Change meals - change minds. In that order.

often behaviour change comes before attitude change

The lone star tick is spreading.

Who, you ask?

The lone star tick. The one causing an allergy to red meat and dairy products. He - I’m writing he to keep things simple - is spreading fast, as climate change is expanding the regions where his kind can thrive (like Martha’s Vineyard)

Climate change leading to more ticks that cause an allergy to beef, which helps counter climate change? Sounds… karmic? Providential? Nature biting back?

Now, this tiny creature is fascinating in his own right - can someone please engineer a version that causes an allergy to all animal products? - but I’d like to use him to illustrate a point I’ve often made. It’s the point about the relationship between behavior change and attitude change.

Back in 2016, the podcast Radiolab ran an episode about a woman named Amy Pearl, who had been bitten by this tick. A lifelong meat lover, with meatballs her favorite dish and steakhouses her go-to, Amy suddenly began getting violently sick when she ate even a little bit of cow’s meat. At one barbecue, after her diagnosis, she still tried to nibble on a grilled steak. It landed her in the hospital. That’s how deep her meat-attachment ran.

But at the end of the interview, Amy is asked how she presently felt about not being able to eat meat (or at least red meat) anymore. Her answer is revealing:

I don’t think I would go back to eating meat necessarily. . . . I wish I could be a vegetarian for ethical reasons. . . . It’s the factory farming and that kind of stuff. . . . Of course, I’m forced to not eat it, but at the same time if I had the willpower I would probably go that way anyway. Also, I think it’s great: we’re all evolving to be on this planet which is getting harder to be on, and we know that meat takes a lot of resources and now I’m not doing that. So the tick is helping me evolve into a better human being.

What happened here is that Amy’s behavior changed first. That tick-triggered change created space for her attitude to shift. Having discovered that living without the food she liked was perfectly possible - maybe even tasty - Amy became more open to the arguments against eating meat.

This is how change often works. Most changemakers try the reverse: present information, make the case, hope that people are persuaded, and trust that behavior change will follow. Sometimes it does, more often it doesn’t.

There’s another way: flip the sequence. Start with behavior change. Because, as they say, where you stand depends on where you sit.

Get people to eat differently first. Maybe they do it for health reasons, or because their environment offers more alternative options that they want to try, or because they’re stuck on a vegan cruise with their spouse.

The crucial thing here is: once people have some positive experiences with vegan food, their defenses often drop, and they become more open, not just to trying more of these foods, but also to pro-vegan and pro-animal arguments. Changed behavior can lead to changed beliefs.

What are the implications of this?

First, we need to make behavior change as easy as possible. That means creating a food environment - including restaurants, cafeterias, supermarkets etc. - where plant-based choices are accessible, attractive, and normalized.

Secondly, we shouldn’t worry too much about people’s initial motivations. I’ve met countless animal activists or ethical vegans who went vegan for health reasons. Motivations evolve, especially as resistance fades. It means we don’t necessarily have to lead with animal arguments, and that health (even price or taste) can be a perfectly good entry point.

Note that I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about the animals. I do agree that ideally people are motivated by concerns about animals, but the point is that these may come later. More structurally, all our pro-animal arguments, our lobbying, our suggestions for legal changes etc… will go down a lot easier once we have made our society less dependent on meat production and consumption.

I explore this attitude/behavior change topic more extensively in my book How to Create a Vegan World.