EA - Introducing Stanford’s new Humane & Sustainable Food Lab by MMathur

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Introducing Stanford’s new Humane & Sustainable Food Lab, published by MMathur on April 30, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.We are excited to announce the new Humane & Sustainable Food Lab at Stanford University’s School of Medicine (California, USA). Our mission is to end factory farming through cutting-edge scientific research that we are uniquely positioned to conduct. I am the principal investigator of the lab, an Assistant Professor at the Stanford School of Medicine with dual appointments in the Quantitative Sciences Unit and Department of Pediatrics. Because arguments for reducing factory farming as a cause area have been detailed elsewhere, here I focus on describing:Our approachOur research and publications to dateOur upcoming research prioritiesWhy we are funding-constrained1. Our approach1.1. Breadth, then depthEmpirical research on how to reduce factory farming is still nascent, with many low-hanging fruit and unexplored possibilities. As such, it is critical to explore broadly to see what general directions are most promising and in what real-world contexts (e.g., educational interventions that appeal to animal welfare [1, 2, 3], choice-architecture “nudges” that subtly shift food-service environments, etc.). We are conducting studies on a range of individual- and society-level interventions (see below), ultimately aiming to find and refine the most tractable, cost-effective, and scalable interventions. As we home in on candidate interventions, we expect our research to become more deeply focused on a smaller number of interventions.1.2. Collaborating with food service to conduct and disseminate research in real-world contextsWe have a unique collaboration with the Director and Executive Chefs at the Stanford dining halls, allowing us to conduct controlled trials in real-world settings to assess interventions to reduce consumption of meat and animal products. Some of our interventions have been as simple and scalable as reducing the size of spoons used to serve these foods. Also, Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises is a founding member of the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative (MCURC), a nationwide research consortium of 74 colleges and universities that conduct groundbreaking, collaborative studies on healthy and sustainable food choices in food service. MCURC provides evidence-based recommendations for promoting healthier and more sustainable food choices in food service operations, providing a natural route to dissemination.Our established research model involves conducting initial pilot studies at Stanford's dining halls to assess interventions' real-world feasibility and obtain preliminary effect-size estimates, then conducting large-scale, multisite studies by partnering with collaborating members of MCURC. We also have ongoing collaborations with restaurants and plant-based food startups in which we are studying whether adding modern plant-based analogs (e.g., Impossible Burgers or JUST Egg) to a menu reduces sales of animal-based foods.1.3. Building a new academic fieldThe large majority of empirical research on reducing factory farming has been conducted by nonprofits. In contrast, academics have engaged comparatively little with this cause area (but with notable, commendable exceptions). Academics have a chick’n-and-JUST Egg problem: without a robust academic field for farmed animal welfare, academics remain largely unaware of this cause area and lack the necessary mentorship and career incentives to pursue it; conversely, without individual labs pursuing this research, a robust academic field cannot emerge. Our lab is designed as a prototype, demonstrating that it is feasible – and indeed rather joyful! – for a lab to focus on an EA-aligned, neglected cause area, while also succeeding robustly by the stri...