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Environment Education and Ecological Art Exhibitions Influence Young People’s Intention to Consume Plant-Based Food Dr. Kuei-Chiu Lee Department of Cooperative Economics and Social Entrepreneurship

For the last 10 years, to save energy and reduce carbon emissions, the Taiwanese government has encouraged citizens to eat plant-based food. This study examines plant-based food consumption by young people after receiving environmental education training and participating in eco-environmental art exhibitions. In the process, the consumption of plant-based food was analyzed from the different dimensions of consumer motivation, including health, religion, environmental protection and fashion. According to the results of the empirical study, while approximately 70% of young consumers eat meat-based food, over 80% of young consumers agree that plant-based food is beneficial for health and environmental protection. Moreover, as the Taiwanese government has implemented the Meatless Monday policy in elementary and middle schools for 10 years, most young people agree that eating plant-based food helps reduce carbon emissions and promotes environmental protection. Enhanced environmental education and diverse eco-environmental art exhibitions would strengthen young people’s behavioral intention to consume plantbased food. The findings of this study also show that young people do not believe that plant-based food consumption is a religious or moral issue. Young consumers choose plant-based food because they want to protect the earth and the environment. This finding underlines the importance of environment education.


Environmental protection
mentions the increase in plant protein consumption, the future plans to increase bean consumption, and the associations of frequent bean eating with socioeconomic factors and bean-related meanings, material issues and competence. While the appeals for health, morality and environmental protection are having positive effects on the demand for plant-based food, several enterprises or social groups have created a new wave of plant-based food with the help of celebrities, making "vegetarianism" an emerging lifestyle following Lohas. For instance, Stella McCartney, a designer for GUCCI launched a series of high-priced fashion products for vegetarians in 2001, which were endorsed by Natalie Portman, another celebrity vegetarian. PETA holds its annual selection of Sexiest Star of Plant-based Food across the world. Chung-tang Shih (the chairman of ASUSTeK Computer Inc.), Biz Stone (the co-founder and creative director of Twitter), and William Clay Ford, Jr. (the executive chairman of Ford Motor Company) all encourage their employees to consume plant-based food.

Consumers' motivation toward involvement
Involvement can be regarded as a force that triggers consumer motivation and is used to explain the decision-making process of consumers, including the duration of decision-making, as well as the formation of faith, attitude, intention and behavior (Kapferer, 1993). Teng and Lu (2016) revealed that the three main organic food consumption motives included health consciousness, food safety concerns and ecological motives. Michaelidou and Hassan (2010) observed that attitude had a more important role in the effect of food safety concerns regarding the intention to purchase organic produce. Such involvement variables drive consumers to the products that meet with their values, need, or benefits and further stimulate the consumers' purchasing behavior (Teng and Lu, 2016;Jeong and Jang, 2016). Armstrong, Kolter and Opresnik (2017, p176) defined attitude as "a person's long-term positive or negative comments on, feelings and behavioral tendencies for certain objects or concepts"; it was not only a way of thinking but also triggered a "behavioral tendency." There are diverse factors which influence the formation of consumer attitude. It does not always require careful consideration. Product attitude, however, influences the decision regarding the purchase of products (Lin, 2010;Jeong and Jang,2016). Attitude has a great influence on consumer purchasing behavior. According to Foodwatch (2008), consumers' understanding and knowledge of food quality influenced their attitudes and their subsequent purchasing intentions (Cheah and Phau, 2011;Tenng and Lu, 2016).

Attitude toward the purchase intention
According to Bagozzi and Burnkrant (1979), purchase intention refers to a person's behavioral tendency towards products; it is a process where an individual intentionally planned to purchase a brand's products (Spears & Singh, 2004). Zeithml (1988) introduced the method of measuring purchase intention with cognitive value, which involved the question items, "May purchase", "Want to purchase" and "Consider the purchase". The scale of this paper was based on Zeithml's research and consisted of such items as "Be willing to purchase", "Believe it worthy of purchase", and "Recommend others to purchase." Magnusson et al. (2003) and Chen(2007) suggest health concerns as a strong predictor of attitude and purchase intention.

Research Design
In this paper, SPSS22.0 was adopted for the statistical analysis.

Purchase intention
In this paper, reliability and validity analysis, one-way ANOVA, Pearson's product-moment correlation, factor analysis, and structural equation modeling were adopted to test the reliability and consistency of the questionnaire.

Basic information regarding the young respondents
There were two questionnaires given in this study. The questionnaire respondents had taken environmental protection courses, and each respondent had received environmental education training which lasted for at least 36 hours, or a semester. Meanwhile, the young respondents of the second questionnaire participated in eco-environmental protection art exhibitions. Most of the respondents consumed meat-based food; and over half of respondents had no religious beliefs. Approximately 90% of the respondents supported the government's Meatless Monday program. In class, the teacher publicized plant-based food, discussed such topics as climate change and global warming, and expressed the idea that consuming more plant-based food helped reduce CO2emissions and protect animals. Moreover, a 30-day environmental protection eco-art exhibition was held. According to the empirical results, the respondents' intention to consuming plant-based food increased to the level of 1 to 3 times a week, and the proportion rose from 80.3% to 91.6%. Most of the young people had a medium level of knowledge regarding plant-based food (see Table 1).

Young consumers' consumer motivation, involvement, attitude and purchase intention for plant-based food
From the perspective of health-base motivation, approximately 90% of the respondent agrees that plant-base food was beneficial for health. Most religious groups or public interest organizations intend to encourage people to consume more plant-based food in order to protect the environment. However, religion is not a major factor for the young respondents, given the fact that majority of young people do not have strong religious beliefs. From the angle of environment protection-based motivation, the Intergoverment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) believes that animal husbandry is one of the sources of CO2 emissions and thus advocates that less meat should be consumed. In the first questionnaire, approximately one third of the consumers were willing to eat plant-based food, and 50% of the consumers were ready to consume plant-based food to fight against global warming and reduce damage to environment. The results show that the "environmental protection" factor could change people's diet. In the second questionnaire, approximately 70% of the consumers were willing to accept plant-based food, and 70% of consumers were ready to consume plant-based food to fight against global warming and reduce damage to the environment. This reveals that the "environmental protection" factor can change people's diet. In terms of marketing strategy, if icons and celebrities are invited to popularize plant-based food, the publicity effect will be limited. The findings of this study show that price and flavor are the main considerations regarding the attitudes of consumers toward plant-based food (see Table 2).  According to the empirical results, there seems to be no direct correlation between the consumption of plant-based food and personality. In the past, it was believed that the consumption of plant-based food was directly related to religious beliefs and that religious believers typically had good personalities. However, the empirical results show that the assumption is incorrect. Approximately 70% of the consumers continued to consume meat-based food. Therefore, changing the consumers' eating habits is difficult. Nearly 80% of the respondents of this study consume meat-based food, but approximately 80% to 90% of them agreed that plant-based food was beneficial for environmental protection and health.
The intention to consume plant-based food in the first questionnaire survey was stronger than that in the second one. Additionally, this study found that the environmental protection curriculum and the environmental protection eco-art exhibitions can deepen young people's understanding of plant-based food and enhance their intention to consume plant-based food. It is clear that the respondents accepted the idea of consuming plant-based food, but it was also observed that there was still a large gap between the expectation and reality.
The findings of this paper also show that environmental protection eco-art activities can motivate young people to accept and popularize plant-based food, in addition to the regular environmental protection education curriculum (see Table 2).The combination of the environmental protection education curriculum and the environmental protection ecoart exhibitions enhanced young people's consumer motivation, involvement and purchase intention and their attitude towards plant-based food.

Reliability and validity
We follow the researchers Cheah andPhau (2011) andDelVecchio (2000), who have suggested that students and a young sample are reliable in such studies. According to the empirical results, the Cronbach's Alpha of reliability of all variables was higher than 0.7, meeting the requirement on reliability. The total reliability value of the first questionnaire survey was 0.946, and the second questionnaire was 0.957.  Hair (1977) proposed that a composite reliability of 0.7 was an acceptable threshold. Fornel and Larcker (1981) suggested that composite reliability should be over 0.6 and that the standard average variance extracted must be over 0.5. The empirical results of the questionnaires met the above requirement that composite reliability should be higher than 0.7 and that average variance extracted should be higher than 0.5 (see Table 4)

Demographical statistics and consumer motivation
This finding indicates that nearly 60% of the young respondents were unbelievers, and 80% of them consumed meatbased food. According to the empirical results, young people would not consume plant-based food forreligious purposes, and most of them did not have any religious beliefs. However, a greater proportion of young people consumed plant-based food for the sake of environmental protection. As the Taiwanese government has implemented the Meatless Monday program in elementary and middle schools for 10 years, most young people are willing to accept plant-based food, which is reflected in their consumer motivation. This finding also indicates that the government plays an important role in publicizing plant-based food.

Established constructs of the Structural Equation Model (SEM)
According to the general model evaluation and the estimate of coefficients in the empirical results, most of the evaluation results met the expectation, and the criterion ratio of all dimensions was over 2. Consumer motivation was also observed to influence consumer involvement; the involvement would influence consumer attitude, which would finally influence purchase intention for the plant-based food. The values for CFI are above 0.90 and the RMSEA values are below 0.08 (Hu & Bentler, 1999). The resultsare provided in Tables 5 and 6. The models provided are a good fit with N=386, CFI = 0.944, TLI = 0.934, RMSEA = 0.065, and N=119, CFI = 0.958, TLI = 0.950, RMSEA = 0.054, according to the usual conventions (Hair et al., 1998;Hu and Bentler, 1999).The results agree with the research by Rambalak and Govind (2016), which observed that the young people's attitude influences the consumers' intention towards purchasing green products.

Conclusions
To reduce CO2 emissions, the IPCC has advocated consuming more plant-based food. Taiwan's Ministry of Education has implemented the Meatless Monday program in elementary and middle schools. During the 10-year implementation, the government has played an essential role in the popularization of plant-based food. At present, there are 2.5 million vegetarians in Taiwan. According to the empirical results of this study, young consumers have begun to become aware of the importance of longevity preservation, probably because they are still a young generation. In the past, the Taiwanese believed that consuming plant-based food was a posture of mercy, and those who had a religious belief were willing to consume plant-based food. However, at present, there has been an increase in the proportion of people who are willing to consume plant-based food to reduce CO2 emissions and to mitigate environment factors, such as global warming and climate change. Moreover, consuming plant-based food is not necessarily believed to be related to having a good personality, which has also been demonstrated in the empirical study. Such a concept has changed the stereotype that those who consume plant-based food do so based on religious beliefs, mercy or karma.
With the SEM and the survey based on the environment education curriculum and eco-environment art exhibitions, this study explored the change in young people's involvement in consuming plant-based food and their attitude towards it followed by the change to their behavioral intentions from four dimensionshealth, religion, environment and fashion. The empirical results show that young people have a medium level of knowledge regarding the consumption of plant-

Purchase intention Attitude Involvement
Environmental protection-based motivation Fashion-based motivation based food and that diversified environmental education can encourage young people to pay more attention to the environment and later strengthen their behavioral intention for consuming plant-based food. In addition, young people may change their diet after taking courses regarding environment protection and after participating in eco-art exhibitions. According to the empirical data, consuming plant-based food is beneficial to human health.