It’s an unfortunate truth that humans don’t always eat what’s good for us — and we don’t always eat what’s good for the planet, either. Food production, alone, is a significant (and growing) contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. And combined with the fuel required to transport various types of in-demand meat and produce around the world, the meat and potatoes on our plates might just have a bigger carbon footprint than we’d like to think about.
So promoting more sustainable food choices is a big concern among environmentalists. The question is whether consumers are actually interested in buying climate-friendly meals — and researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich argue that they are.
Researchers Vivianne Visschers and Michael Siegrist conducted two experiments in a cafeteria at their university to find out whether consumers found climate-friendly meals as satisfying as other meals, and whether a climate-friendly label would encourage people to buy the product.
They hypothesised that the greater a meal’s “global warming potential” (that is, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that went into making it), the more satisfying it would be to consumers. This is because many popular foods, such as many types of meats, also tend to have large carbon footprints.
“Our sensory and evolutionary inclinations seemed to imply that people would like meals with a lower climate impact less, because these meals would contain less meat and other animal proteins, for which we have an innate preference,” said Visschers, a professor of consumer behaviour and the study’s lead author, in an e-mail to “The Washington Post”. However, the researchers found that this was not necessarily the case in their study.
In the first experiment, the cafeteria offered four meal choices, which the researchers analysed in terms of their global warming potentials. Some of the meals happened to be more climate-friendly than others, although they were not labelled as such. The researchers then surveyed diners in the cafeteria on which meals they chose, how happy they were with the taste and how big of an environmental impact the consumer thought their meal had.
They found that taste was actually not significantly correlated with a meal’s carbon footprint. And consumers also seemed to be educated on their meals’ environmental impacts, as a higher global warming potential correlated with a higher perceived environmental impact on the part of the customer.
In the second experiment, the cafeteria offered four meals again — but this time, two of them were deliberately more climate-friendly (that is, had a lower global warming potential) than the others. The researchers placed a climate-friendly label on these meals, and also put up informational posters about the environmental impact of food. Then, they again surveyed customers on the meals they had chosen and how happy they were with the taste.
In this experiment, with the addition of the food labels and informational posters, the researchers found that customers bought more of the climate-friendly meals. And, again, they found that taste was not correlated with a meal’s global warming potential.
The results suggest that it’s possible for restaurants to serve more climate-friendly meals without sacrificing their customer satisfaction. And they also indicate that the adoption of climate-friendly labels encourages customers to buy those meals.
The fact that taste was not correlated with climate friendliness in either experiment is unsurprising, said Bojana Bajzelj, a technical specialist for environmental charity WRAP and previously a food sustainability researcher at the University of Cambridge, in an e-mail to “The Washington Post”.
“Tastiness of the meal probably depends on many things, especially on how well a meal is prepared, and how much care and experience went into it,” she wrote. “The chefs in the university canteen where this experiment was conducted were experienced in preparing both vegetarian and meat-based meals, which probably contributed to these results.”
It’s also true that the setting of the experiments — that is, a single cafeteria in a large university in Switzerland — did not constitute a representative sample of the population, Visschers said in her e-mail. But, she added, “I would expect that there is also no relation between taste and a meal’s impact on the climate in the general population.”
In fact, she said, the consumers in her experiments seemed already fairly educated on the environmental impact of the food they were eating. So in other populations, she might expect the effects of a climate-friendly label to be even greater. “The climate-friendly food choice label could increase the sales of climate-friendlier meals even among this educated sample, which should already make more climate-friendly food choices than the general population,” she said in her e-mail. “The effect of the label should thus be even larger in a more representative sample.”
It’s unclear whether the same results could be obtained in a country such as the United States, which consumes much higher quantities of meat than most of the rest of the world. Beef and poultry also account for the largest sectors of American agriculture and are among the primary drivers of agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions.
However, Visschers said that eating climate-friendly meals doesn’t require becoming a vegetarian. She noted that some meals containing meat can actually have lower carbon footprints than vegetarian meals, if the vegetables are imported from overseas, or if the meal contains a lot of dairy products, for example.
However, she added in her e-mail, “Some consumers will not want to try meatless meals, no matter what. Other consumers will not be convinced to reduce their meat consumption for environmental reasons, but may be persuaded by the health benefits of reducing meat consumption.”
And there’s still more work to be done when it comes to understanding the actions restaurants can take to offer more sustainable meal choices while also protecting their business. Bajzelj suggests more on-the-ground studies in other settings. And Visschers recommends studies on the long-term effects of a climate-friendly food label, as well as more research into the health effects of eating climate-friendly food.
As the authors note in their paper, it’s possible to eat very unhealthy foods with very low carbon footprints, such as lots of sugars and refined carbohydrates. Therefore, scientists should conduct “more detailed research on the relationship between perceived climate impact of meals and their perceived healthiness, to find out to what extent health benefits can be used to promote the consumption of climate-friendlier meals,” Visschers said in her e-mail.
Even with so much still to understand, the study provides an optimistic look at the future of the food industry and the sustainable food movement. The biggest concern for managers in the food industry will be that promoting sustainable meal choices could be off-putting to customers. But this study demonstrates that, at least in some populations, customer satisfaction and environmental responsibility don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
“People assume interventions to change people’s behaviour around food will be unsuccessful, but without trying them, we simply don’t know if that is true or not,” Bajzelj said in her e-mail. “This study shows that such interventions can be effective and not unpopular.”
-Washington Post
