Changing our eating behavior is an important goal in achieving the climate goals. The transition from animal to more plant-based (or vegan) eating patterns contributes to reducing global warming.
This is because animal-based food production produces higher CO2 emissions and requires more water than plant-based products. This study investigated whether offering vegan cooking workshops in schools could contribute to this transition to a more plant-based diet among young people.
CORE
- By cooking vegan meals together with classmates at school, such as at recess or at recess, young people may learn to appreciate the taste of vegan meals, begin to appreciate the importance of a plant-based diet and realize that eating vegan at their school is “normal.”
- Although follow-up research is needed, organizing cooking workshops in schools seems like a possible way to encourage (norms around) a plant-based diet among young people in an attractive and approachable way.
RESEARCH METHOD
WHAT?
This study investigated whether attending a vegan cooking workshop could stimulate that:
- Young people find vegan food tastier and want to eat vegan food more often
- Young people believe that other young people find vegan food more important and that other young people eat vegan food more often
WHO?
155 German youngsters aged 10 to 17 years old
HOW?
The study took place in schools. To begin, all youngsters were given a presentation on five reasons to eat vegan (see
https://proveg.com/5-pros/). Then they filled out a pretest, reporting on how much they liked the taste of vegan food and how important they thought it was to eat vegan. They were also asked questions about prescriptive norms (e.g., “Students at my school think it is important that I eat less meat”) and descriptive norms (e.g., the number of days a classmate ate vegan in the past 7 days) surrounding eating vegan. After completing the pre-measurement, youngsters followed a cooking workshop in small groups (3-6 youngsters). Under the guidance of a researcher and teacher, the group cooked a vegan spaghetti and a vegan muffin for dessert together. After everyone finished eating the meal, the youngsters completed the post-measurement.
RESULTS
- Compared to the pre-measurement, youngsters reported that they liked the taste of vegan food better after the cooking workshop. They also saw the importance of eating vegan food more after the workshop and had a higher intention to eat vegan meals more often.
- After the cooking workshop, youngsters indicated that they thought others in their cooking group thought vegan food was more important (prescriptive norm) and that they ate plant-based food more often (descriptive norm) than before the workshop. Youngsters also thought after the workshop that other students in their school (outside the cooking group) thought vegan food was more important than before.
- It is important to mention that no control group was used in this study. Additional research is needed to draw stronger conclusions about the effects of the cooking workshops, comparing the current cooking workshop with a group of youngsters who did not cook.
This sci-fly was written by Levie Karssen (Radboud University) for RAD-blog, the blog on smoking, alcohol, drugs and diet.
