The Psychology of ‘Sustainable’ Food Choices
What we eat and why we eat it is a deeply personal matter. A complicated mixture of tradition, ethics, and personal taste make studying the psychology of our food choices endlessly fascinating. What’s more, there is sometimes a friction between how we want to be perceived, and the choices we actually make. For example, many people want to think of themselves as animal lovers, but refuse to give up eating meat for a variety of reasons. In summary, our food choices, and the motivations behind them, are varied, and sometimes contradictory.
A recent study of consumers in Switzerland sought to “gain a better understanding of people’s decision-making processes in terms of ecological food consumption and how they evaluate the environmental impacts of different food aspects.” Past research has showed that, in order to be properly motivated, consumers need to be convinced that their choices would actually have positive effects. This study examines how people’s perception of various environmentally-related food choices, including reducing meat consumption and increasing local fruit and vegetable consumption, may change over time. The research measured the views of a group over the course of four years, between 2010 and 2014, a crucial time in the growth of the “sustainable” food movements around the world.
The results of this study show a variety of subtle patterns, and some findings are encouraging. First and foremost, the authors note that overall and in general, “people are informed about the environmental impacts of certain consumption behaviors.” However, on a more focused level, “factual knowledge about product-specific environmental footprints is partially missing among consumers.” The research shows that “the reasons for certain behaviors (e.g., [buying] better-tasting, healthier, or cheaper food) also influence how environmentally beneficial such behaviors are perceived.” In other words, if food producers can express not only the sustainability of a food product, but also describe how it might benefit consumers through better taste or cost, the product becomes more attractive. Using a broad approach and putting across the range of benefits is “a possible way to make green products more attractive and guide consumers toward more sustainable food behavior.” In fact, the authors note that the more direct consumer benefits can be emphasized, the more it is “especially likely to increase consumers’ willingness to reduce environment-unfriendly consumption patterns and increase substitution with environment-friendly alternatives.”
For animal advocates, these things are not merely a matter of individual taste, but of great consequence for the billions of animals killed for food each year around the globe. Though this study looked at Switzerland in particular — and we should be cautious not to assume the results would be the same for all cultures and countries — the findings reflect a certain tendency in western culture more broadly. After a great deal of industrialization / factory farming, there is a trajectory in North America and Europe showing that many consumers want to move back towards a more holistic vision of food production and consumption, and a study from China shows an early tendency to follow this pattern as well. We know our food choices matter, and we want to make better decisions. This study shows that, if we want to motivate consumers to a greater degree, sustainability needs to be packaged along with other, more direct, and personal, benefits.