Get out your cricket flour and vegetarian meat substitutes, the war on meat continues.

A research team at Durham University in the UK has come up with a new way to guilt people out of eating meat: slap graphic warning labels on meat products warning that consuming them will harm the planet.

You don’t want to kill Gaia, do you?

There is no justification for demonising a dietary preference enjoyed by the vast bulk of the British public; those wanting to push plant-based alternatives should do so via the free market, not bureaucrats ⬇️

🗞Cigarette-style warnings on meat products https://t.co/DgCYgCSJGf

— Countryside Alliance Press Office (@CApressoffice) November 1, 2023

According to this study, putting warning labels on meat products does change behavior, and in a real twist, it turns out that warning people about the effects of meat consumption on poor Gaia had a larger impact than health-related warnings on cigarette packaging. In the UK the warnings are extremely graphic, but apparently don’t change behavior that much.

Contrary to our predictions, we did not find evidence that the health warning labels were any more effective at lowering hypothetical meat meal selection when compared to the climate and pandemic warning labels. Climate warning labels were however the most supported by our participants when considering whether any of these warning labels should be enacted as policies. As can be seen in Online Supplementary Materials in our Pilot Study we found that participants considered the impact of meat consumption on climate change as most consequential when compared to the impact on human health and future risk of pandemics. Furthermore, environmental concerns, but not health and pandemic concerns, predicted the proportion of meat meals selected in our experimental task. The higher public support for the climate warning labels may stem from these considerations. This would be consistent with prior work on public support for various obesity policies, which also correlates with people’s prior beliefs about the causes of obesity (e.g., Beeken & Wardle, 2013). Notably, climate warning labels were also rated as most credible in our study, along with health warning labels. The introduction of climate pictorial warning labels may therefore be both effective and most acceptable to the public.

The idea behind the study was pretty simple: What kind of propaganda works to get people to change their behavior? As you can imagine, this group of academics was committed to getting people to quit eating meat in order to save Mother Earth, so the only question that interested them was how to shame people to change their behavior.

What was fascinating when reading the study was just how open the researchers were about their intent to emotionally manipulate people into compliance. They dismissed text-based labels because they don’t elicit the required emotional response. You can’t convince people with reason, so shame and fear are the tools they choose to use.

Activism always works like this: weaponizing emotions and short-circuiting the rational faculties.

But, as with cigarette labeling, the effects are more limited than they would like. In fact, even the most dramatic labels had a limited effect, reducing people’s likelihood of eating meat by about 10%. That’s not nothing, but even in an environment dominated by university students, the desire to eat decent food outweighs fear and guilt.

They’ll keep trying, of course. The mission to regiment your life around their values will continue and is multifaceted.

Persuasion is only one tool in the toolbox. Coercion comes next.