t enough. There are a lot of people who are compelled by certain arguments and don’t change. And there are a lot of people who don’t really think about these things consciously, but then change their behavior subconsciously.
We realized that many behavior changes [stem from] social norms and environmental or situational factors. So more than just your attitudes, what your family members and friends, your partner, your boss, your co-workers, your religious community or any other kind of community that you’re involved in — all those social networks that you’re a part of, first and foremost, are what will shape what you eat, more than just your own personal attitudes. That’s why a behavior change can be hard.
The other reason is just the convenience, cost, availability factors. A lot of people’s eating decisions come down to what’s cheap, convenient and available. So, no matter what kind of attitude you have, if it’s too expensive for you or it’s a half-hour drive away, it’s not going to happen.
Alt-Meat: On the flip side, what has your research uncovered about why some people embrace a plant-based diet?
ROSENFELD: When people draft a plant-based diet, there are two interesting paths that can go. One, we have the drastic change where some people just literally have this awakening and realization one day, where they say, ‘All right. I’m vegan now, and that’s it.’ Definitely that happens. It’s probably the minority, where the majority of people go through a more gradual, progressive stage of change where they start thinking, ‘I’m going to plan to eat less meat.’ And then, gradually, over the course of a few weeks, or months, even years, they begin to phase meat out of their diet or other kind of animal foods — and after a while, are pretty much vegetarian or vegan. So, people can go through the abrupt or gradual thing. The gradual tends to be more common.
There’s also, of course, different motivations why people decide to become plant-based. The main three are health reasons, environmental reasons or animal ethics. And among those, historically, the animal ethics reason was the most common for people becoming vegan. But it seems more and more, the past decade or two, that health and environmental reasons are the more common reasons why people are doing that. And I think that’s because there’s been a lot more research and dissemination of research about the health and environmental aspects of meat consumption and benefits of plantbased foods.
Of course, it’s not one or the other. A lot of people, if not the majority of people, decide to become vegan for two or all three of those reasons. And so, they often co-occur where a lot of people think, ‘Maybe I’ll become vegan because it’s better for the environment.’ And then, the next day they’re reading about health benefits, and now they think, ‘Hey, now I have two reasons to do this.’ And so, it’s common that people have a multifaceted reason for making or at least maintaining their dietary change.
Alt-Meat: Various surveys have been published, over the years, that suggest mixed consumer sentiments about eating cultivated meat. What has your research found?
ROSENFELD: People are pretty mixed on their attitudes toward cultured meat, and we know that the main reasons why people would want to try it are pretty similar to the reasons they’d have for eating plant-based diets — because they think it’s better for the environment and reduces animal suffering. Whether it’s healthier, that seems to be a bit of a less prominent motivation because it is still animal-based meat, so it’s pretty comparable in its nutritional composition. But there are some perceptions that people are intrigued by where maybe it’s ‘cleaner’ or has fewer unhealthy elements in it, like antibiotics that come from animal agriculture.
But [another] interesting motivation is: People who are foodies and base a lot of their identity around food culture, and being progressive, open minded and seeking new experiences; at least for now, cultured meat is this new, cool, trendy thing. So, people who want to be at the forefront of innovation are incentivized personally to eat cultured meat, because maybe it’s a status symbol, or a symbol of your psychological openness.
Alt-Meat: And what about consumers who are not interested?
ROSENFELD: The reason why people are not interested in cultured meat [is] really the health argument, which separates it from why people choose plantbased diets. Because cultured meat is an actual, real meat, it’s so different in what kind of consumer base it might attract. I’ve done some research that’s found that vegetarians are actually less interested than meat eaters are in trying cultured meat. You would think, perhaps, that for vegetarians who are opposed to traditional meat, this cultured meat is great. It’s not ‘real meat,’ so vegetarians can enjoy meat now too. And they’re just like, ‘No, I don’t want that.’ And the reason why is many vegetarians lose their taste for meat and just don’t want the meat taste.
But more than just the taste, it’s a psychological component where morality comes into play, where if you’re a vegetarian or vegan for animal ethics reasons, when you look at a slab of meat or any kind of meat, it’s hard to dissociate. It’s hard to dissociate the meat from the fact that it resembles this slaughtered animal part. And so, it immediately conjures up the uneasy feelings about animal suffering that are morally unsettling to them.
So, I think cultured meat — and this is not a conscious thought, it’s more of an instinctive way that we’ve evolved to experience emotions — is, for a lot of vegetarians and vegans, really unappealing.
Alt-Meat: And finally, where do conventional meat eaters stand?
ROSENFELD: Why meat eaters, the main consumer base, are skeptical of cultured meat is generally that it just seems unnatural to them. We know that ideas about naturalness are a big factor in our food choices, and people don’t want to eat foods they view as artificial or unnatural. And the reason for that is it conjures up ideas about safety. So, people are concerned that foods they perceive as unnatural are also unsafe. That’s a big barrier.
People are also concerned about health effects, and whether cultured meat is less healthy for some reason than conventional meat. They’re also concerned about whether it will taste as good, whether it’ll be affordable.
And people are also concerned about the environmental impact of it too, whether there are unsustainable aspects of that.
And of course, a population of meat eaters is morally concerned about the economic implications of eating cultured meat, where it can — if it were to be widely accepted — do economic harm to the traditional meat industry or the employment sector. That, of course, can be complicated by whether these traditional meat companies adopt cultured meat as part of their company structure.
Alt-Meat: When it comes to acceptance of cultivated meat — and the big asterisk there, of course, is a world where it’s widely available — what would some of those factors might be that would have to change for acceptance to grow for the product?
ROSENFELD: The biggest factor for cultured meat is going to just be the social norm aspect. If more and more people start to eat it, other people will start to eat it, too. But beyond that, you’re going to have to have schools, big industries, companies and organizations incorporating cultured meat into their food ecosystem. When you have the endorsement of big industries, corporations and social systems that normalize cultured meat as part of a food that people in our society eat — that’s going to be important, having it get taken up by social structures.
And then, from that, the more people that can eat it, the more it snowballs. There’s a natural tendency for people to be skeptical of novel food technology. So, it does take effective marketing and social norm changes for that to succeed.
One thing that was interesting: We know for conventional meat, men tend to eat more meat than women, have more pro-meat sentiments and are less inclined to be vegan; for plant-based alternatives, it tends to be women are more open to that than men. There is a shift where for cultured meat, it’s actually men who are more open to trying cultured meat than women. That’s an interesting thing where cultured meat might have a bit of a different consumer image than plant-based alternatives for a variety of reasons. It’s not like the new Impossible Burger 2.0, for example, or it’s not just a next step from that.
I think cultured meat, when you’re looking at, psychologically, the consumer perceptions and interest, it’s quite different from the plant-based alternatives. I wouldn’t even put it in the same category. You have your conventional meats, your plant-based alternative and then cultured meat as three totally different categories.
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COLLECTIVE MEAT CONSCIOUS
https://library.alt-meat.net/articles/collective-meat-conscious