Associate Professor John Knight
“When surveyed, people's opinions tend to give greater weight to societal issues than is reflected in their observed behaviour.”
What people say and what they do are very different things.
Otago Department of Marketing researchers have been looking at whether food miles influence UK consumers' food-purchasing decisions. But, instead of simply surveying consumers' opinions, they also looked at what was actually in their shopping baskets and the decisions that led to those purchases.
“Our survey of shoppers exiting supermarkets found that country-of-origin considerations ranked extremely low among the reasons given for why they chose to buy particular fresh food items,” says project leader Associate Professor John Knight.
Of the 251 shoppers stopped as they exited four UK supermarkets, only 5.6 per cent nominated country of origin as a reason for purchasing a particular item. Further, only 3.6 per cent indicated they had consciously chosen British products because it would be “less harmful to the environment”.
Instead, price was the most common reason given for a purchase (25 per cent of shoppers), followed by brand or variety (23.5 per cent), portion size (12 per cent), freshness (10.4 per cent), the only option (9.6 per cent) and usual/preferred choice (eight per cent).
However, by comparison, when 250 people randomly surveyed in UK streets, 21.5 per cent said that food miles – or the long distance food travels – would stop them from buying New Zealand products.
Knight says these results show a significant gap between what people say about the food miles issue and what they actually do when buying food. “This may be due to a 'social desirability bias' being at play. When surveyed, people's opinions tend to give greater weight to societal issues than is reflected in their observed behaviour.”
The research did not set out to examine the validity of the food miles concept which, Knight says, has already been debunked as a meaningful measure of energy use in food production and transport.
“We were simply interested to find out if it affected consumer behaviour in New Zealand's fifth-most important food export market.”