Eating the Norm – A design exploration of behaviour methods to motivate more climate-friendly food choices
Eating the Norm is a project that explores how we can reduce burdens and make climate-friendly food choices easier to perform. This was done through a multidisciplinary approach that combined methods from behaviour sciences with intervention design. The project included the organization of the Tasty Future Festival, an educational event about food impacts, and the implementation of the Tasty Future Network, which was an attempt to restructure one’s social surroundings through building a network of like-minded people. Through self-elected food challenges, participants received guidance and motivation to take the first steps towards a more sustainable way of eating.
In these times of a declared planetary climate and ecological emergency, the need for both social and individual behaviour changes is more important than ever.
A big contributor to the worsening of our planet’s health is the food industry which accounts for one-fourth of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Next to the immense carbon emissions, food production takes up half of all habitable land on earth, contributes to freshwater withdrawal, biodiversity loss, and eutrophication by the current way of agriculture. At this juncture, the impact of livestock breeding amounts to over half of all emissions of the food production sector. These numbers present a field that needs to be targeted for tackling the climate emergency. And it is not a secret how: Several studies show that the biggest positive change both for our personal and planetary health can be made by the reduction of animal products, especially meat. (Ritchie, 2020; Happer et al., 2019) However, the deeply ingrained norm of meat-eating in our society creates an obstacle for altering towards more sustainable food practices.
This crisis is one of the biggest challenges humanity has ever faced and requires the participation of everyone on every systemic level to mitigate its consequences (Stuart, 2022)
The burdens to change
Consumers increasingly care more about the environment and sustainable consumption, but when it comes to the actual purchasing behaviour, those beliefs and attitudes get overshadowed by habits, convenience, hedonism, norms and value for money (Park & Lin, 2020; Vermeir & Verbeke, 2006). There are several reasons for this phenomenon and our project aimed to identify possible touchpoints to intervene and decrease this attitude-behaviour-gap.
Design for Behaviour Change
Through working within the evolving field of Behaviour Change Design, we benefited from the intersection of methods and evidence from behavioural science and our design thinking ability and creativity as designers. We based our work on the COM-B behaviour (Michie et al., 2014) which highlights the connection of capability, opportunity and motivation as factors that influence behaviour. The project is an attempt to consider those influencing factors and identify intervention possibilities. These implemented, designed interventions aimed to make a transition towards a more climate-friendly diet according to one’s beliefs and attitudes easier. Through that we hope this can eventually lead to a decrease in purchasing animal-products which benefits both the planetary and the human health.
The Tasty Future Network
A survey and personal interviews with our target group revealed that there is a big demand for a like-minded community. It is easier to change if one has an explicit goal and a supportive group around. This insight brought up the idea of starting an inspiring and motivating network, the Tasty Future Network, as a tool for community-building, feedback and more commitment. This network aimed to connect motivated people, offered various nudges, like challenges, reminders, recipes, and feedback and through that tried to present an alternative social norm of diets.
The Tasty Future Network was prototyped with the app Klubraum to test the idea’s response.
No community without people: The Tasty Future Festival
Since a community does not form without people, we conducted the “Tasty Future Festival” as a starting point for this network to grow. The festival was an open, inclusive and educational event that combined lectures and workshops from multidisciplinary researchers and practitioners with food experiences and design interventions.
As mentioned before, our food choices are situated in a complex net and are influenced by many factors, that is why we believe it needs a multidisciplinary attempt to understand this complex net. We invited experts ranging from public health professors, climate fiction professors and entrepreneurs to farmers and chefs to cover as many different perspectives as possible. Through that we could set an epistemological knowledge base that can eventually influence a paradigm shift by nudging new narratives, perspectives, and norms in our food culture.
We aimed to create a highly motivational event, where a community of like-minded people can evolve and where we carried out our design interventions to provoke the target behaviour.
Implementing Behaviour Change Techniques
In the breaks of the event, we included several interactive elements to make the participants not only passive listeners but also actively engaging. One of the interventions was a cooking inspiration hub, where people could exchange recipes, cooking blogs and websites, to share knowledge and inspiration. Furthermore, we installed a guessing question about the average meat intake in Sweden to incorporate insightful facts and reflections about the overconsumption of meat. To bridge the gap between the individual’s current eating situation and their personal goal, we assisted by introducing the “Tasty Future Challenge”, which is a variety of three-week food challenges every person can choose from depending on their capacities and motivation.
The Tasty Future Challenge was the starting point to join the Tasty Future Network. During the three-week challenge the participants received incentives through informing facts and inspiration to keep the motivation high. The intervention aimed to connect the individual wish for a behaviour change with the support of an engaging community.
“Thank you for the great lecturers, this topic is very important and often feels like the hardest thing for people to learn from and actually change their mindset and diet. Fantastic food too!”(feedback from participant)
Strengthening the community
Through recurring get-together events, a space for experience exchange was created which aimed to strengthen the group spirit. We believe if people enjoy being in this network, there is a high potential of this community to become a seed that can grow and live on from the members’ engagement. Every movement starts with individuals who eventually grow into a community. This network can become a space to learn from each other and to become better and more climate-friendly together.
Heading to a Tasty Future
The outcome of this project is the starting point of a network of like-minded individuals with an environmentally-conscious attitude who continuously get involved and connected through small food challenges. These challenges aimed to give guidance and indications on how to start changing your diet towards more climate-friendly eating behaviours depending on how motivated you are.
Through this project we could tackle the deeply ingrained norm of animal product consumption in a privileged, western society like in Sweden and present alternative and more sustainable ways of food consumption. We could empower people to take agency in this climate emergency by rethinking their personal consumption habits in a way that feels manageable and appropriate to them according to their life situations and capacities.
Everything will change eventually, because the planet and the system we are living in right now are on its way to collapse. We can either change now or the change will be made for us.
We know that it is not the consumer’s fault to get presented with so many options to choose from and to not know what is the environmentally best and healthiest decision. But that is exactly where we have to intervene. As long as businesses, institutions and policy makers continue to not enough support environmentally-friendly food options, we have to act and fight for the change we want to see.
We hope our master project inspired others to take action, practice what aligns with their values and thereby increase the pressure on institutions like the campus canteen or the university to also take action for a healthy and tasty future.
References
Happer, C., & Wellesley, L. (2019). Meat consumption, behaviour and the media environment: A focus group analysis across four countries. Food Security, 11(1), 123–139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-018-0877-1
Michie, S., Atkins, L., & West, R. (2014). The behaviour change wheel: A guide to designing interventions. Silverback.
Park, H. J., & Lin, L. M. (2020). Exploring attitude–behavior gap in sustainable consumption: Comparison of recycled and upcycled fashion products. Journal of Business Research, 117, 623–628. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2018.08.025
Ritchie, H., Rosado, P., & Roser, M. (2022). Environmental Impacts of Food Production. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
Stuart, D. (2022). Tensions between individual and system change in the climate movement: An analysis of Extinction Rebellion. New Political Economy, 27(5), 806–819. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2021.2020740
Vermeir, I., & Verbeke, W. (2006). Sustainable Food Consumption: Exploring the Consumer “Attitude – Behavioral Intention” Gap. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 19(2), 169–194. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-005-5485-3
