Tipping the Balance in Dietary Change: aftereffects of designing healthy and sustainable living environments

Shifting food consumption patterns towards plant-based diets can substantially promote personal, public and planetary health. Today’s food environment where unhealthy foods are abundantly available contributed to unhealthy and non-sustainable dietary patterns. Consequently, changes in the food environment have been proposed to foster a transition in consumption. However, the interplay between changes in the food environment and responses to such system changes is currently not well understood. Changing one element in the food environment may affect other environmental features. For instance, a school may adopt a healthy school canteen approach, but success may be impeded if a snack food truck will be positioned in front of school. Similarly, changes in food environments may affect decisions in that setting, but may be counteracted by other individual decisions. Introducing meat-free days at the workplace, for instance, may cause people to eat extra meat at home. Such neutralizing effects may also be at play at a group level where consumption shifts in one group coincide with opposing shifts in other groups. Vegan consumption seems to spread rapidly in one network while other groups increasingly express their attachment to meat, making plant-based diets a contentious, emotionally charged societal subject. This interdisciplinary program aims to co-create healthier and more sustainable food environments employing research-through-design approaches and unravel the complex network of aftereffects. Strategies are designed to tip the balance towards favorable consumption changes. To evaluate the collective impact of these distinct changes in accelerating the transition in food consumption, data science and modelling techniques are used.