The Hidden Forces Shaping Your Choices  🔗 **Source:** [The Hidden Forces Shaping Your Choices](https://share.snipd.com/episode/30c71872-7590-4296-ab58-a26b2bb4b46f) ## Highlights - **How Meat Became The Default American Meal** - Meat became a daily norm in the U.S. due to postwar subsidies, scaling farms, refrigeration, and the National School Lunch Program requiring protein. - Sarah Lake traces the cultural shift to industry marketing and government policy that made meat cheap and ubiquitous. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi A strategy to make meat the norm, starting after the Second World War. Sarah Lake As savory beef stew when it's armored. It was impossible to avoid, and it was advertised heavily and pushed on consumers. Manoush Zomorodi Or malbacon stays fresh longer when saran wraps. Sarah Lake This is when they first started creating national ad campaigns. And when you see these ads that meat is essential for your amino acids, it's essential for a well-balanced diet. Speaker 5 Found that man must have food which furnishes energy, food to build muscle. Sarah Lake And this is where we started getting this idea that meat was normal to eat every day in multiple meals, when in reality, even 10 years prior to that, it was an exception to have meat at a Manoush Zomorodi Meal rather than the norm. But three factors completely flipped what was for dinner. First, the U.S. Government increased its meat subsidies. Second, new technology led to larger farms that could raise and slaughter more animals faster. Plus, people could refrigerate and store more meat. Finally, the National School Lunch Program launched. Lunches are designed to be nutritious. With a mandate to serve protein. Meats and other foods rich in protein. Sarah Lake We saw the fastest and largest shift in our diets that has ever really happened. Manoush Zomorodi I mean, I guess that's when it became like the American thing to do. You have meat and potatoes at dinner. You grill a hamburger in the summertime. ([Time 0:02:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0e928179-8ad3-40c8-a4af-1e2767087118)) - **Make Plant Foods The Default Option** - Do make plant-rich foods the default and affordable option in institutions and stores to shift diets at scale. - Sarah Lake highlights Lidl placing plant-based next to meat at equal price, which raised plant-based sales 30% in six months. Transcript: Sarah Lake And the way in which we go about this is asking the question of how we can offer and incentivize more plant-rich foods. We recognize that many consumers are quite limited in their choices, limited by how much food costs or where it's available, if they can access it. Get companies and governments, whether that's schools and hospitals or its grocery stores and fast food restaurants, to offer and incentivize plant-rich foods. What we eat is less about what we choose and more about what's offered to us. Sarah Lake continues from the TED stage. And companies and governments today still make it really hard for us to choose anything other than me. I mean, it's offered everywhere, and it's cheaper than other options. What we need now is the same fundamental shift in what we eat, but in the opposite direction, back towards plants. We need to grow more food on less land by 2050. And to do that, we need to shift from land-intensive animal protein to land-efficient vegetable protein. Manoush Zomorodi The story that I've been hearing from people is like, oh yeah, you know, fake meat and burgers and hot dogs and things like that had a moment, but people just didn't want them. Is that what happened? Sarah Lake It is partially what happened. Part of the challenge is we're actually talking about a dozen different products with a dozen different technologies behind them. Things like black bean burgers and you have others that are things like lab grown meat, which couldn't be farther apart in terms of what they're made of and what the experience is eating Them. The other part is just simply figuring out how to market these to consumers. One of my favorite opportunities is around what we would call sort of plant-rich meats or blended meats, where you have a burger and instead of it being 100% beef, you actually make it 50% beef and 50% mushrooms or beans. And these products are available today. But we don't yet know how to present this. If you advertise a blended burger or a plant-rich burger, consumers don't know what that is. And quite frankly, a blended burger sounds disgusting. That's not really a product that we see as tasty and desirable. So a lot of this is a marketing challenge. Some of it's an investment challenge. And part of it is just the time it takes to get consumers familiar with these products and start building up the demand where people can have healthier, more plant-rich options without Having to give up meat. Because ultimately, this isn't about no meat. This is about less meat. What we need is for companies and governments to offer and incentivize plant-rich diets the same way they did for meat decades ago. I need to walk into a McDonald's and see a menu full of plant-rich options and have them be just as cheap or cheaper than the Big Mac. And we need our schools and hospitals to offer plant-based foods as the default, where you can get meat, but you have to ask for it as the exception. And we need just as much money to flow into the plant-based industry as currently makes meat wildly and artificially cheap. We know that this can work because it has before. Take Lidl. It's one of the largest supermarkets in Europe. They decided to put their plant-based meat next to the conventional meat in the meat section and make it the same price. So when you went to grab a package of ground beef, you had a healthier, sustainable, plant-based option right next to it that cost the same. Within six months of making this change, the sale of their plant-based products went up by 30% and shows no sign of flagging. Companies and governments have been telling us for decades what to eat. They have the power to help us choose differently. ([Time 0:05:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fc33d665-ea23-40ee-abff-b805a4b71c21)) - **Infrastructure Is Invisible Until It Fails** - Infrastructure is invisible until it breaks and is now stressed by climate change, requiring redesign and decarbonization. - Deb Chachra argues renewable tech and research create real pathways to rebuild resilient, equitable systems. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi She is a professor of engineering at Olin College and the author of the book, How Infrastructure Works, Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. Deb Chachra There's kind of a truism that our infrastructural systems are invisible until they break. And when they break, they're sort of at the forefront of our attention, right? If you don't have clean water coming out of your tap, or if you have an electricity outage, or even if the internet goes down, right? Which is not a survival need, right? It's not a life-threatening thing in most cases, right? And it still really upends your day when that happens, because we have learned to rely on these systems as our infrastructure. Manoush Zomorodi Buckled roadways, melted electrical cables, public transit shutdowns. But these systems that we rely on are being pushed to their breaking point. The extreme heat in the Pacific Northwest this past weekend was brutal for the region's infrastructure. In Texas, millions of people are enduring their third day without electricity in freezing cold temperatures. Deb Chachra Many families are being advised to boil what little tap water they have. Others just have no water at all. Manoush Zomorodi As the climate changes and severe weather events become more common, Deb says our infrastructure is struggling to keep up. Deb Chachra So one of the things which we can't kind of lose sight of is that we want these systems to remain functioning and resilient because they underpin what we can do with our days and how we do It. Rather than spending our days thinking about, well, where am I going to get clean water from? Or how am I going to function without electricity? Manoush Zomorodi And I think for many of us laypeople that we've taken for granted that, you know, we turn on the tap and clean water comes out or that we always have electricity. This is quite a wake up call. How much has a realization set in that the way we've set up our infrastructure has to change? Deb Chachra Well, I would say there's two pieces to that story. So the first one is that almost all of the systems that I describe require energy to work. And most of the energy that we use comes from fossil fuels. So that's the first thing, that if they're powered by energy and that energy is coming from fossil fuels, it produces greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide. The second thing, though, is that we now know that that landscape is changing, right? That climate change is being felt as climate impacts or climate disruptions. That's really meaning that things that we kind of took for granted about how the landscape works, what weather would be like, what 100-year storms are, are changing. And what that means is that the infrastructural systems, the networks that we build, thinking that they were in a stable landscape, well, that landscape may not be stable. In fact, most likely is not stable. So they're just not going to work very well anymore. And whether we like it or not, we need to rethink our infrastructural networks. But these are physical systems that are embedded in the landscape. And that means that we need to think about these sort of landscapes as a whole. Manoush Zomorodi Here's Deb Chatra on the TED stage. Deb Chachra Our landscapes, of course, have been stable. And we know that that's not the case anymore, right? Climate change, that's what climate change is. It's making our landscapes less stable. And that means, you know, this is longer heat waves, this is stronger hurricanes, this is fires, this is flooding. Everything that we think about as extreme weather events, you know, this idea of a natural disaster, right? The thing that makes it a disaster is precisely that it's not natural, right? It's that it affects humans and human communities. And because our landscapes are becoming less stable, sooner or later, the who's affected will be all of us. But we can flip this around. Because as we decarbonize these systems, as we transform them, we have the opportunity to make them resilient, to make them responsive, to make them more equitable. I mean, our infrastructure systems, they are the most powerful tool that we have for how we can respond to climate change. And we know that we can do this, right? Because after decades of policy commitments, we've done the research, we have the renewable energy technology to transform this. We know that there's at least a pathway, and once we know that a pathway exists, we know that many pathways exist. But we can only choose to walk those pathways together, right? ([Time 0:15:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/75de392f-dca3-4546-8341-2305b4a123ff)) - **Use Renewables To Rebuild Resilient Systems** - Do decarbonize and redesign infrastructural systems using renewables to increase resilience and equity. - Deb Chachra notes cheap solar and standardized wind turbines now enable system-scale replacement of fossil-fuel power. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi And you say that this actually presents a lot of opportunity. Yeah. Deb Chachra We now know how to use renewable energy at scale in a way we didn't 20 or 30 or so years ago. And it's hard to pin a date on it because there's two main things. One is the Danish wind turbine, the standard wind turbine that I'm sure you and almost everyone who's listening has seen. And the other is the ability to produce solar panels relatively inexpensively and at scale. And what those two changes mean is that we are now capable of using renewable energy at the same kind of scale that we use fossil fuels So 20 years ago, I would be saying, at some point in The future, we will be able to harness all of the abundant renewable energy that is arriving at the planet, and we will be able to rebuild our infrastructural systems to use that energy Instead, someday. And now I get to say, that day is here. And in some places, the work is being done. Manoush Zomorodi In the UK, there's a massive effort underway to shift the electric grid to have 95 percent renewable energy by the end of this decade. Countries like Costa Rica, Brazil and Norway are already there, all relying heavily on hydropower for their electricity. And in the U.S., tech companies are leading the charge for transitioning to renew say to meet the future demands of the artificial intelligence industry. ([Time 0:20:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f49bb71f-36de-44e8-98ce-0107f2dd0d28)) - **Build Infrastructure That Evolves Like A Forest** - 21st-century infrastructure should evolve like ecosystems, not monuments, to adapt to changing climates. - Deb Chachra contrasts durable megastructures with adaptive 'forest-like' networks that grow and change over time. Transcript: Deb Chachra So in the 20th century, we built out these kind of massive monolithic systems. And I have to say, like, I am a fan of our charismatic megastructures. So in the U.S., that's the Golden Gate Bridge, it's the Hoover Dam, right? These were built as monuments and they were built to endure. But in the 21st century, our infrastructural systems will need to endure not like monuments, but like forests. So if you think about a forest ecosystem, it's powered by the sun. It's rooted in the earth. There's no waste. Everything is basically used to grow new things. It endures, but it actually evolves and changes with time. And of course, it provides a place where all who live there can thrive. Our infrastructural systems are how we take care of each other at scale, so that we can take care of each other as individuals. They underpin our agency. And they really foster and allow us to develop our social relationships with each other. All of these are about what it means to be human. And that means that a commitment to a shared infrastructural future is a commitment to our shared humanity. So this is the world that we can create together. ([Time 0:25:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a5301887-6ae1-4959-86b4-e75acfcd07c6)) - **Tightness Comes From Threat History** - Cultures vary on a tight-loose continuum driven largely by historical threat exposure; tightness enforces order under threat. - Michele Gelfand's cross-national study links natural disasters and invasions to tighter societal norms and stronger punishments. Transcript: Michele Gelfand In some contexts, the rules are very strict. They're what we call tight cultures. They have a lot of rules and a lot of reliable punishments when people violate them. On the flip side, we have contexts where there are looser norms, where there's a wider range of behavior that's perceived as permissible. What we found was that just like we can classify people in terms of their personalities, we can also classify groups in terms of the strength of their norms. Manoush Zomorodi Here's Michelle Gelfand on the TED stage. Michele Gelfand So tight-loose is a continuum. Some groups like Japan and Singapore, Austria and Germany, veer tight. Other groups like New Zealand or Brazil, Greece or the Netherlands, veer loose. And what we found was that tight and loose confers really important trade-offs for groups that we don't recognize. So tight groups have the corner on order. They have a lot more law enforcement and also security, and they have much less crime. Tight cultures with their strong rules have people also regulating their behavior more. They have more self-control. Tight cultures have less alcoholism, they have less debt, and they're less fat. Loose cultures tend to be more disorganized. They have more crime, they have less synchrony, and they have a host of self-regulation failures. But loose cultures corner the market on openness. They're far more open to many different types of people. People from different religions, from races, immigrants, people with disabilities, many stigmatized people. In one experiment I did, I asked my research assistants from all over the world to wear fake facial warts, tattoos and nose rings, and they were asking for help on city streets or in stores. And there was a very clear pattern. People in loose cultures were much more likely to get helped when they were wearing these stigmas as compared to tight cultures. Loose cultures are also open to more ideas. They're much more creative, and they're much more open to change. And tight cultures struggle with openness. So you might be asking by now, what causes these differences? Tight and loose cultures don't share any obvious characteristics, or language or religion or tradition, but there is a hidden rationale and it has to do with threat. When cultures have a lot of chronic threat in their histories, you can think about threat from mother nature, like constant natural disasters or famine, or they have a lot of human-made Threat. ([Time 0:28:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a4eb5849-de3c-4f45-b191-ccec32b28548)) - **Use Tight Loose Awareness To Improve Relationships** - Do assess your default tight-loose mindset, cultivate empathy, and adjust norms intentionally to improve relationships and institutions. - Michele Gelfand recommends using a quiz and negotiating which domains should be tight or loose in families and organizations. Transcript: Michele Gelfand So I want to leave you with a few different ideas of how you can use the tight-loose code in your everyday life. The first is that we should understand our own mindsets. We each have a certain default on the tight-loose spectrum based on our own personal experiences. The second is that we need to cultivate empathy for others' mindsets. Often people that we have a lot of conflict with are people that we have the biggest differences in our tight-loose mindsets, and understanding where they come from can be great to understand And empathize and build better relationships and finally we can harness the power of social norms to better our world culture is in destiny we can tighten up norms when they're getting Too loose or loosen up norms when they're getting too tight luckily for us humans developed and invented social norms and we can use them to better our planet thank you That was Michelle Gelfand. ([Time 0:40:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/df15cb31-a5c1-4904-b851-ed4e934b9e5d)) - **How A Car-Free Neighborhood Rebuilt Community** - Ignacio Delgadillo moved from car-dependent Phoenix to a car-free cul-de-sac in Tempe and now sees daily neighbor interactions. - The neighborhood's narrow walkways, plaza and trees encourage spontaneous social life that driving suburbs lack. Transcript: Speaker 5 Really didn't talk to our neighbors. We don't really know. We say hi and bye as we're driving by, right? And then we just all go straight into our garage. Manoush Zomorodi But about a year ago, Ignacio and his family moved to a community designed to be car-free. Cul-de in Tempe, Arizona. Here, the streets are built for foot traffic. Buildings are close together. Trees line narrow walkways. A plaza with shops and restaurants serves as a town square. Sarah Lake You naturally see people all day doing what they're doing, right? They're going to work, they're going to school, or they're just out enjoying their walk. Speaker 5 However much of a driving or car-dependent city you may happen to be in, there's a certain number of people who, when presented with the opportunity, will live car-free. And that that market is completely unmet. Manoush Zomorodi This is urban planner Jeff Speck. We talked to Jeff last year about his lifelong goal to make American cities more walkable. ([Time 0:42:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2c46e900-5751-4109-802e-9022274a58ef)) - **Design Cities Around Four Walkability Rules** - Do design cities so walks are useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting to make walking the obvious choice. - Jeff Speck prescribes mixed uses, narrow streets, parallel parking, small blocks, windows and active storefronts to increase foot traffic. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi The walk needs to be useful. What do you mean by that? Speaker 5 So useful has to do with the proper mix of uses. So places to live, workshop, recreate, all within walking distance. It typically means more housing in your downtown, which would balance the uses in your downtown and have it be active around the clock. When a neighborhood, which is principally a business district, becomes a truly mixed use district with the proper balance of jobs and housing, it comes to life. Manoush Zomorodi Okay, so we've made our city, we've made our walk useful. Now we need to make walking safe. How? Speaker 5 So the typical American street is designed for speeds well over the posted limit. And that's the exact opposite of what they do in the Netherlands, for example, where you make the streets as tight as they need to be to cause the drivers to go the speed that is safe for The community. The resistance that you find to accomplishing this typically lies in public works departments and engineering departments, which are led by engineers who still embrace the older Concept of traffic safety, which in America grew out of highway safety. So if you think about yourself when you're driving on a highway where your speed is a constant, anything you can do to reduce opportunities for conflict, to increase elbow room is going To make that street safer. So wider lanes, one-way traffic, no parallel parking, no trees, that's the clear zone, big swooping curves, all those things make a highway safer. But it's precisely the opposite that makes a downtown safe. You want to have narrow lanes, you want to have parallel parking, you want to have two-way traffic, you want to have lots of intersections and lots of other things going on. And so the biggest impediment often in cities to making them safe and comfortable to walk around is a traffic engineer who's trained on highway design and has brought it into city design. Manoush Zomorodi Okay. Our walk is useful. Our walk is safe. How do we make it, number three, comfortable for walking? Speaker 5 Comfortable is the most designy aspect of the discussion because, and it's a little counterintuitive, we like to be in places that have spatial definition. If you can picture lower Manhattan or the cranky parts of our oldest cities, those have the smallest blocks of all. And that gets us into the comfortable walk and that delightful feeling of being embraced by buildings on both sides. Manoush Zomorodi Yeah. Speaker 5 So that idea of spatial definition is central to making walkable places. And we, you know, our favorite streets tend to be quite narrow. And then the buildings aren't that tall, but they're considerably taller than the streets are wide. Manoush Zomorodi And that brings us to the fourth and final principle of making a city walkable, which is that the walk needs to be interesting. Yeah. Speaker 5 So the final category of interesting is basically not having blank walls, not having parking structures, having lots of eyes on the street in the form of doors and windows and signs Of human activity. You know, we humans are among the social primates. Nothing interests us more than other humans. And that's what causes us to walk. ([Time 0:44:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e98d8340-d286-43df-8f8d-7f838ae1e57e))