Perspectives on the role that meat takes in our meals and our willingness and capacity to swap it out

There is a range of reasons for reducing our meat intake that is currently making headlines in the news e.g. its contribution to climate emissions, nutritionists’ health recommendations, animal welfare activists’ concerns around our meat production methods. For sure, messaging around the need to reduce meat intake will be most effective if it responds to what people say they care about; their preferences around swapping out meat (if they consider doing that at all), and how realistic it is for them to actually make the changes they say they would like to make.
Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) supported Nourish Scotland to run focus group discussions on this theme with a group of diverse people who eat meat as part of their normal diet. Participants were recruited via an online form to participate in a 2-hour online session, and were asked to take a record of their meals in the week or so in the run up to the session. 15 people participated over two sessions that took place in the last week of June 2024. Their ages ranged from 25 to over 60, they were from a range of cultural backgrounds, except for one person, they had no specific dietary requirements, they all ate meat as part of their normal diets, they were male and female, and based in Central Scotland.
The questions we asked participants during the workshop started with reflecting on their records (of what meat they ate in the week before the session and what role it took in these meals). We then asked them what they cared about when they eat meat, how they might have swapped meat out of these meals (how easy it would have been for them to do so, how they would have felt about doing so), and lastly, their thoughts about eating various meat substitutes.