Have Public Attitudes Towards Sustainable Diets Changed In The Last 10 Years?

The FAO defines a sustainable diet as one that has low environmental
impact, is beneficial for human health, and is culturally and socially
acceptable and economically attainable. One step that has been
suggested to improve the sustainability of the Scottish diet is to reduce
meat consumption. In a 2013 study, Macdiarmid et al.1 found that the
public lacked awareness of the association between meat consumption
and climate change, and there was a resistance to the idea of eating less
meat.
In the ten years since this study was conducted, there has been
considerable development in this area. The importance of climate change
has been widely accepted and the contribution of food to climate change
has been estimated. One visible response from food producers has been
the recent boom in plant-based alternatives to animal products. But
scientific evidence for the impacts of meat on health and the environment
may not have filtered through to the public.
We repeated Macdiarmid et al.’s study to (i) understand current public
awareness of sustainable diets, (ii) determine willingness to reduce meat
consumption and (iii) explore if these have changed over the last decade.