A new study provides new insights into how people judge the environmental impact of the food they eat, and the results suggest that many people get it wrong. These misconceptions clearly demonstrate the need for simple environmental impact labels to guide better choices.
Researchers from the University of Nottingham’s School of Psychology asked 168 participants in the UK to categorize different supermarket foods into their own environmental impact categories. The findings revealed consistent misconceptions about which foods are more or less harmful to the environment. This study cleaner production journal.
Why food choices matter for the environment
Food production plays a major role in environmental problems such as greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss. Encouraging more sustainable diets depends in part on understanding how people perceive the environmental burden of different foods.
Scientists measure the environmental impact of food using life cycle assessment, which tracks the entire process from production to disposal. This cradle-to-grave approach takes into account outputs such as emissions and waste, as well as inputs such as fertilizer, water and energy. Evaluate multiple factors such as greenhouse gas emissions (often in CO2 equivalents), land use, and water use.
Research examining real-world food choices
Previous studies have typically focused on limited food choices. The project, funded by UKRI’s Smart Data Research UK, is the first to investigate how people perceive the environmental impact of a wide range of products commonly found in typical grocery stores.
Participants were also shown scientific estimates of each product’s environmental impact and asked whether the results were higher or lower than expected.
Key misconceptions about food and sustainability
The study found that people tend to judge the impact of a food using two main factors: whether it comes from animals or plants and how it is processed. In general, participants believed that meat, dairy products, and highly processed foods were bad for the environment.
However, these assumptions do not always correspond to reality. Many participants overestimated the environmental impact of processed foods and underestimated the impact of water-intensive products (such as nuts). They were also surprised to learn how much greater environmental impact beef has compared to other meats such as chicken.
Labels could help people make better choices
Daniel Fletcher, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology and lead author of the study, said: “We designed an online task to engage people with this topic and provide an interactive and visual way to explore their understanding of the environmental impact of food. We found that participants were motivated to change their purchasing behavior based on this task and reported an intention to reduce (or increase) future consumption of products that were surprised by their scientifically estimated higher (or lower) environmental impact.”
“Our findings also suggest that people may have difficulty comparing the environmental impacts of animal-based products and highly processed foods, because they believe their impacts are incommensurably different from each other. Environmental impact labels that give foods a single overall grade (such as AE) could help make these comparisons easier for consumers.”
Professor Alexa Spence, from the School of Psychology and co-author of the study, said: “Environmental impact data on food opens up new avenues of research, and is the first study to compare it with a wide range of everyday products and explore how people perceive them. “What this study reveals is that there are many misconceptions on this subject, which actually supports the need for environmental impact labels to help people be more informed about making sustainable food choices.”
