The Good, the Bad, and the Unsustainable: evaluations of red meat alternatives in Italy

Despite the proliferation of alternatives for red meat, there is still much popular resistance toward them. Based on survey data collected in Italy, this paper studies how cultural understandings of nature and tradition inform evaluations of three such alternatives vis-à-vis red meat: plant-based meat, cultivated meat and insect-based meat. The findings firstly confirm the important role of such understandings in shaping acceptance of, and resistance to, these alternatives. Secondly, they highlight how the various alternatives are evaluated differently in terms of these cultural understandings. The findings have implications both for scholarly research and for policy insights on the unique features of each meat alternative.