NUTRITION • FOOD CHOICE
FOOD CHOICE
TIME: 40 minutes
PURPOSE: Encourage thinking around the factors that determine food choice, and how to
create effective solutions.
MATERIALS: Whiteboard and markers
INSTRUCTIONS:
Framing: If we know how to eat healthy, why do we sometimes choose apple pie over an apple?
What are the factors that play into food choice? The following are suggested prompts to ask
participants:
a. What are reasons you see your friends choose certain foods? How about your family?
b. Why do you choose certain foods? Who else is involved in your decision?
c. Are there any other reasons you see people in your community choose certain foods?
1. Write responses on the board. Try to put similar answers near each other. Fill in some gaps if
needed. At a minimum, the following categories should develop:
a. Taste
e. Availability
a. Health
f. Social and cultural traditions
a. Convenience
g. Advertising and marketing
a. Price
h. Farm or Food policy
2. Talk through each category until participants feel comfortable using those terms. See if they
can give examples of ways each category changes food choice. For example, if the price is
too high, you don’t have the choice to buy it.
3. Suggested phrasing: “Food choice is actually a two-stage process. First, there is the food
that’s available to you, within your budget that you can reasonably get to. We’re going to
call that your choice set. Most times, what is in your choice set is decided at the national,
regional, or sometimes community level. Then, there’s the food that you choose to eat within
the options available to you. We’re going to call that your daily choices. We make these daily
choices at an individual or family level. It’s important when looking at food insecurity to target
interventions that will work at both stages.”
4. So, for example, if you had an intervention that taught youth how to make yummy, healthy
meals, that wouldn’t do any good if teens couldn’t readily buy the ingredients needed to
cook those meals, in their communities, within their budget. Here you have an intervention
targeting daily choices, without the choice set to support those decisions.
5. On the flip side, if you started a healthy corner store that sold zucchini from local farms,
at an affordable price, it’s possible that everyone would keep buying potato chips instead
because they didn’t know how to cook zucchini, weren’t sure what it was, or didn’t know
how it would taste. Here you have an intervention that’s expanding choice set, without
working to change daily choice habits.
6. Debrief: Were there any interventions that you brainstormed that might work particularly
well at targeting daily food choice and food choice sets in our community?
GOOD FOOD PURCHASING PROGRAM • GOOD FOOD RISING
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