There’s a Complicated Gap Between Our Values and What We Actually Eat, Research Shows

Consumers worldwide often say they prefer foods from farms with higher animal-welfare standards. But their purchasing decisions do not always reflect their self-reported preferences. Findings in a new study suggest that implicit perceptions of price and taste could be influencing these choices. And experts tell Sentient that a number of complicating factors may be at play, including perceived health benefits and cultural identities.

The study, published in Ecological Economics, analyzed more than 1.7 million food orders across three German university cafeterias. The results suggest that climate, health and animal welfare labels have little impact on consumer behavior. Overall, researchers found that value-based labeled dishes were not chosen more often. And in some cases, dishes with those labels were selected far less often than the unlabeled options.

Menu icons were used by the cafeterias to identify dishes associated with different sustainability attributes, including animal welfare, and researchers compared the share of labeled dishes ordered with the total number of orders on each day over three years. The authors note that these results from food-service menus cannot be generalized to other environments, such as grocery store labels, and that they do not establish a causal relationship between the labels and purchasing decisions. Germany also has stronger climate and animal welfare laws than the United States, in addition to other cultural differences.

But the findings suggest that while consumers self-report interest in more ethically focused food qualities, other factors may be more influential to purchasing decisions.

“I think we can put to bed the idea that environmental labeling is going to be the thing that alone gets people to make better choices,” says Andrew DeCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward, a non-profit advocacy and consulting organization. “There’s very clear psychological trade-off for people between seeing something as ethically oriented and having it be both affordable and tasty.”

The study included follow-up assessments that suggest that consumers subconsciously associate animal welfare with “tastier” food, but it was also associated with being expensive. So when someone is in a cafeteria line and needs to make a quick decision, cost might be more salient than abstract ethical impact.

“Consumers respond more strongly to attributes that deliver private benefit, things like taste, health benefits, price, than to those providing public benefits like climate mitigation or animal welfare,” David L. Ortega, professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, tells Sentient in an email. “Labels signaling societal benefits face an uphill battle at the point of purchase, especially in quick, routine settings like a university cafeteria.”

When it comes to grocery purchases, Mara Miele, a professor of human geography at Cardiff University, agrees that other factors often take priority over consumers’ concern for animal welfare, such as simply getting an affordable dinner on the table that their kids will enjoy. To shift purchasing behavior, she says, the context of the label matters.

“They cannot work by themselves,” says Miele. “Some of these labels are more successful than others … [The dishes] have other qualities; they taste better. They have a distribution system that allows those products to be visible in key locations. It’s more complex … it needs to be in a context that creates the condition for success.”

Culture plays a role, too, says DeCoriolis. He points to the French Ministry of Agriculture’s “Label Rouge,” which signifies higher production standards and has seen higher market share than certified organic in certain sectors. DeCoriolis argues that the label is successful, in part, because it represents more than certain production practices: It’s associated with a belief that French poultry, raised under these higher-welfare conditions, taste better.

“There’s a cultural context … It could be your fitness community and your gym. It could be your culinary community and your French identity. There’s lots of reasons why people tap into their identities to make purchasing decisions that are not about cost,” says DeCoriolis. “Doing different things requires tapping into different identities and giving people a reason to do it. And environmental labels aren’t sufficient to do that.”

Labeling also inherently puts the onus on consumers to choose a more ethical food product. DeCoriolis says that’s the wrong approach to drive broader change.

“We do know that we can shift dining behavior and do that in a way that maintains eater satisfaction,” says DeCoriolis. “Many people’s choices are malleable…It’s a question of why aren’t institutional dining food service operators employing these [strategies] at larger scales?”

How food environments are designed and options are presented, known as choice architecture, has significant influence on decision-making. Studies have shown that presenting vegetarian food as the default choice, allowing for participants to actively choose non-vegetarian, can increase vegetarian-option choice by up to 85%. And participants are nearly twice as likely to choose the plant-based option if it is listed first on a menu.

But for Miele, the market will not shift toward better animal welfare practices without farm-level changes: If farmers make higher profit from better-welfare products, then animal welfare will improve, and the market share of the products will increase.

“It’s not looking at consumption, but it’s actually looking at production,” says Miele. “At the moment, the majority of animal welfare improvements, they come at a cost for farmers…If there are more technological innovations, animal welfare innovations that help farmers to perform better…then you would have more animal-friendly products.”

Policy can drive these changes while potentially increasing affordability, says Daisy Freund, vice president of farm and industry engagement at the ASPCA.

“In the United States, factory farming is heavily subsidized by the government, and higher-welfare farms receive next to nothing in support. This should be the other way around,” Freund tells Sentient in an email. “State and federal policies can significantly shift markets and support higher welfare purchases.”

In recent years, 15 states have passed legislation to restrict or prohibit intensive confinement. California’s Proposition 12, for example, prohibits the extreme confinement of breeding pigs, egg-laying hens and veal calves and has repeatedly survived constitutional challenges from lawsuits brought by meat industry groups.

According to DeCoriolis, while consumer support for better animal welfare doesn’t always translate directly into grocery or food-service purchasing decisions, it shows up at the ballot box.

“When you ask voters about [animal welfare] as a collective values issue, they make a choice that’s going to raise their prices. When you ask them to make that choice in a grocery store over and over again, it’s a different outcome,” says DeCoriolis.

“If what we want is to ban certain kinds of practices or not have certain kinds of practices in animal farming, that has to happen at a collective policy level.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to add area of expertise for Ortega and Miele.