Plant power: SEEDing our future with plant-based eating

Abstract

The climate crisis, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, are contributing to a shift in what people eat. For environmental sustainability, ethical, social justice, and health reasons, people are embracing plant-based diets, which involve consuming mostly fruits, vegetables, grains, and beans and little or no meat and dairy products. Drawing on insights from consumer psychology, this review synthesizes academic research at the intersection of food and consumer values to propose a framework for understanding how and why these values—Sustainability, Ethics, Equity, and Dining for health—are transforming what people eat. We term our model the SEED framework. We build this framework around a report assembled by the Rockefeller Foundation (2021) that describes how to grow a value-based societal food system. Finally, we highlight insights from consumer psychology that promote an understanding of how consumer values are shifting people's diets and raise research questions to encourage more consumer psychologists to investigate how and why values influence what consumers eat, which in turn impacts the well-being of people, our environment, and society.