Every little helps: exploring meat and animal product consumption in the Tesco 1.0 dataset
Analyzing trends in animal product sales over time: insights from 420 million purchases in a leading UK supermarket chain.
The production and consumption of meat and animal products have been associated with an array of ethical, health, and environmental issues. While social scientists have increasingly focused on meat reduction and the promotion of meat alternatives in recent years, and have identified a number of regional, seasonal, and sociodemographic variations in consumption, empirical work is often based on self-reported data. To build a greater understanding of actual dietary habits, we seek to provide analysis based on real food purchase data by aggregating data from different sources. To this end, we explore the consumption of meat and animal products in the Tesco 1.0 dataset, an Open Access dataset representing 420 million food item purchases made by 1.6 million loyalty card users at 411 Tesco stores across Greater London in 2015. The data is aggregated most granularly at the level of monthly purchase of 11 broad food categories in 4833 lower super output areas (LSOA—the smallest geographic area). We represented the consumption of meat and animal products graphically for each month of the year and for each of 33 London boroughs. In general, we found that the spring and summer months had the highest consumption of meat and animal products, including poultry, and this decreased in autumn. We also combined the Tesco 1.0 dataset with datasets from the London Datastore (a free and open data-sharing portal that provides over a thousand datasets to understand the city and develop solutions to its problems), and identified several demographic factors as predictors for the meat consumption. Contrary to our hypothesis, areas with older, lower education, and more conservative populations had a lower proportion of meat consumed. In line with our hypotheses, a lower proportion of meat consumed could be observed in areas with higher population density, better health, and more Hindus. The purpose of this paper is to add to knowledge on regional, seasonal, and sociodemographic variations in animal product consumption, as well as provide a valuable overview of animal product consumption using a novel data source that comprises actual purchase data rather than self-reported consumption.
Giving farm animals a name and a face: Eliciting animal advocacy among omnivores using the identifiable victim effect
Exploring how giving a farm animal a name and a face can boost animal advocacy among omnivores.
Diets based on animal products are costly to our health and the planet and often inflict suffering on animals. In this study, we aimed to elicit animal advocacy among omnivores using the identifiable victim effect, a welldocumented phenomenon in which presenting an identifiable victim, compared to anonymous or statistical victims, evokes greater caring and helping behavior. We explored whether this finding extends to farm animal victims, and particularly among omnivores who may have a material interest in the outcome (i.e., the slaughter of farm animals)., Consequently, due to their dietary lifestyle and consumer support of the meat industry, they may be perceived as complicit in the victimization. In Experiment 1, omnivore participants indicated a greater likelihood to sign and share a petition to save an identified runaway calf (presented with a name and a picture) from slaughter than several unidentified runaway calves. In Experiment 2, we extended these findings to actual petition signing, along with reporting support of the petition. In Experiment 3, we further replicated the iden tifiability effect using real donations to save the runaway calf (calves) from slaughter and demonstrated it is limited to a single-identified victim. Additionally, we found that feelings of sympathy (Experiment 1) and ambivalence towards meat (Experiment 3) mediated the effect, whereas concern, empathy, identification with animals (Experiment 2), and ecological identity (Experiment 3) moderated it. Omnivores who scored high in concern and ecological identity, and low in empathy and identification with animals were more susceptible to the effect. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
