FCRN member Lukas Paul Fesenfeld has co-authored this paper, which surveys people from China, Germany and the United States to assess levels of public support for various types of policy aimed at reducing meat and fish consumption. It explores how “packaging” several policies together can increase acceptance among voters.

This paper finds that downplaying explicit statements of environmental benefits can be a more effective advertising strategy than prioritising the environmental aspects in product categories that are not normally seen as “green”. This is because consumers often perceive green products as performing less well than conventional products, according to the paper. 

This report assesses the impact of the UK non-profit Veg Power’s “Eat them to defeat them” advertising campaign, which aimed to persuade children to eat more vegetables. Children who had seen the advertising campaign were more likely to agree with statements such as “Eating vegetables is fun”, “I like vegetables” and “Vegetables can be really tasty” than those who did not see the adverts. An estimated 650,000 children ate more vegetables as a result of the campaign.

In this report, the global non-profit World Resources Institute lists 23 ways in which the food service sector could encourage diners to choose dishes that contain more plants and less ruminant meat.

According to this paper, most meat-eaters think that vegetarian and vegan diets are ethical, good for the environment, healthy and socially acceptable, but also tend to believe that these diets are difficult, not tasty, inconvenient and expensive. Vegetarian diets tend to be viewed more positively than vegan diets across all measures included in the survey, except for ethical considerations and the environment, where vegan and vegetarian diets are viewed equally.

The Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University has launched a new podcast series, The Changing Room, which will explore how to cope with social, economic and environmental change. The first episode explores how climate change is affecting our everyday lives. The second episode, which will be released in January 2020, will discuss food justice.

This report from Dalhousie University and the University of Guelph tracks changes in food prices in Canada. It finds that prices in some food categories were impacted by environmental events, including an unexpected 5% increase in fish prices due to warming oceans. It also predicts that consumers will put strong pressure on food producers to avoid single-use plastic packaging, and that the Canadian food system is likely to be stressed by climate change, such as through  droughts, forest fires and heavy precipitation.

This report by Lloyd’s Register (a UK-based provider of professional services for engineering) surveyed 1000 UK shoppers. It finds that one in three shoppers are concerned about food safety, only 19% are very confident that the vegetarian or vegan food they eat does not contain meat, nearly two thirds of people sometimes check the country of origin of food they buy, and 85% of shoppers think it is fairly or very important for supermarkets to source their products ethically and sustainably.

This report from the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University examines how farming in China can move away from a dependence on “industrial agriculture” (defined here as excessive and inefficient use of fertilisers and pesticides) towards agroecological systems (including practices such as lower stocking densities, using manure instead of synthetic fertilisers, growing diverse crops and using soil-building techniques).