Food choice: A choice between many good things that might be misunderstood

The projecy is funded by CARe (0,2 MSEK) and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (0,2 MSEK). Scientists involved are Fredrik Carlsson, Elina Lampi, Erik Nyberg, and Thomas Sterner from Department of Economics at UGOT.

The decision about what food to buy is nowadays a complex decision and it is not easy to be a “good” consumer. Consumers care about price, taste, look, health, location of production, transport, use of pesticides, animal welfare, the use of antibiotics, the effects on climate etc. At the same time previous studies about food show that there is often poor understanding among the general public about what we really mean by GMO free food, ecological production, antibiotic use in meat production or good respective bad animal welfare.
Our objective is to look at the different effects of meat production by looking at many aspects at the same time. The question is how the consumers make trade-offs between the different aspects of meat production, in particular if there are actual trade-offs between characteristics (apart from price). The use of antibiotics is also much less investigated than other aspects such as use of GMO, carbon labelling etc. An important fact is also that an increasing share of the meat consumed in Sweden is imported and has its origin in countries with more liberal antibiotics use in meat production.
We will use a survey-based method, choice experiment, to investigate consumer choices of a meat product. More specifically we will vary the level of animal welfare, effects of meat production on climate, the healthiness of the product, and the use of antibiotics in animal production, where a liberal antibiotics use might worsen the problem with antibiotic resistance. We target a random sample of the general public.