Better Products Are the Key to Expanding Veganism
When trying to expand veganism, people often rely on one of two strategies: persuasion or product development.
- Persuasion means doing things to persuade people to be vegan in the current world. This includes things like making documentaries, ethical arguments, and online posts designed to convince people to stop eating animals.
- Product Development means developing products that make veganism easier — such as plant-based meat.
While both of these strategies are important, persuasion is limited by the difficulty of personal change.
Persuasion Struggles When Personal Change Is Needed
Many people care deeply about social justice. Yet veganism remains one of the few social justice issues people rarely accept. This gap reveals something important: persuasion struggles when it asks people to change their habits, not just their opinions.
For example, many people strongly oppose police brutality. But for most people, supporting that position requires no change to their personal behavior. This made it feasible to gain widespread support against police brutality.
In contrast, persuading people of veganism requires getting people to personally change the food they eat. Accordingly, adoption of veganism has remained limited.
Good Products Reduce the Barriers to Change
In the 1990s, a lot of people were worried about climate change. However, basically no one was giving up their gas-powered cars.
When did people begin to stop using gas-powered cars? After electric cars became a viable alternative.
This behavioral change from millions of people happened not because persuasion got better, but because products got better. Even if we had donated 100x more money to climate persuasion, people still wouldn't have abandoned gas-powered cars at scale if the only alternative was bikes.
Veganism is similar. Even if we spend 100x more on vegan activism, adoption will likely remain limited if the underlying product doesn't improve (in cost, taste, etc.).
Conclusion
The future of veganism likely hinges less on how compelling the message is—and more on how easy it is to act on. By creating better products, we can make veganism not just an ethical choice, but an effortless one too.
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