1. Research Questions
What is the experience appreciating growing, preparing, and eating your own food?
What is the experience of preparing and eating sustainable foods that you didn't grow?
How does the experience of appreciating growing, preparing, and eating your own food relate to the experience of a consumer of sustainable foods?
What is a scale of measurement for apprecating the experience of growing, preparing, and eating your own food?
What is a scale of measurement for appreciating preparing and eating sustainable food that you didn't grow?
XXX
2. Background / Context
Current food production practices are energy intensive, contribute greatly to pollution, [XXX] etc. Food Production must become more sustainable while meeting the needs of consumers in the near future. While there are many impressive plans for more sustainable food production practices [XXX Lit Review], many are not supported by consumers (in terms of consumers being willing to pay for "value added" sustainable food production practices, or recognizing additional value of fresher or higher quality foods). There is a lot of market research to explore this problem [XXX Lit Review], and a lot of research to help Producers become more efficient or more sustainabile [XXX Lit Review], but very little research done to explore how the consumer's experience can change and develop to value sustainable food production practices.
The Consumer Experience is generally an under researched area [Goodman], with food supply systems research often focusing on Producer, Supplier, or Supply Chain, not the consumer experience. Market research is common, and may appear to be exploring the consumer experience, but it is generally focused on finding out only enough of the consumer's experience to use to increase sales for producers, not necessariliy for the benefit of the consumers or to understand the consumer experience for the consumers themselves. [Consumer vs. Producer Lit Review XXX]
3. This Research
Instead of exploring the Food Consumer experience exclusively in the context of an external Producer or as a andversarial relationship between Consumer and Producer, this research is designed to explore the Food Consumer AS Producer, with each participant having specific experiences growing, preparing, and eating their own foods, in addition to exploring the Consumer experience of the participants in their role as Food Consumers but NOT Producers.
Urban Farmers are uniquely positioned to experience roles as Sustainable Food Producer for others (for foods that they grow to sell), Sustainable Food Producer for themselves (Producer and Consumer, for foods that they grow and eat), and Sustainable Food Consumer but not Sustainable Food Producer (for foods that they eat but do not grow). [Urban Agriculture Lit Review XXX]. In addition, Urban Farmers have had experiences becoming more interested in and valuing more sustainable foods.
4. Methodology
Life Course Perspective is a unique methodology to explore how participant's life experiences have influenced their current choices and behavior patterns, including food choices [Devine XXX]. It has mostly been applied to exploring people's current and past experiences and identities around healthy eating, and has not been applied to Sustainability or Urban Agriculture yet.
This research's goal is to create a scale of measure of the Food Consumer valuing/appreciating Sustainable Foods, that can be used measure the change in appreciation over time, and comparing this dependent (latent) variable to independent variables involving life experiences or food production or food consuming experiences.
Phase 1 will be a qualitative study of Urban Farmers, using Life Course Perspecive methodology, to learn more about the Consumer Experience and the Consumer Appreciation of Sustainable Foods. The scale will be developed from the data from this study. Life experiences, Food consumer experiences, and producer experience variables will also be chosen based on the data from this qualitative study.
Phase 2 will be a quantitative study, testing the Food Consumer's Appreciation of Sustainable Foods scale, and if it is a good measure, using it in a quantitative study to predict Appreciation from changes in independent variables involving life experiences, food consumer experiences, and food producer experiences, to be determined by qualitative study.
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