How Do You Sell Compassion? with Chris Bryant

[00:00:05] Mariann Sullivan: I'm super excited. It's like, you're doing the work that all of us want to know about. You're figuring out how to pull this off, and it turns out to be a fairly complicated question, but you've really done a lot of work in actually focusing on the fundamental question.

How do we change the way the world eats? Rather than going really big picture, it makes sense to start with just you're telling us what exactly Bryant Research is and what it does.

[00:00:30] Chris Bryant: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks again for having me on the podcast. A real pleasure to be talking to you. Yeah, I started Bryant Research when I was finishing up my PhD in psychology, where I was looking at consumer acceptance of cultivated meat. And as I finished that, it was just the start of COVID basically.

And so, you know, I had a lot of time and few living expenses on my hands. And I still feel very lucky that I was able to and have been able to maneuver my life into a position where I can spend all my time doing what really, I suppose I would do for free if life was free, which is a, you know, very fortunate position to be in.

I feel grateful for that every day. But Bryant Research is a social science research company. We do research related to the protein transition. So we do surveys, polling, focus groups, that sort of thing. And we also do policy white papers and discussion papers and position papers relating to meat reduction and alternative proteins.

[00:01:33] Mariann Sullivan: Is this exclusive to the UK or do you do any work in the US or in any other countries?

[00:01:37] Chris Bryant: The team's all based in the UK, but we do work all over the place. We've done projects in the U S and Canada and different countries in Europe as well.

[00:01:45] Mariann Sullivan: I think you mentioned focus groups. And that's what I think of when I think of social science research, which I don't know much about. And I guess polls. I mean, that's pretty obvious. Are there any other kind of methods you use to find out what people are thinking, or is that the basic of social science research in this kind of area?

[00:02:01] Chris Bryant: Yeah. So in terms of getting at what people are thinking, we're generally looking at, as you said, polls and surveys in terms of the quantitative, you know, what percentage of people, overall from a representative sample agree with this or that. And then you have the focus groups, which, getting into more in depth discussions with people and getting a sort of richer feel for their perceptions.

We also do social experiments. So this will typically be, for example, an online survey. When you take an online survey, you may have taken one of several possible versions, and the researchers are looking to see how different versions affect people's answers on average, right? So, for example, you'll notice that I use the word cultivated meat at the start when I was describing my PhD work.

That word cultivated has been the subject of many of these kind of experiments where we'll show some people the word cultivated and others the word cell based, and clean meat was in vogue at one point. We'll do these kind of experimental setups. We can say, you know, given a few hundred people seeing each of these different names, what impact can we then see in terms of their attitudes and their intention to consume those products.

So that's the kind of work we do, what I would call like the empirical projects, which is like looking at original data, working with consumers directly. And increasingly we're doing sort of strategic research, modeling, political research. And that includes things like looking at government data sets and compiling information in different ways.

So we have a project at the moment where we're trying to estimate the impact of factory farming sites in the UK, in terms of air pollution and the impact on local property prices and so on. Our researcher who's working on that project said he found one source that said, there's only one facility that will knock more off your house price if it's set up across the road than a factory farm, and that's a landfill site. Right? These are like the most undesirable things to have as a next door neighbor. And so for things like that, we can model based on, oftentimes, publicly available data. In other cases, we might be acquiring proprietary data, but yeah, it's all with the aim of looking at different strands of this transition away from animal products and towards alternatives.

[00:04:12] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, this is like such unbelievably important work. So that describes the work. Who are the clients? I assume they come to you asking sort of specific questions or at least in a specific area. So who are they and what do they want to know?

[00:04:25] Chris Bryant: Ideally, you've nailed the description of an ideal client who will come to us asking a sort of specific question. In the sense that they might have an idea of the kind of area that they need research into, but it's not fully formulated the precise question that they would want to ask. Usually that can come from a discussion about what they're hoping to get from the research.

There's a few different things that the type of organizations that we work with might be looking to get. So we work with meat alternative companies, so plant based meats, cultivated meat and so on, as well as animal protection non profits. And there's a few different sort of reasons that they might be looking for research.

One is to inform their sort of strategic decision making. So for example, what should we call our product? What kind of packaging should we use? Which of these plays better in a kind of experimental way? So that's one sort of purpose of research. Another might be to investigate public opinion on an issue which most people are uninformed about or don't know about or where you suspect public opinion is on your side, but nobody has yet asked the question.

Those are often quite specific things on behalf of nonprofits. So for example, we worked with a nonprofit in Canada who wanted to investigate whether consumers had been misled by the welfare labels on egg packaging.

And that was part of a broader piece of work that they were doing around the egg industry in Canada. So, there was a situation where, you know, they knew the type of work that they wanted, and the purpose there was to demonstrate public support as part of a broader project.

[00:05:55] Mariann Sullivan: Sort of things like, What do people think cage-free means and what does it really mean? That kind of thing?

[00:06:00] Chris Bryant: Exactly, yeah, so we had some questions in there, which were showing people pictures of the conditions associated with each of the labels you can find on eggs in Canada, asking them if they thought those conditions were better or worse than the labels implied, asking them their views about Canadian supermarkets' responsibility to ensure that all of their eggs are appropriately labeled in a transparent way and so on.

So we did a survey of Canadian consumers getting into some of those questions. Yeah, this is an example of the kind of use that that kind of survey research can have for nonprofits. And I will say as well, while we are not a nonprofit ourselves, we are sort of next door to nonprofit in the sense that we don't make very much profit.

You know, we're all, uh.

[00:06:46] Mariann Sullivan: Unintentionally nonprofit.

[00:06:47] Chris Bryant: Well, yes, quite, yeah!

[00:06:50] Mariann Sullivan: I used to always want a t shirt for my dog that said unintentionally nonviolent because I fed her vegan food. It's sort of a similar kind of thing.

[00:06:59] Chris Bryant: They would, if you gave them half a chance. I've got a dog as well, so I know. Yeah. But we're all, you know, frankly, underpaid vegans who are, you know, engaged doing this work for the movement. Right? And so we usually, when we're working with nonprofits, especially, we're usually able to do what would usually be five figure projects in industry for four figures, you know?

[00:07:18] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, And, hopefully the industry will grow and you will grow along with it. Because hopefully at some point, there'll be some money in alternative proteins and that's certainly a topic I want to get into.

We started talking about this a little bit, just about the egg question, but let's talk a little bit about messaging. Images of animal cruelty. I think this is like, especially for grassroots activists, and a lot of our listeners are grassroots activists, this is a quandary because a lot of what you do is try to tell people what's happening, and it's really hard to tell people what's happening. I mean, we all know that.

Because the images of animal cruelty shut them down, but if you don't show them the images about animal cruelty and you focus on other topics, are you really just not telling them the full story? What have you found about the usefulness of images of animal cruelty, and perhaps more important, how to get people to look at them?

[00:08:06] Chris Bryant: I love this question. I think it's really nail on the head for so many activists. And this is always something that, when I meet people who call themselves animal activists primarily, and I imagine the kind of encounters they must be having and the kind of comments that they must be getting in the comment section and so on, this is the thing that I always want to tell them. There is a lot of pressure from different sources to don't go so hard on the animal message there, mate. I think that, obviously it's socially uncomfortable if you know, you're queuing with your meat eating friend and order the vegan meal and they say, Oh, how come you're vegan? It is uncomfortable to say, well, I think that you're perpetrating violence and so on. Like this, you know, most animals are factory farmed and by buying and consuming animal products, you are directly funding the abuse of those animals. I mean, that is the honest answer.

[00:09:02] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. And the more you go into detail, the more uncomfortable it is.

You actually tell them what's happening. That's really uncomfortable.

[00:09:10] Chris Bryant: Absolutely. And I think that because it is kind of an uncomfortable social interaction, a lot of vegan activists might be tempted to believe that going hard on the animal message is not going to be effective. And some people say, well, that might be, there could be a backlash effect, right? And people respond to the messaging and they get cognitive dissonance and now they're going to dig in their heels on the other side and things like that. Actually, the evidence is that it is effective to talk about animal cruelty in animal production. It is effective. It is uncomfortable, but it is effective, it is. There are a bunch of studies comparing an animal cruelty and animal rights message to an environmental or a health message, for example.

And quite consistently, you'll see that the animal based message gets a higher percentage of people saying that they're going to change their diet. It gets them to commit to more substantial changes. So for example, going vegan rather than going flexitarian, and it gets them to maintain those changes for a longer time.

So the animal message really is the most effective one if you had a limited amount of resources and you want to put something on a billboard, for example, the animal cruelty message is the most effective one. There's plenty of evidence to support that. Now on the topic of cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning as it occurs here, this will be the experience of a lot of vegan advocates when they are having such interactions with people who have never considered going vegan before, right?

The man on the street, proverbial man on the street. And they will encounter this person really making up their reasons as they go along. And it's very obvious often that people are saying, right, I think that actually plants might be sentient, and actually I'm not convinced that animals are.

It's like, okay, is this really a position that you'd be taking if we weren't talking about veganism? Like, probably not. Right? So that motivated reasoning and that cognitive dissonance is very palpable to any vegan who has spent time in this conversation, but what we don't see is that for a lot of non-vegans, getting them to that stage is progress.

Even when they are making up their silly reasons, they're, half the time, hearing themselves and going, that can't be it. , I'm gonna need to get another solution here. Right? They're quite sure that they don't wanna give up their meat and animal products, but they're gonna cast around for a reason, and I think that it's likely to be very rare, just as a matter of ego, to say nothing of practicality, that someone will, in that sort of heated debate setting, concede in real time and go vegan there and then, right? They will most likely leave that conversation feeling annoyed. They may even dislike the vegan who's been speaking to them, but as a vegan advocate I encountered on the tube in London recently said to me, they're not there to make friends. So, what might appear to be... here's an interesting thing as well. Let's say that somebody has this kind of an encounter with a quote unquote, aggressive vegan. And they're forcing them to look at images of factory farms or slaughterhouses, whatever it may be, in almost all cases, it takes quite a strong character to not basically just dislike this person in front of me who's making me feel bad about myself, right? In most cases people are just going to be like, I dislike that, I interpret that behaviour as aggressive and so on. But they might still think about it after they leave.

They might go home and draw the curtains and realize they didn't really have a good response. And the thing that the person was saying was actually quite horrible. Now, if the next interaction they have with the vegan is with their vegan friend, or some friendly acquaintance, and they have already had that seed planted, they might go on to tell the story that, Hey, this friendly vegan was the one who converted me. And this aggressive vegan wasn't.

And that might be true from their perspective, but they don't actually know, as none of us can fully account for our motivations and the source of our behavior and so on. They can't say that the aggressive vegan in that situation didn't play a role. I think there's all sorts of pressure, including in the vegan community, to shut up about animals.

Don't just go hard on animal cruelty stuff, talk about the environment and so on. It's just not as compelling when talking to the public.

[00:13:35] Mariann Sullivan: What about, and I can imagine what your answer will be, but also people advise using nice pictures of animals, like a lovely picture of a pig, while verbalizing, stop the cruelty or something. Is it really important to have that image? PETA, I think, is perhaps the past master, they're willing to put those images out there. The really awful images. Is it better to do that? Is it the images? Or is this, a deeper dive than you've actually done? Is it the images or the words?

[00:14:03] Chris Bryant: No, I think you want the images as graphic as you can be without being censored. Basically.

[00:14:09] Mariann Sullivan: Interesting.

[00:14:09] Chris Bryant: I think you probably don't want lots of images of the 1 percent of animals who are not on factory farms to be out there, lest people get the impression that that's the norm.

[00:14:19] Mariann Sullivan: No, I didn't mean that exactly. Just like a picture of a pig that's clearly in a sanctuary or something, not in agriculture.

Yeah.

[00:14:26] Chris Bryant: I understand what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:27] Mariann Sullivan: Like, we love pigs and pigs are beautiful, kind of thing.

[00:14:30] Chris Bryant: There are some studies showing that like people are more likely to pick up the leaflet if it has a picture of a happy animal than a factory farmed one or whatever, but they're not more like to go vegan.

[00:14:39] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah. That's an interesting point. Pick up the leaflet. How do you get past the fact that people just don't want to have this conversation at all? Or if you're standing in line, and they can't get away from you, or if it's somebody you know, and they feel obligation to listen to you, but most people don't, and most people don't feel the obligation to pick up the leaflet. When you have information that people don't want to hear, but will change them, how do you get it to them?

I mean, not just for individual activists, but for organizations who want to do campaigns like this.

[00:15:08] Chris Bryant: It's a really good question, yeah, and it's especially the case with this kind of animal cruelty imagery that we're talking about. I wrote an article on this called animal cruelty images are persuasive if we can overcome avoidance. And that's the crux, right? People will look the other way.

It basically comes down to, how do you get people, as you've said, to pay attention to this information that they don't want to look at, but will change them. In fact, they probably don't want to look at it because it will change them, right? They don't want to have to go vegan, so they're like don't show me.

I think from an organizational perspective, one thing that you want to do is look at having difficult to avoid media. So leaflets, for example, are very easy to just not pick up if they look like they're going to be upsetting. Billboards on the highway, a little bit more difficult to avoid if you drive past that part of the highway twice a day and you have a big billboard in either direction with a difficult to avoid image of animal suffering and a simple message that summarizes, you know, when you buy animal products, you cause this animal suffering, please try plant based alternatives, something like that.

And we've done some studies on billboards. Something like that, I think is likely to be effective because it's difficult to avoid, whereas things like radio ads, I feel it's relatively easy to change the radio station as you're driving along. Certainly flyers, it's easy to avoid.

So I think it's about getting into media, which make it difficult to look the other way. That's one thing.

[00:16:32] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, that makes really a lot of sense. All right, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about the food, because a lot of the work you do has to do with getting people to accept the food. And of late, I feel like one of the things that I didn't anticipate, particularly, is the industry would fight back.

I don't know why I didn't anticipate that, but we are seeing a lot of counter messaging from the industry about the food right now. And as one huge example, the term ultra processed, and I know you've done some work investigating the meaning of this term and what influence it's having. So how successful has the industry been in labeling plant foods as ultra processed?

I teach animal law and I had a student who's very pro animal, and I heard her talking to somebody else about how the Beyond Burgers were ultra processed. I can't believe she ever used that term before in her life. So clearly that messaging has reached even her, so I feel like they've been quite successful with this effort.

What does it mean to be ultra processed and what can be done to counter it?

[00:17:28] Chris Bryant: They have been, and people on the vegan side and on the plant based side have been a bit disorganized in how we're responding to this. I've seen some people giving far too much ground on this topic. Ultra processed foods is a concept from a framework which been around for about 15 years.

The key thing about this framework was that It was originally talking about foods that were made very profitably by very large companies that were wrapped in plastic, that were aggressively marketed. The whole framework of which Ultra Processed is a part, was not meant to be to do with nutrition or health outcomes at all.

It was more like a socio political economic critique of the way that the food system is structured. And there might be reasonable critiques to make along those grounds, but somewhere along the way it's been misappropriated to talk about health and nutrition. And now, interestingly, there are some studies which show that if you have higher consumption of foods in this broad category called ultra processed, then you are going to have worse health outcomes.

But, perhaps you can preempt my critique by the way that I summarized the study outcome there, it's not particularly helpful to put foods into these broad categories according to their degree of processing. There's obviously going to be highly processed foods, which are some of the healthiest things that you can consume, like for example, vitamins and mineral tablets. Whole grain bread is counted as ultra processed in this framework, and it's just not unhealthy for you. Plant based meats are another one.

And in fact, plant based meats compared to meat from animals have a lower calorie density, they have lower levels of saturated fat, they have lower levels of cholesterol, and they have higher levels of fiber. All of these are nutritional profiles which favor plant based meats over meat from animals relative to the most important health problems in developed countries, being heart disease and cancer amongst the biggest killers. There's a favorable nutritional case for plant based meats over meat from animals, so that's the key thing that I would say on this. Plant based meat alternatives often are in the category ultra processed, but that is not determinative of their healthiness. Things that are ultra processed can be very healthy. And likewise, things that are completely unprocessed, for example, red meat, which falls into category one, unprocessed, are known to be unhealthy, right? Are known to be associated with higher risk of heart disease and cancer.

And then again, we have, milk, which is going to be actually only safe to consume if it is processed to a degree, right? Completely unprocessed raw milk can have all sorts of contaminants and so on. So degree of processing is being used as a very crude proxy for health.

And here's the key thing, this has been deliberately encouraged by the meat industry, as you mentioned. There's a survey in the UK where plant based meats are second only to ready meals when people are asked to name ultra processed foods. I'd say ready meals like microwave TV dinners, you guys would say, and then plant based meats right below that.

And they're a tiny portion of all the foods in that category, but that association has been made so strong by the meat lobbyists, and what they don't want us talking about is actually plant based meats are healthier than meat from animals. They have lower saturated fat, they have lower calorie density, they have lower cholesterol, they have higher fiber.

You can make all of these comparisons of plant based meat next to meat from animals, and you're gonna find that the plant based meat comes out on top.

[00:21:09] Mariann Sullivan: That's fascinating. Yeah, I always like to say, and my listeners have heard me say this a million times, so I apologize to everybody, but, like, meat is obviously a completely processed food. They take vegetation and they process it through the body of an animal and add a lot of fat and cholesterol and all these terrible things for you.

I mean, that's processing as far as I'm concerned.

[00:21:30] Chris Bryant: That's absolutely correct. Yeah. And here's the joke with the ultra processed category as well. There was another study more recently where they looked at, actually, let's not talk about this broad category ultra processed, which is going to include, you know, healthy meat alternatives right next door to Coca Cola and Cheetos, right?

Let's look at more specifically, categories within ultra processed and their relationship with health outcomes. And when they did that, they find that almost all of the variants in these health studies, which show ultra processed foods being bad for you, are driven by two categories of ultra processed foods.

One is sugar sweetened beverages. So it's, you know, fizzy drinks, soda pop and so on. And the other is processed meat.

[00:22:12] Mariann Sullivan: Oh, wow.

[00:22:13] Chris Bryant: The process plant based products in that study were not associated with an increased risk, associated with no change in risk.

[00:22:18] Mariann Sullivan: They really have done very well with this completely bogus marketing strategy.

[00:22:23] Chris Bryant: They've done extremely well. And I think that the pushback has to be just getting onto the grounds of healthiness. If you look at a lot of the coverage that's talking about ultra processed foods, it will have a slight of hands like this, where there's technically true statements, which kind of leave you with the idea that plant based meats are unhealthy, but don't quite say it.

Now, here's an example that I saw recently. Plant based meats are in the category of ultra processed foods. Okay, that's a true statement. Ultra processed foods have been shown to be associated with negative health outcomes. Well, that's also a true statement. Right, well, it's true on net, but it's kind of suggesting, and now the third says many ultra processed foods are unhealthy due to high levels of fat, sugar, and salt.

Again, that's a true statement about ultra processed food. Now, you could read that paragraph and come away thinking that you've just read plant based meats are unhealthy because they have high fat sugar and salt, but you didn't read that. They didn't say that. They're not. They have lower levels.

[00:23:22] Mariann Sullivan: This is like a problem from first year logic.

[00:23:25] Chris Bryant: Yes, it really is.

Yeah. Yeah, it's that sleight of hands, which I mean, we do have the advantage of being right, but unfortunately, that only matters to some extent.

[00:23:34] Mariann Sullivan: I totally agree. I say that all the time. The one thing we've got is that we're right. But, I mean, I think we could look of all this effort from the industry as sort of a sign of success. I mean, we had to anticipate they weren't gonna just like say, oh, okay. You win.

[00:23:49] Chris Bryant: Yeah, well, first they ignore you, then laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win, right? We're at the fighting stage.

[00:23:56] Mariann Sullivan: And vegan food, of course, has gotten a lot better in the last few years. And, since the UK is basically the place where veganism seems to be growing the fastest, how important has that been in the UK's expansion of veganism? Is it the food? Is it that the food has gotten better?

[00:24:11] Chris Bryant: I think it's been massively important. I've been thinking about the ways that this has been even more important than I had ever realized. Certainly, that is one level. I, myself, have only been vegan since it was very, very easy. I went vegan in 2019.

[00:24:26] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, you timed that well, I have to say.

[00:24:28] Chris Bryant: Yeah, yeah, it really was, and now you can get vegan food absolutely everywhere. And frankly, it's been very easy since then. So that's definitely one thing. Many of the reasons that people used to give for abandoning veganism were to do with there's not options for me when I go out to eat with friends, it's sort of socially isolating in that way.

That has to a large extent been removed. It's quite rare now to find a restaurant or a venue with no vegan option, certainly in the UK. And so I think that major thing that used to be a big segway out of veganism has been removed to a large extent because now people can get their, you know, tasty and convenient and affordable food.

So I think it's been really, really important in that sense. It lowers the bar for how convinced you have to be of the argument. It's going to be related to how much of a sacrifice you'll have to make. If you can get to the stage where truly all of the plant based stuff is indistinguishable or better than all of the animal product stuff, then what motivation is anyone ever going to have to say, well, actually, I don't know if pigs are conscious, right?

Like you would, no one would ever claim to have that opinion ever again. There would just be no motivation for it. Right. So that's one thing. I think another thing, which I have just sort of become aware of, the alternative proteins industry, one of the things that it is, and can be, is a source of revenue for the animal movement, right?

A lot of the leaders of these companies are vegans and are mission driven, many times leaving larger paychecks on the table because they want to come and work in something aligned with their ethics. And importantly, many of the investors and owners of these companies are also vegans and are also mission driven and are some of the big funders of the animal movement, right?

The big foundations that fund the animal movement are likely made up of people who have a lot of money in beyond meat stocks and so on, right? You would think. And of course, many of them are attached to industry funds and things like that. So the financial health of alternative proteins is going to be upstream of the financial health of the animal movement, frankly.

The better that these companies do, that really is going to translate into more dollars for advocates and non profits and everyone else in the movement.

[00:26:50] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, that's really interesting. So it's not even just that we want people to be eating those foods. It's that, that's money in the bank for the movement.

[00:26:57] Chris Bryant: Exactly, yeah, and I used to say, and I still think this to a large extent, I don't really mind whether or not vegans start eating Beyond Burgers because they're already not eating beef burgers, right?

I mind about getting people to stop eating beef burgers. I still think that to a large extent, but actually I probably now have a preference for vegans eating Beyond Burgers.

Not only are they not unhealthy, as many people have the misconception, but actually they are playing an important role in being the vehicles for getting these products out and for having these products enable an easier transition for meat eaters and having these products be valuable investments for the big funders of the animal movement as well.

So, you know, it's really multifaceted and multi pronged, the benefits of a healthy alternative proteins industry. Another aspect to that as well is politically. It's a very difficult conversation to have with any politician or policymaker if your only ask is to do less animal farming. Let's all eat less meat, let's have our meat and dairy industry get smaller.

No politician who's concerned about the economy, which is all politicians, wants to hear that.

[00:28:03] Mariann Sullivan: Well, yeah, for a million reasons. I mean, the ones who do are heroes, but I don't know what it's getting them, you know.

[00:28:09] Chris Bryant: Well exactly. Yeah, and you know the ones who think it don't say it out loud, right? There are

gonna be vegan politicians who, you know, know not to say it.

But now that you can go to politicians and policymakers and say, we have this growing alternative proteins industry in the UK or in the US and it's creating jobs and it's a growing part of the economy and we're exporting American products to other parts of the world and so on. Well, now policymakers are interested and will start to say, actually, does it make sense to be passing all of the asks of the animal lobby, in various contexts, right?

Is there a case for, you know, support of this growing industry? It gets you there kind of politically as well as economically in terms of resources for the movement and just like behaviorally in terms of people having to sacrifice less.

[00:28:58] Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I hadn't really thought of that, but those are really good points. And, on the other hand, I feel like the common wisdom is that this industry has been faltering. I mean, certainly the incredibly high hopes for Impossible and Beyond have not crystallized to the extent that we wanted them to. And what about the, you mentioned price, taste and convenience, you know, like, as the motivations and we have been told, I think it's particularly from the Good Food Institute, but from others as well, this is what we need. Price, taste, convenience. That's going to happen. And of course, we don't have parity on price, taste, and convenience yet. So the final word is not in on whether that's all we need, but do you think that's all we need? Or do we need to get people to want to try these things?

Maybe not so much like you, that might not have tried it before we had Price, Taste, and Convenience, but now that we are close to having it, do we also need those animal cruelty messages and all of the rest of it to tell people why you should change?

[00:29:55] Chris Bryant: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think we do. Yeah.

We have increasingly good products that are coming down in price. I mean, that has been a big barrier for people in the UK, I think for a long time. Actually pound for pound, the plant based products are like up to 50 percent more expensive than other meat products.

And part of that is because they have much lower volume. So they have to have much higher margins.

[00:30:17] Mariann Sullivan: And also, the situation in the U. S., the subsidies, I mean, they don't have the subsidies.

[00:30:21] Chris Bryant: The subsidies are certainly a factor that makes the price of animal products artificially low. There could be a case for, you know, in talking about the environmental harms of animal farming being comparable to petrol. We have very high tax at the gas station here in the UK, with an environmental justification, right?

And so I think that there could be a case for that as well, but on the elements that we need to get us there, I do think that we need the alternative protein products to be as good and as cheap as possible. I mean, to me, that's pretty obvious, really. There was some contention as to whether a precise version of this idea was correct, in recent months, but having written on one side of this contention, and since spoken to my colleague on the other side of this contention on the importance of price, taste and convenience, I think that the parts we disagree on were fewer than either of us anticipated.

I think what we agree on are that It is incredibly important for alternative proteins to continue to get better and to continue to get cheaper. There's very little doubt that those two things happening are going to increase the share of alternative proteins. Convenience is a little bit more difficult to quantify.

There's also some variability as to how important people rate healthiness, which we've spoken a little bit about. People's ideas about healthiness vis a vis processing, which are often wrong and wrong by design, I think. But that is not enough.

I think that people still need a reason to change the thing that they are currently doing out of habit. It's probably the case that I could get a slightly better deal on my broadband if I were to, you know, really go and research and look into, could I get a faster thing for a lower price? Probably I could. But in the absence of some compelling reason to go and look for it, I'm not going to. I'm just going to continue with my current contract, right?

[00:32:17] Mariann Sullivan: Right. Exactly.

[00:32:19] Chris Bryant: So I think, you know, we talk about this in terms of push and pull factors. And in this analogy, the push and the pull are both going in the same direction. So we've got pull factors, which are alternative proteins, which are getting better and getting cheaper and pulling people towards these new animal product alternatives, but they need the push factors, which are traditional animal advocacy, basically. And people putting in front of the public, these are the reasons that you need to change.

I think interestingly, they kind of need to be two separate parts of the movement, in some sense. The companies that are the alternative creating factors over here with the pull factors are generating the revenue, but you don't really want the Beyond Meat logo on the advert about factory farmed pigs.

Even if they're saying we're the solution to this problem, it's just, it's probably not good optics, right? I do think that there's a case for, and this happens to a large extent, as I mentioned, through the investors and the foundations, for the funding from this alternative proteins pull factors over here to be funding the push factor adverts, which will be things like animal cruelty messages, compelling people to move away from animal products and try plant based alternatives.

No specific brand, but a clear message, which again, a lot of people are not going to like to see. The thing to understand about the role of cognitive dissonance there is that it's a necessary part of the process. Like putting the animal cruelty message in front of people. It will give people cognitive dissonance, but that is a necessary part of the process.

And one way of resolving that is to change the behavior, right? There's probably no vegan who used to eat meat. who didn't have some sort of cognitive dissonance in the transition. You have to have that, oh, I'm realizing that something is wrong here, in order to get the motivation to change anything. So I think that trying to avoid giving people cognitive dissonance is like a fool's errand, really.

It has to be something that people go through and resolve by changing their behavior.

[00:34:19] Mariann Sullivan: I mean, that makes total sense. And it does mean that the activists, and I guess activist organizations kind of just have to suck it up and face the fact that they're never going to be loved. But, you know, that's not really the goal. Most of us don't care.

But, I mean, for the activists, we're basically seeking one on one kind of change.

So a lot of discussion amongst particularly environmental activists that this is a waste of time, mostly because they don't particularly want to go vegan. That getting people to change one on one is useless. We have to get systemic change. It's hard to imagine what kind of systemic change on the side of animal welfare, not on the supporting non animal proteins, but on the side of animal welfare, other than really, really pretty basic ones.

You're probably more likely to get them in the UK even than here. Some kind of reforms in factory farming are so hard to achieve. So, how do these things intersect? Should we just be advocating for individual change, even though it's hard to go one by one when you're talking about billions of people, or are there kind of systemic ways that we can seek to get people to understand, not just that this food is delicious, but that there's a really good reason to eat it.

[00:35:25] Chris Bryant: Yeah, it's a great question. And it speaks to something that has been the approach for effective animal advocacy, which is the effective altruism wing of animal advocacy. And, you'll be aware of organizations like the Humane League and Open Philanthropy, that are very much on systemic and institutional interventions being, you know, the best value for money intervention.

And I think that there's good evidence that that's the case, as far as we know currently. My point that I always like to make about this is that the systemic and the institutional change is dependent on some amount of individual change because governments have to reflect what voters want and companies have to reflect what consumers want, basically.

Right, Target can't just ban factory farmed products tomorrow if all of the consumers still want cheap animal products because they're all just going to go to Walmart instead. Right? And, you know, Biden can't just ban factory farming tomorrow if all the voters still want their cheap bacon because they're all just going to vote for Trump instead.

Right, so you do have to, at some level, have the public on your side to be able to get any of the institutions to be on your side. The powerful heads of these institutions are ultimately beholden to public opinion, really. The institutional changes that you can get and that are advocated for and that should be advocated for, you can think of them as being within like an Overton window.

There's like a certain amount of animal welfare laws or whatever it may be, that the public will accept or even will demand, but beyond that, people are going to start saying, well, now my meat's getting a bit too expensive. I'm not going to, right? The individual attitude change needs to come along in order to be able to support any systematic, institutional change that one is hoping to make.

And, you know, you'll find this, if you start trying to advocate for institutional change in countries where there's just way lower rates of vegetarianism, veganism, because. a lot of times companies are like, we know that consumers in this country don't care about chicken welfare, or whatever it may be.

And until can get them to care about that, then I'm afraid we're just going to do whatever's cheapest. Now, again, there is some change that you can make within that kind of window, but, yeah. That's actually another point that I would make about animal advocates, and the courage to be disliked on this.

I think that one of the functions that those unapologetic activists can have is to serve as, so there's this idea called radical flank effect. And the idea is basically that if there's sort of more radical members, then it can open up the door for more moderate people in the same movement to be able to make progress in that direction.

And in that case, you know, the unapologetic advocate might be acting as a common enemy for the sort of more moderate vegan advocate and the non vegan to both say, Oh, I'm not... you know, the more moderate vegan might say, Well, I'm not like this aggressive vegan over here. They might not really believe that.

They might actually understand that this person over here is playing an important role, and hopefully some of the unapologetic vegans understand that they are playing that role and that their role is not to be liked, but nonetheless is an important one.

[00:38:39] Mariann Sullivan: I love that. I really love it. Like, because not being liked is part of this life.

[00:38:44] Chris Bryant: Yeah.

[00:38:45] Mariann Sullivan: I think that's a good place to stop in our main interview, and I have a few more questions, particularly about welfare and rights and how all of that controversy within the movement has played out here.

But we should go to the bonus segment for that, because I think we've taken up enough of your time on the main interview. I could talk to you forever though, Chris.

[00:39:04] Chris Bryant: I wish we could!

[00:39:05] Mariann Sullivan: This is the stuff. This is the stuff I want to hear about.

Before I let you go, just tell people where they can find you and just tell them some of the kind of reports that you've done that people might be interested in reading.

[00:39:15] Chris Bryant: Yeah, absolutely! So, you can find us at bryantresearch. co. uk and in particular, you can check out our insights there. So we have a bunch of reports of various different lengths on various topics relating to the protein transition. So we have some stuff on here about the small body problem. I'm looking at things about the different languages and euphemisms that are used around meat products.

There's some modeling that we did on NHS savings in here. There's a bunch of interesting reports here. And if you're looking for something in particular, you can reach out to me. My email is chris at bryantresearch. co. uk. Bryant research is B R Y A N T research. Yeah, thanks again for having me on the show.

[00:39:56] Mariann Sullivan: Excellent. Lots to dig in there. Thanks so much.