Contemporary food production and consumption cannot be regarded as sustainable and raises problems with its wide scope involving diverse actors. Moreover, in the face of demographic change and a gr...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15487733.2013.11908111

Sustainable food consumption: an overview of contemporary issues and policies

Background Our daily food choices have a huge impact on the environment. Production of meat has a much larger impact compared with the production of vegetable-based proteins. In order to create a food production and supply system that is more sustainable and environmentally friendly, food consumption behaviour needs to change. A reduction of meat intake is necessary. The introduction of alternative protein sources (e.g., insects or cultured meat) might be one possibility to replace meat. Scope and approach The present systematic review identified 38 articles to answer the following three research questions: 1) Are consumers aware that meat consumption has a large environmental impact? 2) Are consumers willing to reduce meat consumption or substitute meat with an alternative? 3) Are consumers willing to accept meat substitutes and alternative proteins, such as insects or cultured meat? Key findings and conclusion Consumer awareness of the environmental impact of meat production is surprisingly low. This is true for consumers in various European countries. Likewise, willingness to change meat consumption behaviour in terms of reducing or substituting meat (e.g., by eating insects or meat substitutes) is low as well. How people can be motivated to decrease their meat consumption behaviour has been underexplored. In particular, experimental studies are lacking and further investigations should focus on strategies (e.g., nudging interventions) that might help to motivate pro-environmentally friendly meat consumption behaviour. Moreover, population-based studies are scarce, and we need more in-depth studies on the factors that increase people's willingness to reduce or to substitute meat consumption.

Consumer perception and behaviour regarding sustainable protein consumption: A systematic review

Flemish consumer attitudes towards more sustainable food choices

“Meatless days” or “less but better”? Exploring strategies to adapt Western meat consumption to health and sustainability challenges

Sustainable food consumption is an important aspect of sustainable development. When adopting a sustainable food lifestyle, consumers are confronted with complex choices. Today’s food consumption is too complex to be explained by socio-demographic factors exclusively. A broader perspective is needed. In order to explain behaviour across different consumer segments better, relatively homogenous segments of food consumers were identified by segmenting food consumers based on a wide range of variables. The current study aims to provide an overview of published studies that have segmented consumers with regard to sustainable food consumption. The literature review has been conducted by searching SciVerse Scopus for all relevant articles available until November 2010. The main criterion for including a specific study was the inclusion of empirical analyses of primary data, resulting in consumer segments with regard to sustainable food consumption. Sixteen articles were incorporated in the final analysis. First, the variables used for segmentation and profiling in the included articles have been categorized into three levels of abstraction: personality characteristics, food-related lifestyles and behaviour. The three levels of abstraction proved to be helpful in categorizing the segmentation studies. The findings indicate that variables on all three levels were efficient in differentiating consumer segments regarding sustainability. In addition, the importance of price and health differed across the segments, although these variables are only indirectly related to sustainability. Second, the three most frequently identified consumer segments with regard to sustainable food consumption were: ‘greens’, ‘potential greens’ and ‘non-greens’. These segments differed from one another on all three levels of abstraction. This implies that future segmentation studies should include variables on all levels of abstraction to get a complete picture of existing sustainable consumer segments. Marketers should be aware that targeting specific segments based on socio-demographic variables exclusively is not sufficient. Personality characteristics, lifestyle and behaviour are all important to take into consideration. Attempts at stimulating sustainable consumption might be most effective when differences across consumer segments are taken into account. Future research is needed to explore the characteristics of different sustainable food consumer segments with respect to their potential contributions in promoting sustainable development.

Segments of sustainable food consumers: a literature review

Our growing demand for meat and dairy food products is unsustainable. It is hard to imagine that this global issue can be solved solely by more efficient technologies. Lowering our meat consumption seems inescapable. Yet, the question is whether modern consumers can be considered as reliable allies to achieve this shift in meat consumption pattern. Is there not a yawning gap between our responsible intentions as citizens and our hedonic desires as consumers? We will argue that consumers can and should be considered as partners that must be involved in realizing new ways of protein consumption that contribute to a more sustainable world. In particular the large food consumer group of flexitarians offer promising opportunities for transforming our meat consumption patterns. We propose a pragmatic approach that explicitly goes beyond the standard suggestion of persuasion strategies and suggests different routes of change, coined sustainability by stealth, moderate involvement, and cultural change respectively. The recognition of more routes of change to a more plant-based diet implies that the ethical debate on meat should not only associate consumer change with rational persuasion strategies and food citizens that instantiate “strong” sustainable consumption. Such a focus narrows the debate on sustainable protein consumption and easily results in disappointment about consumers’ participation. A more wide-ranging concept of ethical consumption can leave the negative verdict behind that consumers are mainly an obstacle for sustainability and lead to a more optimistic view on modern consumers as allies and agents of change.

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Reducing meat consumption in today’s consumer society: questioning the citizen-consumer gap

Paying thorough attention to cynical action and integrity could result in a less naive approach to ethics and moral communication. This article discusses the issues of integrity and cynicism on a theoretical and on a more practical level. The first part confronts Habermas’s approach of communicative action with Sloterdijk’s concept of cynical reason. In the second part, the focus will be on the constraints and possibilities of moral communication within a business context. Discussing the corporate integrity approach of Kaptein and Wempe will provide this focus. Their approach can be considered as a valuable contribution to the question of how to deal with (dilemmas of) conflicting interests, open discussion, fairness, and strategic decision-making in the context of stakeholder dialog. However, it is concluded that Kaptein and Wempe seem to overstretch the concept of corporate integrity by their inclination to make it an all-purpose remedy for corporate dilemmas.

Erik de Bakker

Papers

Reducing meat consumption in today’s consumer society: questioning the citizen-consumer gap

Integrity and cynicism: possibilities and constraints of moral communication