Abstract
Food choices are difficult to change. People’s individual motivations (such as taste, cost, and food preferences) can be at odds with the negative environmental outcomes of their food choices (such as deforestation, water pollution, and climate change). How then can people be encouraged to adopt more sustainable food choices? This rapid review uses a dual-processing framework of decision-making to structure an investigation of the effectiveness of interventions to encourage sustainable food choices (e.g., local and organic food consumption, reducing meat and dairy intake, reducing food waste) via voluntary behavior change. The review includes interventions that rely on fast, automatic decision-making processes (e.g., nudging) and interventions that rely on more deliberate decision-making (e.g., information provision). These interventions have varying degrees of success in terms of encouraging sustainable food choices. This mini-review outlines some of the ways in which our understanding of sustainable food choices could be enhanced. This includes a call for the inclusion of possible moderators and mediators (past behavior, attitudes, beliefs, values) as part of effect measurements, because these elucidate the mechanisms by which behavior change occurs. In light of the climate change challenge, studies that include long-term effect measurements are essential as these can provide insight on how to foster sustained and durable changes.
Highlights
Encouraging people to adopt environmentally sustainable diets is an important step toward lowering greenhouse gas emissions
Some studies have found that universalism values are predictive of food choices independently of the effect of an intervention (e.g., Campbell-Arvai et al, 2014; Zhou et al, 2019) Zhou et al (2019) found that participants with stronger universalism values were more likely to choose plant-based options, irrespective of a nudge intervention
The findings of this review indicate that interventions can be used effectively to encourage environmentally sustainable food choices
Summary
Encouraging people to adopt environmentally sustainable diets is an important step toward lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Cues in the environment could be altered (placing fruits by the check-out counter; see Kroese et al, 2016) to facilitate the desired behavior This integrative mini-review (please see Supplementary Materials for methods detailing study selection) uses a dual-processing framework to structure an investigation of the effectiveness of interventions to encourage environmentally sustainable food choices. Nudging interventions alter the choice architecture (e.g., the food environment) so that people’s automatic, quick mode of decision making is activated. This suggests that nudging might be effective in changing behaviors that rely on automatic processes, such as food choices (van Kleef and van Trijp, 2018; Vecchio and Cavallo, 2019). Altering the availability or portion size is another form of Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
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