How the sausage is made: Testing the effectiveness of an informative video in promoting sustainable food consumption

We use an incentivized consumption measure to assess the impacts of watching a roughly 15-minute video about industrial-scale pork production on sustainable food consumption. We find that the demand for (more sustainable) plant-based meals increases by 252.7 percent while the demand for meat-containing meals decreases by 27.0 percent immediately after watching the video. Notably, these effects exhibit some persistence. Compared to baseline levels, we find that demand at a one-week follow-up is still 121.8 percent higher for plant-based meals and 13.5 percent lower for meat-containing meals. The video appears to have a particularly large impact on the demand for pork, with immediate and one-week decreases of 45.2 and 30.1 percent. We also observe smaller yet still significant decreases in the demand for other meat products, with immediate and one-week reductions of 24.0 and 10.6 percent, suggesting that information about industrial-scale pork production can affect preferences for other types of meat. Overall, the video appears to be quite effective in promoting plant-based eating compared to others tested in the literature. Even so, the relatively low baseline popularity of pork compared to other meats in our sample suggests that the impact of the video may be limited by its focus on pork, raising the possibility that a broader portrayal of industrial meat production could be even more effective in promoting sustainable food consumption.