Transitioning global food systems toward higher welfare and lower animal product consumption requires systemic change that addresses policy, economics, culture, and individual choice simultaneously.
Animal welfare improvement at scale requires food system thinking that goes beyond individual consumer choices. The structure of current food systems, including subsidies that favor animal agriculture, food environments that make animal products default choices, and cultural norms that treat high meat consumption as normal and aspirational, constrain individual choice in ways that individual behavior change campaigns cannot overcome alone. Systemic change requires policy shifts in agricultural subsidies, investment in alternative protein infrastructure, food environment redesign in institutional settings, and cultural norm evolution. Individual choices matter and aggregate, but they must be supported by systemic change to achieve welfare improvement at the scale the problem requires.