Breaking unsustainable food habits

By Noah Linder

In my research I explore psychological barriers for change, trying to address the fundamental question of today: how come we don’t change, even though we know that we should?

There are many potential psychological barriers in the way of a sustainable transformation of the food system: Sunken cost fallacy (our tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made, even when equal or better option exists), Status quo bias (our preference for the current state of affairs and that change from that baseline is perceived as a loss), Loss aversion (we prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains), Cognitive dissonance (our tendency to justify actions when they are contradictory to our beliefs to reduce feelings of discomfort), to name a few..

But to me, the biggest barrier for sustainable change within the food system might be Habits. Our ingrained routines, guarded by automatic processes and framed by culture, family traditions, personal preferences, and convenience.

Generally, our habits are tremendous asset to us in our daily lives, they help us conserve mental energy and make our lives efficient and frictionless. They provide us with pre-determined action responses or mental solutions to recurring problems and help us to leap into action even when we lack willpower, are stressed, or not able to deliberate on responses. Habits can be seen as our brain's way of outsourcing action control to environmental cues, so that we can multitask and conserve energy. However, once habits take shape — they persist without much deliberation or reconsideration and can be very difficult to change. To change a habit there is a need for continuous conscious effort to override automatic responses and establish new behaviors, which can be very challenging over time when willpower fluctuates and other factors interfere, pushing us right back in to our old routines.

Let’s look at grocery store shopping as an example, a situation in which we are extra prone to develop habits. It is quite a unique environment, and one where many of us spend a considerable amount of time. Our regular food purchases are typically made in the same store, following a familiar path along the aisles, and the usual products ending up in our carts. Due to the repetitive nature of these decisions, taken in recurring similar environments, our choices often quickly become highly automatic. Furthermore, the load of information in a grocery store often overwhelms consumers, leading them to further rely on habitual choices and simple heuristics (mental shortcuts) like familiarity, previous decisions, price etc. To change towards more sustainable diets means, almost per definition, that we need to break old unsustainable habits, and to do that we need to use tools that account for habit breaking. The more traditional approaches like information and persuasion — are almost always ineffective or insufficient to break habits.

In Sweden today, according to recent consumer attitude surveys, many express a strong interest in sustainable food and a willingness to change their behavior to reduce environmental impact. They say that vegetarian meals are increasingly replacing meat-based ones on their plates, and that they plan to eat even less meat in the coming year. However, total meat consumption has been steady over the last 6 years with around 80 kilos per capita (about two times the world average). I strongly believe habits play a substantial part in explaining this intention-behavior gap.

Of course, it is not only consumer habits that need to change. Perhaps even more importantly is to look at organizational habits. Routine decisions at the workplaces, outdated marketing tactics, placement of products, routine investment decisions etc. Changing these habits has an even greater potential to impact the system.

I hope to contribute with this perspective in the ReSus-project, to highlight the need to understand and address habit-breaking amongst consumers, and all people employed in the supermarkets and grocery stores industry, to help promote a sustainable transformation of the Swedish food system.