Sustainable Healthy Diet: Consumer Demand and Sustainable Food Consumption Patterns

Dear Colleagues,

In 2019, the Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization jointly defined Sustainable Healthy Diets (SHDs) as consisting of various dimensions: sustainability not only includes the environmental dimension but also the social, economic, and cultural dimensions; health is not just disease prevention but includes the physical, social, and mental well-being. These principles not only set ambitious goals but also potential tradeoffs among some of these dimensions.

Diets reflect food consumption patterns, including meal, snack, and beverage choices in the short and long term. To achieve a SHD, most consumers would need to regularly make sustainable, healthy choices (e.g., vegetables, legumes, nuts). Unfortunately, these foods are not usually considered to be the most desirable, and can be also more expensive, and thus SHDs remains a niche segment of the overall consumer food market. So how will we shift population-wide consumption for these foods and make SHDs desirable to everyone? One approach is to make them affordable vis-à-vis subsidies. Another approach is through choice editing of unhealthy or potentially unsustainable options via taxes, sales bans (e.g., restrict sales in schools or public procurement), or marketing bans (e.g., advertising, event promotion bans). While affordability and choice editing may make sustainable healthy choices affordable or reduce the appeal of unhealthy foods, respectively, it is unclear whether these approaches also change consumers’ underlying preferences.  

In this Special Issue we take a broad view of consumer demand, consisting of underlying preferences (e.g., desires, aspiration) and choices. We seek to examine the current evidence around changing consumers’ underlying preferences and the impact on choice, because this remains a critical policy and programmatic gap. We seek original research articles documenting quantitative or qualitative studies, as well as systematic, scoping, and narrative reviews that address one or more of the following topics:

(1) Social norms to shift demand for healthy or sustainable foods:

- Eating experiences, consumption lifestyles, ethical consumption;

- Social identity (e.g., parent, friend, gender, etc.), social status, group status, social class/wealth;

- Peer networks, peer influence;

 (2) Morals, values, symbolism, and narratives to shift demand for healthy or sustainable foods:

- Technology (e.g., social media) or media strategies (film, TV) to support food culture change;

- Food culture (e.g., traditional cuisine, territorial diets, “locavore”/local foods), rituals;

- Morality, religious values, social justice, or human values (e.g., universalisms, benevolism, etc.) used in promotion efforts;

(3) Food environment and the construction of preferences

- Decision-making (e.g., heuristics, affect, goals, or outcomes);

- Memory, associations (e.g., halo effects, recognition heuristic);

- Environmental cues (e.g., images, message framing).

Dr. Eva C. Monterrosa
Dr. Daniel R. LeClair
Dr. Wendy Gonzalez
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• preferences
• values
• food culture
• social norms
• social identity
• peer networks
• memory
• narratives
• decision-making
• sustainable healthy diets