Local Food Boon Spurred by Pandemic May be Short-Lived
hubie writes:
The COVID19 pandemic affected American households in countless ways, but according to researchers, some of the most tangible shifts are taking place in the food system.
A combination of supply chain issues, tighter budgets, concern about shopping in public spaces, and increases in at-home preparation has led to a greater interest in sourcing food locally, but the question remains how long that interest will last. A team of researchers from Penn State's Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education conducted a study to find out.
[...] "During the pandemic, food consumption changed and so did the sourcing of that food," said Martina Vecchi, assistant professor of agricultural economics at Penn State and lead author on the study. "A lot of people started exploring different ways of purchasing food and we wanted to understand the determining factors in their decisions."
[...] "We thought of those as the two mechanisms that could influence the willingness to buy this type of product: anxiety and sense of community," Vecchi said. "We assumed that as people got more anxious because of the pandemic, they would buy more local food because they thought it was safer. We also thought it might strengthen their sense of community and would therefore reflect a higher willingness to pay for local food."
The results show a trend in the opposite direction. As anxiety increased, sense of community decreased. Vecchi explains that the rise in local food sales during the pandemic may simply be a byproduct of supply chain issues and fears about supermarkets, not a reflection of permanent changes in consumer behavior.
"It doesn't appear that their actual willingness to invest in local food was higher," Vecchi said. "Sure, they were paying for local food, just because they felt that was the safest option, but it's not that their actual willingness to pay for it was higher."
[...] "My advice to policymakers and farmers is to try and deal with consumers' anxiety and their sense of community first," Vecchi said. "We have to solve for that if we want to sustain a vibrant local food economy."
Good luck trying to manage anxiety in our world of social media news.
Journal Reference:
Martina Vecchi, Edward C. Jaenicke, Claudia Schmidt, Local food in times of crisis: The impact of COVID-19 and two reinforcing primes [open], Agribusiness, 2022. DOI: 10.1002/agr.21754
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