Getting People to Eat Plant-Based Foods Is Hard — but Why, Exactly?

Plants are, in general, cheaper than meat — so why don’t people eat more plants? It’s a question that’s vexed and frustrated proponents of plant-based diets, as the relative unpopularity of plant-forward eating flies in the face of most basic assumptions about consumer choice and behavioral economics. In truth, there are a number of reasons why it’s hard to get people to eat plants.

Let’s take a look at some of the barriers — and potential solutions.

Plant-Based Food Is Often Cheaper, but Remains Less Popular

In 2021, an Oxford study analyzed the average costs of different diets around the world, and found that entirely plant-based diets were cheaper than any of the alternatives, with vegetarianism a close second. This coincides with existing research showing that meats are the most expensive type of food, relative to their nutritional value.

This general finding was replicated in a 2023 study — although as we’ll see, the story is very different when it comes to plant-based alternatives to animal products, as opposed to raw plants themselves.

Moreover, public opinion polls suggest that people want to eat more plants. In a 2022 survey, 42 percent of respondents said they intend to eat more plant-based foods in the future, and 27 percent said that they want to eat fewer animal-based foods. A poll taken the next year had over one-third of respondents expressing interest in adopting a vegan diet — which isn’t synonymous with a plant-based diet, but nevertheless implies a strong interest in consuming more plants.

These trends haven’t quite created the sea change in eating habits that some expected. In the United States, people are still eating fewer fruits and vegetables, and more meat, than the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends. Rates of veganism and vegetarianism continually languish in the single-digits. In a 2023 survey, 42 percent of Americans said that they had made a New Years Resolution to eat more plant-based foods — only to abandon it midway through the year. 

Meanwhile, per-capita meat consumption has nearly doubled over the last 60 years, which is very bad news for a number of impacts, including climate change. Meat is responsible for between 11 and 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and is a constant drain on our planet’s water and land reserves.

But make no mistake: despite some media hype over the purported rise in veganism, meat is still front and center in most people’s diets, and plant-based meals still aren’t the norm. And that’s a problem, given the litany of environmental damage caused by meat production.

In theory, people want to incorporate more plants into their diets. But in practice, they’re not.

Why Aren’t More People Eating Plant-Based Foods?

Reason #1: Practical or Ideological Obstacles

For some people, there are practical challenges to incorporating more plant-based foods into their diets. Fruits, vegetables and other plants may be cheaper at the grocery store, but there’s a perception that plant-based meals are more difficult to prepare than meat-based alternatives.

Moreover, in some regions of the country and the world, fresh produce isn’t readily accessible in the first place. The systems that create and exacerbate these inequities are sometimes described as “food apartheid.” Fast food, by contrast, is abundantly available: there are 207,827 fast food restaurants in the U.S., for example, which averages out to one restaurant every 18 square miles.

And of course, there are people who are actively, consciously opposed to plant-based foods: in a 2023 survey, 16 percent of people said that they’ve never tried plant-based alternatives because they don’t support veganism. To be clear, one doesn’t need to “support veganism” in order to incorporate plant-based foods into their diet — indeed, it’s not even clear what “supporting veganism” means, as there are many disparate reasons why people go vegan. Nevertheless, negative attitudes towards plant-based diets do remain a psychological obstacle for some folks.

Reason #2: Many People Eat Animal-Based Foods by Default, Not Choice

All of these factors contribute to the slow adoption of plant-based foods. According to Laura Lee Cascada, however, they don’t tell the whole story.

Cascada is the Senior Director of Campaigns at the Better Food Foundation (BFF), a non-profit whose mission is to promote and increase public consumption of plant-based foods. Cascada says many people eat meat instead of plant-based foods not because they actively dislike plants, or because they can’t access plant-based foods, but simply because meat-eating is a longstanding cultural norm that greatly influences how food is offered and presented.

“Food is usually served in a way that reinforces the idea that meat should be the main part of every meal,” Cascada tells Sentient. “It’s hard for people to break out of that when they don’t see their communities, their friends, or their family eating a plant-rich diet.”

The value that society places on meat-eating has deep-seeded historical roots, and for many, carnivorism is still seen as a sign of virility and strength. These norms can make it harder to convince people to eat more plants.

Reason #3: Plants Are Cheaper…but Plant-Based Alternatives Aren’t

Plants are cheaper than animal products, so in theory, a plant-based diet should be cheaper than a meat-based one. But it’s not quite so simple, because a lot of people don’t just want to eat plants — they want to eat plant-based imitations of animal products, like Impossible Burgers, oat milk, cashew cheese and so on.

Unfortunately, these kinds of products are often more expensive than their traditional counterparts. At Burger King, for instance, an Impossible Whopper costs around a dollar more than a meat-based Whopper. In U.S. supermarkets, a gallon of plant-based milk will generally cost you around $3.00 more than a gallon of dairy milk.

According to the Good Food Institute, plant-based meat was an average of 43 percent more expensive than animal meat in 2020. Plant-based cheese was 40 percent more expensive, plant-based milk was 11 percent more expensive and plant-based eggs were a whopping 113 percent pricier than chicken eggs.

For those who are content eating plants in the “traditional” way — cheap dishes, like rice and beans — none of this is a problem. But for those looking to swap out their hamburger for a plant-based equivalent, that extra dollar might be enough to dissuade them from doing so.

Potential Solutions for Getting People to Eat More Plants

The Better Food Foundation’s signature initiative, DefaultVeg, isn’t aimed at persuading consumers to change their diets. Instead, it seeks to shape eating habits by convincing restaurants, hospitals, schools and other dining establishments to subtly change how they present and serve their food to diners.

The approach is based on nudge theory: the idea that small changes in how choices are presented to a person can have a great impact on the decisions that person makes, even if they aren’t consciously aware of it.

There are several ways for establishments to “nudge” people into eating more plants, Cascada says. One is to make plant-based foods the default meal choice while still offering meat and animal products to people who specifically request them, a strategy that BFF has pursued successfully in hospitals, universities and other places that serve food but are not restaurants.

Restaurants, meanwhile, can nudge customers by modifying the design of their menus so that plant-based meals are integrated with meat and dairy-based dishes, as opposed to being relegated to their own section. Even simply increasing the number of plant-based dishes that are offered, or placing them at the top of the menu, can result in more people ordering them, Cascada says.

This all might sound just a bit too easy; is it really possible to get people to eat more plants just by putting vegetarian dishes at the top of the menu, or offering them plant-based meals by default and hoping they don’t ask for meat instead?

According to research, the answer is yes. Studies have shown time and again that small nudges like this, insignificant as they might seem, are extraordinarily effective in getting people to eat more plants.

One such study divided participants into two groups. The first was offered a meal that was meat-based by default, but with the option to switch to a vegetarian dish if they wished, while the second group was given a vegetarian meal by default, but could swap it out for meat if they asked to.

The results were striking: when meat was the default option, 98 percent of the participants ate meat, but when vegetarian meals were the default, only 13 percent chose the meat dish. Similar studies of default meal offerings have yielded similar results.

“Our approach of subtly altering the dining experience, so that it makes these foods more accessible and more normalized to people, is really important,” Cascada says. “It lets people who haven’t already heard convincing messaging about why they should go vegan just casually make those choices.”

This approach to promoting plant-based diets has a number of upsides. It’s easy to implement, easy to scale and is flexible enough to be tweaked for different localities and demographics. It doesn’t require people to learn about the upsides of plant-based foods, nor does it involve changing the public’s mind about the merits of meat consumption.

According to the Better Food Foundation, the 500+ institutions in which DefaultVeg is active have collectively reduced carbon emissions by 888,000 kilograms, and saved 21,000,000 gallons of water.

The Bottom Line

Getting people to change their diets is hard, and that’s doubly true when the change in question goes against established cultural norms and standards. But plant-based nudges are an easy, frictionless way to circumvent these challenges.

By simply presenting plant-based foods as the default choice, while still allowing people the freedom to eat what they want, advocates of climate-friendly diets can increase plant-consumption, change our cultural norms around meat-eating and make our food systems more sustainable.