Turning meal choices upside down for people and planet.
We’re building on cutting edge academic research and popularise ‘menu-flipping’ - the inversion of meat/plant based food option ratios on menus - to accelerate a shift in social norms favouring diets that are healthy for people and planet.
High meat consumption in rich countries is one of the key drivers of the climate crisis. Land use change, energy inputs, methane emissions, feed supply chains and transportation mean that livestock production now accounts for around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. But we can change that! We can help tackle the climate crisis and biodiversity loss by helping more people switch to plant-rich diets.
Food is a tricky issue to tackle. What we eat is both highly culturally charged and strongly habituated. This creates two challenges for us; it’s harder to change behaviours at the speed required, and secondly, politicians will be extremely wary of bringing in policies to limit food choices - no one wants to be told what not to eat.
What if, instead of taxing meat out of shopping baskets or banning certain foods, we simply change up the choices we have in front of us?
Recent academic research found that flipping a menu from ¾ meat to ¾ veggie quadrupled the number of people choosing a vegetarian option from 12% to 48%.
A flipped menu inverts the ratio of meat and vegetarian/vegan options to make the majority meat free - presenting more choice of lower carbon dishes, and reframing this as the norm. We want to take this simple but powerful idea and accelerate its uptake.
We're running a pilot project with SOS-UK to flip in-house catering menus in student canteens. The University of Leeds and New City College will be putting our trial to the test this Spring.
We can't wait to see if we can help students buy fewer meals with meat in them and tackle carbon emissions.
The project will complete by summer 2024 so watch this space.
This project is funded by the Ennismore Foundation.