Abstract
Sustainable food consumption is an essential component of sustainable development. Previous literature mainly focused on consumers’ environmentally friendly consumption, and paid less attention to their avoidance of unsafe consumption. This article investigated the effect of loneliness—an important psychological and social trend—on consumers’ avoidance of unsafe food and the associated mechanisms. Based on a survey with 120 student participants and an experimental study with 315 non-student participants, we found that loneliness made consumers avoid unsafe food, but not safe food. We further verified that consumers’ perceived immune status and concern for negative impression worked as two mechanisms between the relationship of loneliness and food avoidance. Moreover, we revealed a moderating mediation effect of food safety risk, where the indirect effect of loneliness on food avoidance via both perceived immune status and concern for negative impression only existed for unsafe food. This article extended the research setting of sustainable consumption from increasing positive consumptions to decreasing negative ones, and identified the influential factors from the interaction of consumer characteristics and food features.
Highlights
Sustainable food consumption and production are becoming increasingly urgent issues with the ever-increasing anthropogenic carbon, water and ecological footprint
We investigated unsafe food avoidance in the context of sustainable food consumption because food is associated with unknown risk from two sources: On the one hand, the use of pesticides and related technologies in food production may cause negative ecological impacts; on the other hand, high consumption of red meat and energy-intensive food increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure, cancer and metabolic syndrome [7]
In model 1, loneliness was included as the only predictor and the avoidance of unsafe food was the dependent variable
Summary
Sustainable food consumption and production are becoming increasingly urgent issues with the ever-increasing anthropogenic carbon, water and ecological footprint. It plays an increasingly essential role in achieving sustainable development. While production-side improvement could significantly contribute to reducing environmental impacts per unit of food supply through technological change and efficient operation, consumption-side improvement has recently been receiving increased attention [1]. Consumers could contribute to sustainable development by either reducing waste from food consumption or being thoughtful in their daily food choices. Both increased consumption of sustainable food and reduced consumption of unsustainable food contribute to sustainable consumption. This research focused on the latter, consumers’ avoidance of unsafe food
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