Reducing Meat Consumption in Today’s Consumer Society: Questioning the Citizen-Consumer Gap

By E. Bakker, H. Dagevos. 2012

264 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Our growing demand for meat and dairy food products is unsustainable. It is hard to imagine that this global issue can be solved solely by more efficient technologies. Lowering our meat consumption seems inescapable. Yet, the question is whether modern consumers can be considered as reliable allies to achieve this shift in meat consumption pattern. Is there not a yawning gap between our responsible intentions as citizens and our hedonic desires as consumers? We will argue that consumers can and should be considered as partners that must be involved in realizing new ways of protein consumption that contribute to a more sustainable world. In particular the large food consumer group of flexitarians offer promising opportunities for transforming our meat consumption patterns. We propose a pragmatic approach that explicitly goes beyond the standard suggestion of persuasion strategies and suggests different routes of change, coined sustainability by stealth, moderate involvement, and cultural change respectively. The recognition of more routes of change to a more plant-based diet implies that the ethical debate on meat should not only associate consumer change with rational persuasion strategies and food citizens that instantiate “strong” sustainable consumption. Such a focus narrows the debate on sustainable protein consumption and easily results in disappointment about consumers’ participation. A more wide-ranging concept of ethical consumption can leave the negative verdict behind that consumers are mainly an obstacle for sustainability and lead to a more optimistic view on modern consumers as allies and agents of change.

Subfields: Ecology, Food Science, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae9786c376b80a17fff651c5fd5156173627f97d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. M. Sandberg
2. Fraser McLeay
3. K. Ramachandraiah
4. Chrysostomos Apostolidis

In Food Science

1. M. Sandberg
2. Fraser McLeay
3. K. Ramachandraiah
4. Chrysostomos Apostolidis

In Plant Science

1. M. Sandberg
2. Fraser McLeay
3. K. Ramachandraiah
4. Chrysostomos Apostolidis

Citations in the corpus

• Should we stop meating like this? Reducing meat consumption through substitution (2016, background): “De Bakker and Dagevos (2012) suggest that a sustainability-bystealth strategy can contribute to the efforts towards more sustainable consumption for consumers who are generally unconcerned with issues about food sustainability but will accept changes in their consumption, particularly if they are…”
• Potential Development of Sustainable 3D-Printed Meat Analogues: A Review (2021, background): “The direct and indirect effects of livestock production include food security issues, health risks, animal welfare issues, and the loss of biodiversity [8].”
• Reducing meat consumption in developed and transition countries to counter climate change and biodiversity loss: a review of influence factors (2017, unknown): “As a parallel strategy, several studies (e.g. de Bakker and Dagevos 2012; Dagevos and de Bakker 2015) show that one very efficient route towards change is to focus on consumers as change agents for reduced meat consumption, with abilities and inclinations that need to be strengthened.”
• Sufficiency transitions: A review of consumption changes for environmental sustainability (2021, background): “Appointing responsibility for change to individual consumers has been increasingly criticized (Spengler, 2016), though de Bakker and Dagevos (2012) have argued that consumers are important change agents in transitions.”