Want us all to eat less meat? Just move it 2 steps away!
A SIMPLE trick may be the key to getting people to eat a lot less meat – all you have to do is move it further away.
A two-year study involving more than 100,000 lunches and dinners suggests that if eating meat means walking just two more steps, more people go for a vegetarian choice instead.
Researchers put healthy veggie meals close to the entrance of two university cafeterias to find out if people would choose the food they came across first. That was not the case in a cafe when they had to walk less than three feet to the meat. But in another where steak and pepperoni pizza were six feet away, vegetarian sales soared by 40 per cent.
To check it was the distance making the difference, researchers cut the space between the types of dish in the second cafeteria to just over two feet. This led to veggie sales reducing or staying the same and meat dishes surging. But just putting the vegetarian options at the start of the queue every other month raised the sales share from 15.6 per cent to 21.8 per cent.
Emma Garnett, lead author of the Cambridge University study, said: ‘This may be down to the additional effort. Convenience is extremely important.’
The research, published in Nature Food journal, also found that people are more ‘flexitarian’, eating less meat in the week for health reasons or due to the environmental toll of livestock farming. But they also ate more vegetarian meals when they were cheaper.