Menu Choice and Meat-Eating Habits: Results of a Field Experiment in Two University Canteens
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript by Egeler and Baur investigated how customers respond to a revised menu choices of meat and 10 ovo-lacto-vegetarian or vegan dishes by implementing several interventions in two Swiss university canteens. Overall, the data show a clear potential to reduce meat consumption in canteens by increasing the range of attractive veg-dishes without explicitly marketing them as vegetarian or vegan.
The strong points of the manuscript are that the authors (1) address relevant phenomena related to society, environment, and health, (2) implemented a real-world laboratory experiment. The weak points of the manuscript are (1) no strong theoretical foundation for the variables under investigation and methodological choices, (2) methodological choices that cannot allow clear conclusions.
Please find my major and minor comments below. I hope that they will be helpful in improving the manuscript.
-Theoretical foundation. I am missing theoretically embedded arguments for the development of hypotheses and methodological choices. The manuscript could be improved by embedding hypotheses and methodological choices in existing body of literature.
-Restructure introduction. Align discussion with introduction. There are several arguments in the discussion section suitable to introduce the study.
-Since methodological choices cannot allow clear conclusions, discussion and conclusions about findings could be written down in a somewhat more nuanced way.
-Info about Ethical Committee approval is missing
-Is the classification of lunch type based on customers’ purchases during the 12 weeks of the field experiment? Did the authors categorize an individual as, for example, ‘Buffetarian’ or ‘Never meat’ by considering only an average of a meal once a week in the canteen? If this is the case, it may be a great limitation. The experimental setup could be improved by attenuating causal conclusions and clearly reporting limitations of the method.
-Since authors did not conduct statistical analyses aiming to highlight differences, they should not describe their results in terms of differences. They don’t know if two percentages are statistically different.
-Figure 1 is presented two times in the manuscript.
-Ln304-305, page 9: the source is missing
-Ln322-330, page 10: how the authors explain the differences between their findings and the results from the study by Garnett et al.?
-Ln340-342, page 10: The authors should consider also that generally education is negatively associated with food neophobia
-Ln344, page 10: please, specify if you refer to Swiss males because in other countries females are generally more neophobic than males. Moreover, several studies did not find sex differences on neophobia scores
-Ln380-382, page 11: since the authors do not have a control condition (ovo-lacto-vegetarian and vegan dishes labelled or marketed as such) they should not derive such conclusion. They could only speculate on this.
-A paragraph with limitations is missing. Please provide it.
-Ln387-390, page 11: Do the authors have practical suggestions?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The article by Egeler, GA. and Baur, P. investigates the customers response to a revised menu choices of meat and ovo-lacto-vegetarian or vegan dishes.
The results and observations are relevant to the problem posed and provide proof for the consistency of literature data regarding the meat consumption, climate targets, public health.
The work is original and scientifically reliable since the methods are appropriate and adequately described.
The article is well presented with proper use of tables and figures.
The speculations made are reasonable and all the interpretations are warranted by the data gathered.
The overall design of the study is good, the undertaken research is properly described and the conditions are well defined.
The message is transmitted clearly: the usual choices are more appealing to meat-eaters than for customers with flexitarian, vegetarian, or vegan eating habits.
The title reflects the content of the article, but it is recommended that it be formulated in a more scientific way.
The English is understandable to the reader, but minor spell check required.
L2 …”choose”…
Line 364 …habits “are” more frequently …
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Throughout the manuscript there are minor English language issue. Spell check would be useful
Author Response
Thank you for your comment. Our manuscript was proofread by a native English lecturer twice who we have worked with before.
