How to encourage people to follow a climate-friendly diet? Increase social cohesion!

Reducing meat consumption is increasingly recognized as a necessary strategy for mitigating climate change and improving public health. While motivations to reduce meat intake are well documented, few studies have integrated these with basic human values to understand dietary behaviour. This paper addresses this gap by examining how environmental, health, and animal welfare motivations interact with value orientations based on the Schwartz’s theory of basic human values to influence consumers’ willingness to adopt an additional meat‐free day per week. By integrating motivational and value-based frameworks in a Central Eastern European context, this study offers a novel, multidimensional perspective on dietary transitions. Based on a representative sample of 1031 Hungarian adults surveyed in 2021 we employ Kruskal–Wallis and Bonferroni-corrected post hoc Dunn’s tests, along with ordered logit regression models to explore how specific motivations interact with value orientations and socio-demographic factors. Our findings indicate that health concerns are the most compelling driver of dietary change, while environmental and animal welfare considerations have a more modest influence. Moreover, a strong social orientation as presented in the Schwartz theory appears to reinforce the willingness to modify eating habits, independent of the motivational source. These results imply that policies emphasizing health benefits and fostering community cohesion could be more effective than information-based interventions alone in promoting sustainable dietary practices and shaping culturally sensitive, value-aligned food policies.