A global crisis struck the world in the shape of the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020. As a result, supermarkets have experienced panic buying behaviors, empty store shelves, out of stocks, and a large increase in online sales. Supermarkets, producers, marketers, and businesses have had to adapt to consumers' changed buying behavior in food consumption. In previous research, it has been found that price and quality are two of the most influential factors in the consumer decision- process, in particular, increased price sensitivity and perceived quality of food products concerns consumers in crisis situations. The aim of this study was to research beyond panic buying behaviors, by investigating if consumer buying behavior has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic regarding price sensitivity and perceived quality within two specific food categories, meat as well as fruits and vegetables. In addition, a moderating effect of residency in either Austria or Sweden was tested. A quantitative method has been used, in which consumers in Austria and Sweden were surveyed in an online questionnaire. 169 responses from consumers were analyzed. The result suggests that the buying behavior in regard to price sensitivity and perceived quality of meat, fruits, and vegetables has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. No moderating effect of residency was found. The findings in the study create a foundation in a unique crisis situation that has never been studied before and the exploratory nature of the study gives multiple indicators for future research.

This paper analyses the EU’s European Green Deal and the changes to Food production it seeks to implement in its Farm to Fork Strategy, introduced in 2019. Attempting to establish whether or not it will enable them to succeed in meeting their goal of a 55% reduction of Green House Gas Emissions by 2030. The analysis on the EU’s food production system is done using a theory which looks at the production efficiency, the shift of diets and the reduction of food waste that the strategy seeks to implement. Arguing that specific shifts in these categories must be made if the EU’s climate goals are to be met. This is then compared to the actual policies implemented in the Farm to Fork Strategy. The thesis concludes that, while the EU succeeds in its food waste preventions as well as some aspects of its production efficiency, it is lacking in its strategy regarding shifting diets and that, in order to meet its climate goals, substantial shifts will need to be made in this category.

Det mest miljöskadliga livsmedlet är kött, trots kunskapen motiveras inte människor till att minska sin köttkonsumtion. Konsumtion handlar också omkänslor och sociala normer. Människor saknar kunskap för att lyckas implementera förändringar i deras beteende. Begreppet nudge innebär en beslutsmiljö som förändrar människors beteende på ett förutfattat vis utan att neka andra valmöjligheter. Den pågående utvecklingen av robotar kommer leda till att robotar i framtiden har möjligheten att påverka mänskligt beteende. Det behövs forskning inom informatik och digital design om hur robotar kan påverka människors matbeteende genom nudging. Etologiska robotar härstammar från sociala robotar och grundas i etologi och fokuserar på human-robot attachment (HRA) och den anknytning som sker mellan människa-robot istället för bara interaktionen. Etologiska robotar har utvecklats för att komma runt effekten av Uncanny Valley. Robot-robot-human interaction (RRHI) har möjligheten att påverka människor känslor och beteende. Denna studies syfte är att designa etologiska robotar för att genom nudging påverka människors beteende gällande köttkonsumtion i en spekulativ framtid. Studien ger inte ett fullständigt svar på hur köttkonsumtion kan minskas i allmänhet utan är ett bidrag till informatik om hur robotar kan användas för studiens målgrupp. Studien har en kvalitativ ansats och innefattar intervjuer och pilotstudie för att arbeta nära målgruppen för att nå de mest lämpade utseendet och beteendet hos robotarna. Resultatet visar att robotar kan passa för att påverka människan i detta syfte då robotar kan ha en konstant närvaro i miljön där köttkonsumtion sker. / The food that is the most environmentally harmful is meat, but this knowledge does not motivate people to reduce their consumption of meat. Consumption is also about feelings and social norms. People lack the knowledge to successfully employ changes in their behavior. The concept of nudge means a decision environment that changes people’s behavior in a predicted way, without banning other options. The current development of robots will lead to robots having the possibility to influence people in the future. There is a lack of research within informatics and digital design about how robots can influence people’s food behavior. Ethological robots have been developed to go around the Uncanny Valley. Robot-robot-human interaction (RRHI) have the potential to influence people’s feelings and behavior. This study aims to design ethological robots that through nudging influence people’s behavior regarding meat consumption within a speculative future. The study does not provide a complete answer on how meat consumption can be reduced but rather a contribution to informatics on how robots can be used for this study’s target group. Through a qualitative approach the study has conducted interviews and a pilot study to work closely with the target group to design the most complete appearance and behavior for the robots. The results show that robots can be suitable to influence people with this purpose because robots can be a constant presence where the consumption of meat happens.

Background: The consumption of meat in western societies keeps growing. This leads to a paradox, with a growing awareness in the society of health and environmental issues regarding meat consumption and a growing willingness to substitute meat more often.  Purpose: Explore the intentions of households with elementary school children to consume meat substitutes and to match these intentions with the actual behavior to find the extent of the intention-behavior gap and how they explain their intentions, behavior, and potential disconnect. Method: To understand the actual behavior of the households, two weeks' worth of grocery receipts were collected and analyzed. To explore intentions, additional semi-structured interviews were conducted, where the participants got the opportunity to explain their intentions, behavior, and gap.  Conclusion: The results show that there are three types of consumers, depending on the level of intention. The profiles differ whether they feel the need to explain their intention or the intention-behavior gap. To explain themselves,  All profiles state that meat is too delicious to leave out and that meat is a habit formed in childhood. Depending on the profile, additional reasoning was more internal or external.

Is it more effective to evoke negative emotions in social advertisements than positive emotions? This study compared positive and negative message framing strategies in social marketing advertisements that aimed to encourage a reduction in meat consumption. This project explored how each strategy influences consumers' attitudes toward the recommended behaviour and investigated the role of emotional and attentional responses to each message framing strategy. The purpose of this research was to determine whether negatively framed messages are more effective than positively framed messages in influencing consumers' attitudes, emotions, and attention. The motivation of the study was to provide formative research for the design of social marketing interventions to effectively influence consumers' attitudes towards advertised causes with the use of message framing, and to advance theoretical understanding of how consumers respond to social marketing interventions. Furthermore, this research attempted to resolve differences between results obtained in previous framing research in the social marketing context. This study uniquely proposed the use of cutting-edge consumer neuroscience techniques to develop a clearer understanding of consumers' emotional and attentional responses to social marketing advertisements. The results were presented from a mixed-method approach, which combined quantitative and qualitative research methods. An experiment was conducted by using two social marketing print advertisements aimed at encouraging a reduction in meat consumption, by highlighting the impact of consuming meat products on animal welfare. Respondents involved in the experiment viewed an advertisement that was either positively framed or negatively framed. The research applied self-reporting methods, as well as consumer neuroscience methods, including facial coding, galvanic skin response (GSR), and eye-tracking, to explore the proposed research framework. The combination of these methods allowed the collection of data on attitudinal, emotional, and attentional responses. The results of this research demonstrated that negatively framed advertisements are more effective in changing consumers' attitudes towards reducing meat consumption than positively framed advertisements. Thus, messages aimed at encouraging a reduction in consumption should highlight the negative consequences of participating in certain behaviours. Neither emotion nor attention were found to mediate the relationship between message framing and attitude. However, positively framed advertisements elicit significantly higher levels of emotional valence; and negatively framed advertisements elicit significantly higher levels of disgust and attention. Social marketers should, therefore, leverage these feelings of disgust; and they should implement negative framing strategies to increase the attention paid to an advertisement. However, educational social marketing interventions should be considered, in combination with negative message framing, to effectively influence consumers' attitudes towards social issues. These findings have provided research for better developing message framing strategies for the communication of sustainable consumption. Furthermore, these strategies contributed to the existing social marketing literature by addressing the lack of information on marketing efforts aimed at reducing meat consumption. This research also filled important gaps in the literature regarding positive versus negative message framing strategies, and social marketing interventions can now be implemented with an increased understanding of how consumers respond to different message framing strategies.

Climate change mitigation requires changes in greenhouse gas emitting behaviours. This dissertation aims to provide insights into the influences of behaviour change for two high-impact pro-environmental behaviours: climate policy support and consumption of animal products. It does so by using quasi- and randomized experiments and by monitoring changes in behaviour over time. Study 1 examined changes in climate policy support and climate change risk perception over the course of a naturally occurring event: seasonal forest fires. It employed growth curve modeling techniques in a structural equation modeling framework to analyze longitudinal relations between these two constructs over time, and to examine growth in climate change risk perception while controlling for the effect of exposure to forest fires and other extreme weather. Indirect exposure to forest fires (e.g., media) had a modest effect on climate change risk perception. Climate change risk perception for individuals with above-mean perceptions of scientific agreement tended to increase faster than for those with below-mean perceptions. Individuals whose climate change risk perception grew at a faster-than-average rate tended to also grow at a faster-than-average rate for climate policy support. Study 2 provided insight into the psychological influences on consumption of animal products and on willingness to reduce. Following a comprehensive literature review, known influences were examined using Latent Profile Analysis to identify groups of individuals with similar perceptions of facilitators of meat consumption and obstacles to reducing it. Three groups were identified: strong-hindrance meat eaters, moderate-hindrance meat eaters, and reducers. Validation variables confirmed the practicality of the three profiles: groups differed in their current consumption of animal products and in their willingness to reduce. Using these findings, three group-matched interventions were designed in Study 3. Intervention design was informed by four behaviour-change frameworks. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: control condition, implementation-intention condition, information-and-healthy-recipe condition, and information-and-substitution condition. Then, they completed up to 28 days of food diaries. Multilevel model analyses were employed to examine changes in the consumption of animal products over time. Participants reduced their consumption by 20 grams of CO2 per day on average. Individuals that were randomly assigned to an intervention condition that matched their meat-eater profile reduced their consumption of animal products by 40 grams CO2 per day on average. Taken together, these studies highlight the importance of considering individual differences (i.e., tailoring) when designing pro-environmental behaviour interventions. / Graduate

Within the area of animal ethics, there has been ongoing discussion around whether people in developed countries are justified in consuming animal based products or not, some argue that we are, and some argue that we aren't. In this paper I present a kind of middle-way position in response to the ongoing discussion, in which I argue that a decent chunk of a population in developed countries are justified in consuming certain animal products, but only so far as the exclusion of these animal based products would cause harm to the boycotter. Many of the arguments that are raised in order to defend the consumption of animal products, often rely on controversial assumptions or stances in order to make their claim. In this paper I attempt to distance myself from these types of arguments, by giving an argument that only relies on already commonly held moral beliefs that we all already take to be true, and the argument I make is therefore just an extension of a moral belief that we already have, which is that it is morally justifiable to consume animal products in order to avoid a personal harm. The claim very simply put is the following: We already believe that a person is morally justified to consume animal products from animals that yield relatively low amounts of food in order to survive, if we take this to be true, then we should also believe that a person is morally justified to consume animal products from animals that have a much greater yield of food, but where the food is used not to survive, but to avoid personal harms that stem from boycotting animal products. To give a more precise description on why the former (to survive) entails the latter (to avoid harms from boycotting) is because firstly, the amount of harm that's being done to the animal to avoid both cases is the same, and secondly, the level of harm that's being prevented by consuming the products that come from that animal are also the same. I conclude therefore, that if we want to remain morally consistent, we should accept the latter case to also be justified, which is that we are justified in consuming animal products in order to reduce a personal harm, but only so far as those harms would be prevalent if the person where to exclude animal based products from their diet.

The discipline of Sociology has been quiet regarding the production of food by industrial agriculture. However, there are issues that potentially undermine the ability of industrial agriculture to continue to produce food at the same rate. These issues include: global climate change, aquifer depletion, soil erosion and exhaustion, the increase in global production of meat, the ever expanding global population and peak oil. This thesis considers how these issues will affect Manitoba’s agriculture, Manitoba’s ability to adapt to a period of change and its ability to continue to feed its population. Unstructured interviews with expert informants allowed for the collection of data that are not readily available. These data are combined with pre-existing data to assemble an agricultural profile. There are two competing theories within the current dialogue: limits-to-growth and ecological modernization. Ultimately, the food procurement practices will be assessed with reference to the limits-to-growth theory and recommendations will be made.

The discipline of Sociology has been quiet regarding the production of food by industrial agriculture. However, there are issues that potentially undermine the ability of industrial agriculture to continue to produce food at the same rate. These issues include: global climate change, aquifer depletion, soil erosion and exhaustion, the increase in global production of meat, the ever expanding global population and peak oil. This thesis considers how these issues will affect Manitoba’s agriculture, Manitoba’s ability to adapt to a period of change and its ability to continue to feed its population. Unstructured interviews with expert informants allowed for the collection of data that are not readily available. These data are combined with pre-existing data to assemble an agricultural profile. There are two competing theories within the current dialogue: limits-to-growth and ecological modernization. Ultimately, the food procurement practices will be assessed with reference to the limits-to-growth theory and recommendations will be made.

The diploma thesis deals with the paradox that arises based on a conflict of actions and opinions on the consumption of animal products. The aim of the work was to reveal the social factors that cause this discrepancy, assuming that social factors play an important role. This assumption is based on the consideration of meat as a social construct rooted in culture, and thus the consumption of meat is examined in this paper not as an individual decision but as a result of the influences of different institutions and social structures. This paradox is being studied on ecologically active individuals, and it is assumed that in this case the discrepancy between opinions on animal products and actual behaviour will be even more pronounced. The conclusion of the work reveals as one of the most important factors family and traditions, which cause that individuals are afraid of exclusion from the social group of the family and at the same time they want to be true to traditions. Respondents often preferred to conform to members of the groups to which they belong or to culture and traditions. The work also deals with the guilt caused by this discrepancy, taking into account the impact of ecology as an external factor.