Why are 40% of Indians^[1] and only 4% of Americans vegetarian? In a word, environment. It’s not that Indians are magically more ethical, empathic, eco-conscious, or enlightened than Americans. Instead, they live in a culture that promotes and supports vegetarianism. It’s much easier to be vegetarian when your whole family is vegetarian and there are vegetarian options everywhere you go. Yet when we discuss diet or activism, we often talk in terms of personal choices and values rather than environmental forces. In doing so, we’re leaving half the puzzle in the box.

Culture, government, work, and community are the water we swim in. These interlocking systems define our day-to-day. We go to work because we need money; attend church (temple, mosque, etc.) because we believe in God and it’s where our community is; and try to be the best person we can be for our families. We choose some of these places and people. Others, we are born into^[2]. Each of these institutions has its own norms about what the ideal person looks like - what does it mean to be a good American, employee, Christian, or parent? - and a variety of enforcement mechanisms for pushing people toward that ideal.

The most obvious enforcement mechanisms are carrots and sticks. You get cheap insurance rates for a clean driving record; you get higher rates and your license suspended for too many tickets. Some enforcement mechanisms are more formal and others are more informal. There’s a law requiring you to get a driver’s license before you start driving, but most teenagers start driving because it’s what their peers expect. The most subtle enforcement mechanisms show up in how the environment makes certain choices easier and others harder. It’s easy to navigate a city by car and hard to navigate by bus, which is a result of government policies that push a norm of car ownership without ever explicitly telling anyone what to do. Often, norms are enforced by a combination of these mechanisms - carrot and stick; formal and informal; easy and hard. It all adds up to a whole lot of push and pull on a person.

I don’t mean to make it sound like we’re solely driven by the forces around us. There’s plenty of wiggle room within and between systems for individual choice to emerge. We choose our career path, pick up hobbies,  and make friends who fit with our idiosyncrasies. We decide what’s worth pursuing and avoiding. In extreme cases, we end up defying the systems that we started in. There wouldn’t be many vegans or vegetarians running around if we couldn’t buck these larger trends. But neither can we forget that all of our individual choices take part against the backdrop of the larger culture, institutions, and communities.

Being vegan or an animal activist is never going to catch on if making that transition ends up alienating you from your friends and family. We can get a lot more mileage from our efforts if we pay attention to and harness the forces swirling around an individual. Thinking in terms of external forces has big implications for how we plan our activism.

Go After Environment, Not People

One of the first things someone with an addiction does when trying to quit is remove the source of the addiction (ex. alcohol) from their home. If the object of their addiction is available, there will come a moment when their self-control flags and they fall right off the horse. Most of us don’t have addictions, but we still share the same trait of reaching for whatever comforts our environment provides, whatever is easily available. If we change the environment, behaviors shift almost automatically. Whether you have fruit or candy bars in the house, that’s what you’ll end up snacking on.

In the context of activism, aiming for environmental shifts bypasses a whole lot of trench fighting over individual choices. For example, New York City public schools participate in Meatless Monday. Like swapping candy bars for fruit, this program switches out meat-forward meals for vegetarian meals. The school system serves one million students a week, the equivalent of creating 50,000 new vegetarians^[3]. 50,000 new vegetarians would represent a 14% increase in the vegetarian population of NYC^[4]. Instead of having the hundreds of thousands or millions of conversations needed to convince 50,000 people to go vegetarian, animal advocates were able to pull off this seismic shift with a few dozen conversations with city officials and a little policy work.

Meatless Monday in NYC schools represents an ideal kind of environmental change: a moderate policy shift in institutions like governments and corporations that replaces animal products with plant products.^[5] Institutions set standards and standards promote a specific default option. Most people will end up choosing the default, whatever it is. The nice thing about working with institutions is that usually there are only a handful of people in charge of something like what food the cafeteria serves. If you can find the right combination of benefits and pressures (PREVIOUS ESSAY) to influence those people, you can get the weight of the organization behind your cause.

If you can’t go directly after an organization, you can often create a subgroup within an organization to promote a certain set of values, like an Effective Altruist group at Microsoft. It’s a much lower lift to start a new group than to alter a large organization, and something magical happens when people come together. People who were previously isolated now know they’re connected to a larger group and that group can begin acting together. It can be a proving ground for ideas, generate its own culture, and recruit new members. Once a subgroup has established itself, the members can start working towards changing their larger organization from the inside out.

Once a new norm is in place, whether through an institution changing its policy or a subgroup forming around a set of ideals, the norm gains a life of its own. People get used to it and will start defending it as the status quo. Unlike people going vegetarian or vegan, which has an 84% recidivism rate, policies and norms are much harder to repeal once in place. Many policies are never challenged and the ones that are challenged stay in place more often than not: 60% of reform campaigns for public policies failed.  A good norm is a gift that keeps on giving, rooted in institutional inertia rather than individual whims.

When Persuading People, Mind the Environment

Unfortunately, it is not always possible to find an environmental fix. Sometimes we have to persuade individual people. When we try to persuade people, we usually resort to rhetoric centered around the trifecta of ethics, environment, and health. We dangle these carrots to motivate people. What’s missing from the narrative are the sticks and barriers that come into play when making a change. Even if someone wants to change, if there are more powerful forces pushing against them, they won’t follow through.

One question to ask is “How difficult is it to go vegan or become an activist?” A single mother living in a food desert is going to have a much harder time going vegan than a software engineer who lives next to a Whole Foods^[6]. Since the shape of the environment is what’s preventing the change, the emotional arguments will only outweigh the difficulty for the most receptive (and potentially the most well-off) people. Another question is “What are the social or economic consequences for going vegan or becoming an activist?” A restaurant owner will never make their restaurant vegan if they’re convinced it will put the restaurant out of business. This kind of social punishment is less visible, but no less potent than the more physical barriers.

Instead of piling on guilt or exhorting people to overcome these hurdles, it’s often more effective to make the right choice easy. Or if we can’t make it easy, at least altering the cost-benefit ratio enough to favor change. This usually looks like providing them with viable, positive alternatives to the status quo^[7]. The Transfarmation Project is a great example of this. They help provide industrial animal farmers, who are often trapped in debt to large corporations, with the resources and support to transition to plant-based operations. They’re not shaming farmers or just telling them to stop, they’re providing the scaffolding needed to move to a better world.

If we can’t make the right choice easier, we can often harness external pressures for our own ends. The Humane League used cage-free commitments from companies to pressure other companies that hadn’t committed. It’s a bad look for a company to have less follow-through on their animal welfare commitments than McDonald’s. Often, among the different pressures that an individual is facing, there will be some that are more aligned with our causes. We just have to take the time to do our homework and find an angle that works for us.

Working at an environmental or institutional level takes more effort than replaying our iconic arguments. The solutions have to be tailored to the target individual’s context and the forces that are most influential to them. Everyone sits at a nexus of competing demands from their friends, their family, their community, their work, and their own personal needs. It takes research and planning to figure out what those demands are. It’s not cheap and sometimes we will lose the campaign along with all of the effort that went into it. But when it works, we can reach people we never would otherwise.

Change the Current

It’s much easier to work with an environment than against it. Defying a social environment or institution is a costly endeavor that requires particular dedication and fortitude. I think vegans and animal activists are exceptional in our ability to swim against the current. But expecting everyone to do what we do is like expecting everyone to be a marathoner. While most people could go vegan or run a marathon in theory, how far removed being vegan or marathoning is from our regular environment makes them prohibitive. Better instead to change the current so that it flows in the direction we want.

If you’re feeling punchy about changing an environment, the best place to start is close to home, with institutions you’re already woven into. Think of the schools your kids go to, your place of worship, or your neighborhood potlucks. You won’t be an outsider in these institutions, coming in and trying to impose something new; you’ll be a member of the community taking an interest in making them a better place. One small concrete action would be to call your favorite restaurant, tell them how much you love their food, and ask them if they’d be willing to put a vegan item on their menu (or if they already have one, maybe they could have two). You can show them Happy Cow and explain how it could help bring vegans to their business. Make life a little smoother for the next person who wants to be a vegan.

Three Things to Try

1. Call a restaurant. Tell them you love their food and ask if they'd add a vegan option — show them Happy Cow as a business case.
2. Diagnose before persuading. Before your next one-on-one conversation, ask “What's the biggest environmental barrier this person faces?” Address that instead of leading with ethics.
3. Help Reduce Friction: When someone expresses interest in going vegan, don't just cheer them on, help reduce friction: Share a recipe, offer to cook together, or identify restaurants near them with good vegan options.

Informed By

• Thinking in Systems by Donna Meadows
• How to Create a Vegan World by Tobias Leenaert

Thanks to beta readers: Kim Evans, Maddi Laffitte, Nimisha Mehta, Brian de Silva

1. ^{^}

    Although meat consumption in India is rapidly increasing as the country modernizes - another environmental factor.

2. ^{^}

    The majority of Americans stay in the same state where they were born, the same religion as their parents, and the same political party as their parents.

3. ^{^}

    If a vegetarian eats approximately 20 meals a week, then 1 million vegetarian meals served in a week is equivalent to 1,000,000 / 20 = 50,000 vegetarians.

^{^}

 I’m taking the base rate of 4.2% vegetarians in the US and multiplying that by an estimated 8,478,000 people in NYC, which gets us to about 356,000 vegetarians. 50,000 “new vegetarians” / 356,000 existing vegetarians = 14.0%. There’s going to be some variance in the actual numbers (a large liberal city probably has more than the average number of vegetarians), but 14% should be in the right ballpark.

^{^}

Technically not a total replacement, but a big step nonetheless.

^{^}

 It’s me. I’m the software developer living next to Whole Foods.

^{^}

 On a personal note, one of the big reasons I was able to go vegetarian was that my college had an abundance of vegetarian options in the cafeteria and a dedicated vegan station.

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