Does future design induce people to make a persistent change to sustainable food consumption?

Adopting sustainable food consumption (SFC) is essential for addressing climate change, improving health outcomes and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, little is known about what encourages people to make a lasting shift to SFC. This research considers a future design (FD) approach where people are asked to think about a problem and to act through taking a perspective of future generations, investigating the question “how does the FD approach impact food consumption?” and the hypothesis “FD induces a lasting shift to SFC.” We employ a social experiment with three treatments of “control group,” “deliberation” and “FD,” collecting data on organic and nonorganic vegetable consumption with 300 households in Bangladesh over three months. In the control group, households report the consumption. In deliberation, they additionally deliberate among their family members to think of a vision, a mission and a strategy for the consumption. In the FD treatment, participants additionally consider the perspectives of past, current and future generations before deliberating on the same issues. Results indicate that FD affects people to have a sustained increase (decrease) in organic (nonorganic) vegetable consumption as compared to any other treatment, and the effect under FD is approximately twice as much as that under deliberation in magnitude and in each round. Overall, FD demonstrates a great potential for inducing people to make a persistent change to SFC. • We study how the future design (FD) approach affects household food consumption. • A 3-round social experiment has been employed in Bangladesh over three months. • People in the FD think about a problem and act through taking future standpoint. • FD increases (decreases) organic (nonorganic) vegetable consumption. • Persistent changes to sustainable food consumption are achieved through FD.