What, how, and why we eat is a climate and health policy that deserves attention

Individual food choices, when accumulated collectively, can influence food demand and even catalyze social change. Understanding the contexts that shape individual food choices is therefore essential to designing policies and interventions that support food systems and planetary health.

Photo by Milind Ruparel / Unsplash

Almost every day, we are confronted with the same question: What should we eat today? At first glance, the question may seem simple and personal. Yet, without us realizing it, the choices we make at the dining table have far-reaching implications for our health, the environment, and the future of our climate. 

What we eat, how our food is produced and obtained, and why certain foods matter to our bodies are no longer merely individual concerns. They are part of a food system that shapes collective health and resilience in the face of climate change.

Global climate change and the ongoing health crises associated with dietary patterns are closely connected to how food systems operate, how food environments shape our choices, and how consumers determine what they eat. What ends up on our plates does not exist in isolation: it is influenced by availability, price, access, culture, habits, and the information we receive about food.

At the same time, feeding a global population projected to reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050 will require a fundamental transformation of food systems. Understanding what, how, and why we eat, as well as how these choices relate to climate change, is essential to designing policies that protect planetary health. This is where the discussion of individual food choices becomes important.

In the context of climate change, seemingly small decisions, such as individual food choices, can accumulate into significant impacts. When millions of people make food choices every day, these decisions collectively shape how food systems operate and influence which foods continue to be produced across food value chains. Eventually, these patterns of production and consumption have consequences for climate change.

One of the most tangible impacts can be seen in food waste. Food wasted at the individual, household, and retail levels represents wasted resources used to produce, process, transport, and supply that food. When food ends up as waste, these processes also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. Decisions about how much food we buy, store, consume, or discard are therefore inseparable from efforts to reduce the environmental impact of food systems.

More broadly, individual food choices also have the potential to catalyze social change. When people adopt and promote eating behaviours with lower climate impacts, these choices can influence others and develop into collective practices. Changes in consumer behavior can create new forms of demand and, in turn, drive changes across food systems.

Grassroots movements can be an important starting point for such social change. One example can be seen in the vegan soul food movement in the Southern United States. Soul food is an important part of the identity, traditions, and culture of many African American communities in the region. Traditionally, however, the cuisine also relies heavily on salt, fat, and meat, which can pose challenges to planetary health. In recent years, African American chefs have begun developing a vegan soul food movement as a way to respond to high rates of obesity, diet-related noncommunicable diseases, and other health challenges within their communities, without abandoning the cultural values embedded in soul food.

The evolution of food practices, including vegan soul food, also shapes how people acquire, prepare, and consume food. Nutrition-specific interventions, as demonstrated by the vegan soul food movement, have shown promising health impacts. Interestingly, several characteristics of diets that support human health are also aligned with recommendations for a Planetary Health Diet. Reducing the consumption of ultra-processed foods and red meat, while increasing the consumption of plant-based foods, can benefit both human health and the environment.

However, this overlap does not mean that there is a single diet that can be applied uniformly to everyone. 

Understanding individual food choices remains important because each person has different nutritional needs, health conditions, preferences, habits, and food environments. 

This presents a paradox: individual diets are becoming increasingly diverse, while global diets are becoming increasingly similar.

The growth of diets and the modernization of food systems have expanded the range of foods available to individuals, but it is important to remember that people have different needs and circumstances. Therefore, efforts to build healthier diets cannot simply determine what foods are ideal to consume; they must also consider how and why people ultimately choose the foods they eat.

A behavior-based approach helps explain this complexity. Food choices are not always the result of rational calculations of costs and benefits. Some decisions are made consciously, while others occur automatically and are shaped by habit. 

These choices are also restricted by the socioeconomic and cultural conditions of the food environment in which people live. In other words, someone may want to follow a particular diet or way of eating, but their final choices are still influenced by whether the food is available, economically accessible, and compatible with the social norms and practices around them.

Individual food choice is therefore not a simple matter to change. The choices we make every day take place within a system shaped by many interconnected factors. Yet, understanding how individual food choices accumulate and influence food demand and supply can help us identify current shifts and anticipate future trends, including how food systems may respond to climate change and disruptions to supply chains. Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers therefore need to understand the mechanisms connecting individual food choices with the way food systems function. By applying an individual food choice lens, we can account for the contexts and behaviors that are often overlooked in policy design and eventually develop interventions that are more relevant, effective, and sustainable.

References:

• Rampalli, K. K., Blake, C. E., Frongillo, E. A., & Montoya, J. (2023). Why understanding food choice is crucial to transform food systems for human and planetary health. BMJ Global Health, 8(5), e010876. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2022-010876

• Vermeulen, S. J., Park, T., Khoury, C. K., & Béné, C. (2020). Changing diets and the transformation of the global food system. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1478(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14446

• Willett, W., Rockström, J., Loken, B., Springmann, M., Lang, T., Vermeulen, S., Garnett, T., Tilman, D., DeClerck, F., Wood, A., Jonell, M., Clark, M., Gordon, L. J., Fanzo, J., Hawkes, C., Zurayk, R., Rivera, J. A., De Vries, W., Majele Sibanda, L., … Murray, C. J. L. (2019). Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems. The Lancet, 393(10170), 447–492.