Image Resource Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly? The Green-Feminine Stereotype and Its Effect on Sustainable Consumption In the past few years there has been much interest in consumption behaviours and how these can be influenced for the better of the environment. A huge obstacle faced is that, compared to women, men are much less likely to be eco-friendly in their attitudes, choices and behaviours. Read
Image Resource Fear of climate change consequences and predictors of intentions to alter meat consumption This study explores how fear of climate change affects affluent Swedish individuals in their intentions to reduce or alter meat consumption. Noting that fear appeals form the dominant communications approach used in raising awareness about environmental issues and motivating behavioural change, the authors set out to explore the processes through which such appeals may or may not motivate consumers to change. Read
Image Explainer What can be done to shift eating patterns in healthier, more sustainable directions? Eating patterns (or diets) are an important point of interconnection in food systems between human health and wider environmental impacts. Shifts in how people consume towards sustainable health eating patterns can bring multiple benefits. And when they are undertaken by whole populations, their overall effects can be considerable. Although there is much we still don’t know, the broad trends of what sustainable health eating patterns look like are known well enough to take action today. However, this presents another difficult challenge: how can eating patterns (at the individual and population scale) be shifted towards those that are healthier and more sustainable? Understanding this problem and its potential solutions provides a useful primer on the way in which consumption in food systems takes place through a combination of human choices (whether conscious or not), and is influenced by the wider contextual environment that actively constrains and influences these choices. Read
Image Resource Good Practice Report on Sustainable Public Procurement of School Catering Services This report from INNOCAT, a project set up to help encourage eco-innovation in the catering sector, showcases best practices from a group of cities working on procurement of food and catering services. The report takes a close look at school catering since this represents a significant share of the procurement budget of many local governments. Read
Image Resource Which diet makes the best use of US agricultural land? Future demand for food and for land is set to grow. A key question is therefore: how can we most productively use land for food, in order balance the multiple competing demands for the ecosystem services it provides? One way this has been investigated previously is by looking at crop yields and how to increase them. Another way, focussing instead on the consumption side, has looked at the metric of dietary land footprint. Read
Image Resource China’s new dietary guidelines encouraging citizens to eat less meat In their latest dietary guidelines, the Chinese government recommends a slightly lower meat intake than it did in its previous 2007 guidance. Read
Image Resource How under-reporting of consumption can explain the apparent fall in UK calorie intake This report, produced by the Behavioural Insights Team, seeks to resolve an important area of uncertainty for obesity policy, asking, are official UK statistics on calorie consumption plausible? Read
Image Resource The effects of naming and shaming campaigns: the case of the Dutch factory farmed chicken One Dutch animal rights NGO and a growing public antipathy to the extremes of industrial animal farming have caused several major supermarkets in the Netherlands to stop selling meat from fast-growing chickens. Read
Image Resource Meat consumption contributing to global obesity Energy intake has long been recognised as a factor in obesity, but more recently, interest has increased in whether some dietary patterns containing differing amounts of macronutrients and food groups, contribute more to body weight gain than do others. Read
