Burning Questions
Fellowship Award Winners

Topics to be Addressed during the Award Period:

What are the effective behavior change strategies to reduce meat consumption in Brazil and China?

• What are the the personal, cultural, and environmental influences and government policies enabling meat consumption /reduction in Brazil and China?
• What does the research tell us about the effectiveness of behavioral and informational strategies to reduce meat consumption, especially what insights are transferable to meat reduction from research conducted in in Brazil and China on behavior change strategies to promote health behaviors, such as healthy eating?
• What are the potential trade-offs that may complicate the success of strategies to reduce meat consumption in Brazil and China, especially potential unintended nutritional, environmental, or equity consequences?
• What are the essential steps to design, implement and evaluate behavioral and informational strategies to reduce meat consumption in Brazil and China that will maximize the chances of success?

Some of the Things We Really Liked when We Read the Application:

• Tiny Beam Fund is interested in applications about meat consumption reduction in middle-income countries such as Brazil and China with significant and/or rising meat consumption. The reason is that Tiny Beam Fund is focused on industrial animal agriculture's practices and business model, on academic research that provides a deeper understanding of this model, its negative impacts on society, and possible solutions to address these negative impacts. It has been known for quite a while that tackling this business model is very challenging when the products from this business model are promoted heavily by meat/food conglomerates with deep pockets (and sometimes by governments), and the public continues to buy these products enthusiastically. At the same time urging consumers to reduce their purchase of these products is very hard. Still, one needs to try to reach consumers, to understand their consumption behavior, and devise strategies to steer them away from industrially produced meat products.