Reduced Meat Consumption: from Multicriteria Argument Modelling to Agent-Based Social Simulation

Abstract

A second nutrition transition seems to be emerging towards more plant-based diets, curbing meat consumption in developed countries at the beginning of the 21st century. This shift suggests that rational arguments tend to influence an increasing number of individuals to adopt vegetarian diets. This work aimed to understand and simulate the impact of different types of messages on the choice to change food diets at the individual level, and the impact of the diffusion of opinions at the collective level. It provided two results: (1) a network of arguments around vegetarian diets is modelled using an abstract argumentation approach. Each argument, formalized by a node, was connected with other arguments by arrows, thus formalizing relationships between arguments. This methodology made it possible to formalize an argument network about vegetarian diets and to identify the importance of health arguments compared to ethical or other types of arguments. This methodology also identified key arguments as a result of their high centrality in being challenged or challenging other arguments. The results of constructing this argument network suggested that any controversy surrounding vegetarian diets will be polarized around such high centrality arguments about health. Even though few ethical arguments appeared in our network, the health arguments concerning the necessity or not of animal products for humans were indirectly connected with ethical choices towards vegetarian diets; (2) an agent-based simulation of the social diffusion of opinions and practices concerning meat consumption is then introduced. The purpose of this simulation was to capture the balance of vegetarian vs. meat-based diets. It contributes to modelling consumer choices by exploring the balance between individual values and external influences such as social pressure, communication campaigns and sanitary, environmental or ethical crises.

Safety vs. Sustainability Concerns of Infant Food Users: French Results and European Perspectives

“…An additional, more recent approach, relates to the second one since it proposes a structured representation of arguments, but adopts a database-rather than a logicalmodeling of arguments, allowing for a very extensive description of arguments with the purpose of performing selective argument analysis [41] based on the criteria, stakeholders, expertise, or source viability considered, and integrating bipolarity. Initiated in [40], it was further used in later works [38,45] and implemented in a software tool outlined in [46]. This tool [47] is used for data analysis in the present paper.…”

The development of a decision support system for the infant food chain

“…12,19,1 Developments and argument structuration in the food sector can be consulted e.g. in Thomopoulos et al 22,23 In the second step, all the possible combinations of parameter values are computed. The results are the "scenarios" considered.…”

The Application of Artificial Intelligence Models for Food Security: A Review

“…Analysed the impact of climate-smart agriculture on food security using an agent-based analysis [88] Human systems Simulate strategies of the perishable food market under different circumstances [104] Human systems Reduced meat consumption [114]; social influence on meat-eating behaviour [132] Human systems…”

“…AI models were also applied to assess the utilisation of food. The analysis also showed 11 documents focusing on social influence and the consumption patterns of specific food products, such as dairy [58,113,114] and plant-based meat alternatives. With this category, models were also used to explore the food utilisation of different farming styles and their impact on hunger and rural health [115].…”