The latest results from the Consumer Food Insights survey from the Purdue Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability (CFDAS) are now out.
This month, we explored consumers’ conceptions of a word that seems all the buzz in the food and agricultural space: regenerative. A small problem with the word: nobody quite knows exactly how it is defined. This tweet and the following back-and-forth a few weeks ago illustrates the point.
So, first we asked our representative sample of U.S. consumers if they knew what “regenerative” meant in the context of food and agriculture. 62% said “no.” 38% said “yes.” Of the minority who said “yes,” we asked them describe the term in a few words. The following word cloud has most common responses.
Then, all survey respondents (regardless of whether they’d said they knew what the word meant) were shown a subset of 13 terms in a series of questions, and were asked, in each question, to identify the term that they most associated and the term they least associated with “regenerative.” This lets us put each of the 13 terms on an underlying scale, which we normalize to range from -1 (least associated with regenerative) to +1 (most associated with regenerative). Respondents most associate “regenerative” with “sustainable” and least associate it with “no-till” (see the figure below). Yet, most surveyed terms score close to 0, particularly among those who report familiarity with the term, indicating that there lacks a clear consumer consensus on how to conceptualize “regenerative.” (The fact that “regenerative” is ill defined reminds me a bit of the arguments I wrote in a post I write about a year ago about the factors driving the ebbs and flows of different fashionable food and and agricultural words and practices.)
In terms of our headline survey measures, we find that food spending remains near its 2022 peak, and food price inflation expectations continue to decline. Food insecurity rates remain steady if not a tad lower than last month.
This month, we did a deep dive into impacts of gender and marriage status. We find that women have higher food insecurity than men, but married women are fairing much better than unmarried women. Similarly, food satisfaction is highest among married men and lowest among unmarried women. Food sustainability behaviors are broadly similar between men and women. Women and singles broadly express more progressive food politics. In terms of trust in information, women distrust McDonald’s and other food companies like Tyson and Nestle more than men. Women also distrust Fox News more, while men distrust CNN more. Married men trust their doctors more than other groups, and married women trust their family members more than other groups. Furthermore, women express slightly more trust for government agencies (FDA/USDA) than men. Married men were most likely to say GMOs are safe to eat (51% indicating as such) while single women were the least likely (only 26%) to believe so
We did NOT find big gender differences in a variety of shopping behaviors such buying organic, checking the nutrition label, buying cage free eggs, or recycling.
There’s lots more in the report. Check out the detailed reporting here.