Primary Submission Category: Applications in Physical Sciences, Engineering, Environment and Miscellaneous Applications
Evaluating the impact of alternative protein in the United States
Authors: Anna Thomas, Maya Mathur,
Presenting Author: Anna Thomas*
Industrial animal agriculture is a major contributor to climate change, deforestation, air and water pollution, zoonotic disease transmission, and antibiotic resistance. Substitutes for animal products (‘alternative protein’) are a promising approach to shift consumption in a more sustainable direction. Here, using the Nielsen Consumer Panel – a dataset of more than 1 billion grocery store transactions – we evaluate the impact of alternative protein in the United States. Specifically, we aim to assess whether alternative protein availability reduces climate impacts of food choices. We conduct our pre-registered analyses at the household, grocery store, and regional levels. In addition to descriptive analysis, we apply several causal inference techniques including synthetic control, the autoregressive distributed lag model, and interrupted time series. We compare assumptions, relative strengths, and limitations of each of these methods. We also assess sensitivity of our findings to unmeasured confounding.