DefaultVeg Ambassador Program

We wish to use funding from the Plant-Based Diet Initiative to hire student ambassadors to promote DefaultVeg at Stanford, coordinating with various university leaders to positively transform the way we serve food at Stanford events, conferences, and beyond.

Significance for the Plant-Based Diet Initiative

DefaultVeg is simple—make plant-based food the default and give people the choice to opt-in for meals with animal products. DefaultVeg is inclusive, reduces your carbon footprint, and increases the healthfulness of your meals.

Making plant-based food the default can help reshape what we think of as a “normal” meal. Whether at your dinner table or in a dining hall, how food is presented plays a big role in what we choose to eat. DefaultVeg relies on “nudges” to motivate us to choose delicious food that’s better for us and the planet.

At Stanford, we are excited for the potential of DefaultVeg to encourage students and faculty to eat more plant-based foods rather than animal-derived foods. We believe that this program can help to establish a culture at Stanford of plant-based, sustainable, and inclusive eating and would facilitate large studies on student eating behaviors.

Target Audience

We will target Stanford organizers who are in charge of ordering food for conferences, meet-ups, talks, and similar events. Because we seek to have the largest impact with the most effective use of our resources, we aim to target university leaders whose food decisions will affect the greatest number of meals per year.
These include university admins who are commonly delegated the task of ordering food by other faculty, the key caterers that those people order from such as R&DE Catering, and leaders of large academic departments who might order from local restaurants rather than caterers but host many events per year. Indirectly, our audience is then the people whose eating habits will be impacted by these decision-makers —that is, the students, faculty, and guests who will attend these conferences, meet-ups, and talks.

Engagement Strategy

We intend to present event organizers with the opportunity to make their food selection process easier while also being more sustainable for the planet, inclusive to anyone coming to their events, and healthy for everyone who eats their food.
For those who order catered food from a group like R&DE Catering, we will first set up a partnership with the caterer such that their chefs can artistically design a creative, seasonal, and quality DefaultVeg meal at request, and then the organizers can communicate to the caterer a desired number of people to serve and easily receive good plant-forward options for their events. Such catered options could even be provided for a group of university admins to help convince them of its efficacy. For those who manually order from restaurants rather than caterers, we will use the aforementioned resources and consulting from the Better Food Foundation, Farm Forward, or other non-profits supporting the DefaultVeg initiative to provide a list of DefaultVeg options for the venues they already use or other local restaurants.

Ambassador Role

The primary goal of ambassadors is to convince university leaders to adopt DefaultVeg and help them implement it. To do this, they will create and share infographics about DefaultVeg and helpful resources for plant-based catering. Additionally, the ambassadors will collect and analyze data on the effectiveness of this intervention in order to evaluate its counterfactual impact and help convince other leaders to adopt DefaultVeg.

For the initial iteration of the Program, Ellie Fajer and Gabe Mukobi will be ambassadors, though we intend to create a pipeline for other students to become new ambassadors and continue this work for years to come. Already, Ellie and Gabe have had success in reaching out to key leaders of the Stanford Computer Forum, the Introductory Studies department, and the R&DE Catering service who each are in favor of implementing DefaultVeg within their respective domains.

Direct and Indirect Impact

The fundamental impact of this funding will be to help establish the DefaultVeg Ambassador Program as a consistent opportunity at Stanford. As a direct result of this, we believe this program serves as an excellent opportunity to affect a significant amount of positive change at Stanford and make our community eat more sustainably, ethically, and healthfully by eating more plants and fewer animals.

This program can also produce useful research. In addition to directly measuring the number of meals, event goers, tons of carbon emissions, or other metrics which we are affecting, there is also an exciting opportunity here for behavioral research on the impact that nudges can have on eating behaviors. In fact, several other universities that have been adopting DefaultVeg have been running such studies, and there is potential for Stanford to participate in intercollegiate research.

Last, we anticipate that convincing Stanford leaders to commit to DefaultVeg, getting more Stanford community members eating plant-forward meals, and studying the positive and efficient impacts of this work will indirectly help normalize plant-based diets at Stanford. We hold that this will empower incoming students, as well as new departments like the School of Sustainability, to see conscious, sustainable, and inclusive food choices and the larger Plant-Based Diet Initiative as an integral part of the Stanford culture and tradition.

Measurable Results

There are two categories of results we will directly measure: the impacts a DefaultVeg initiative has on the environment and animals affected by food and the impact on the people ordering and consuming that food. For the former, The Better Food Foundation and Farm Forward will assist us with impact calculations on the tons of carbon-equivalent emissions, water and land use, and other factors changed by serving an increased number of plant-based meals instead of animal-based meals. For the latter, we will conduct research surveys on both the ordering experience of targeted university administrators when ordering a more inclusive menu and the eating experience of their event attendees when eating still excellent but plant-based meals. We are especially interested in conducting comparison studies on the differences between ordering DefaultVeg meals or animal-default meals for admin ordering experience and attendee satisfaction.