There is increasing demand for organic food products throughout the Western world. Health concerns have frequently been found to be the main motivation of consumers purchasing organic products, but the literature on consumer preferences and behavior is less clear about what ‘health’ means to consumers of these products, and because of this it remains unclear what exactly drives consumers to choose organic products. This article investigates health from the perspective of consumers, and analyzes negotiations of, and justifications behind, their consumption preferences. The analysis is based on a focus group study conducted in Denmark in 2016. Three different understandings of health can be found when consumers explain their preferences for organic products: Health as purity; Health as pleasure, and a Holistic perspective on health. The first two are familiar from the literature on food. The third, which reflects principles behind organic agriculture, is less documented in the context of consumption. Health as purity was the dominant understanding of health used by the participants when explaining why they purchased organic food products. When participants discussed healthy eating in general, detached from a specific context, most employed a purely nutritional perspective as a definitive argument in supporting claims about healthy eating. The paper’s findings have implications for future research on organic consumption. They also have practical implications for organic food producers and manufacturers.
In Denmark, as in many other countries, demand for organic food products has grown over the last few decades. Developments in modern organic food production have been driven largely by the ideal of sustainability and environmental concerns. However, attitudes to production have evolved in a dialogue between producers and consumers, leading to developments in the perceptions of both parties (Lassen & Korzen, 2009). The non-sensory attributes of food products – in addition to their sensed qualities such as taste and texture – are important to organic consumers (Hjelmar, 2011, Magnusson et al., 2003); and among these non-sensory qualities personal health benefits are now considered to play the most important role in consumers’ decisions to opt for organic (Hansen et al., 2018, Apaolaza et al., 2018, Rana and Paul, 2017, Honkanen et al., 2006). Studies have found that consumers who prefer organic food often describe both health and environmental concerns as motives behind their choice, but there is also some evidence that an expectation of health gains is the factor most likely to push consumers from a mere preference for organic products to actual purchases of them, overcoming the fact that organic produce is generally more expensive than the conventionally produced alternatives (Denver & Christensen, 2015).
As far as we have been able to determine, the way consumers themselves perceive and define health in relation to organic food products is overlooked in nearly all studies of consumer attitudes to organic foods. This is surprising, as the concept of health can hardly be said to be free of ambiguity (cf. Bisogni, Jastran, Seligson, & Thompson, 2012). As a result of this lack of clarity of how consumers understand healthiness, researchers working on organic consumption risk misinterpreting the health claims being made by those who participate in their studies. There is also a wider issue, since if society and food suppliers are to increase the market share of organic food products, it will be important to know precisely why organic foods are in demand.
The consumption of food products is part of everyday life. Food choice is contextual, dynamic and integrated in social life; it is intertwined with practical considerations, family disputes and emotional factors (Sobal et al., 2014, Christensen, 2004). It is also affected by political reflections and moral debates. People’s values, and what they see as ‘good’ for themselves, their families and society, are enacted in consumption, and therefore if we are to understand the consumption of organic food products we need to investigate how preferences are justified and negotiated (Stamer, 2018, Boltanski and Thevenot, 1999). Moral norms often underlie consumer activities. Boltanski and Thevenot’s Boltanski and Thevenot, 1999, Boltanski and Thévenot, 2000 Conventions approach is a framework for studying moral debates carried out in everyday situations in which people face conflicting requirements. In situations where choices are contested, or debated, people are obliged to justify their everyday choices with reference to underlying norms, in an acceptable manner, so that the justification appears sound and relevant to all involved parties (Boltanski & Thevenot, 1999). The Conventions approach is based on the assumption that people are able to justify their practices, and that in doing so they are able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate justifications (Andersen, 2011). Boltanski and Thévenot (2000) claim that justifications are grounded in different, yet common, moral conventions about the worth of practices, persons etc., and that these so-called orders of worth pre-date individuals or social groups and are used to make sense of situations in everyday life. Each order of worth, or regime of justification, has its own internal logic and functions as a repertoire of legitimate justifications which individuals invoke in situations in which their values or practices are contested. It is thus in situations of debate and negotiation between people that it becomes apparent how people use concepts like health to justify their preferences, and this in turn reveals what they associate with these concepts.
Health concerns have been found to be linked to different orders of worth (Stamer, 2018, Andersen, 2011, Truninger, 2011). However, given the ubiquity of health concerns connected with the consumption of organic food as well as general food consumption (Ilmonen, 2011), our study does not assume that healthiness is tied to a specific regime of justification. Hence, rather than using the Conventions approach to link particular understandings of health with specific orders of worth, we will employ the theoretical concepts of the approach to analyze the use of health in negotiations and justifications observed in a group of organic consumers.
Understandings of health, healthy food and meals, and the contextualization of the concept of health have been investigated in consumer studies and the sociology of food for more than a decade. We have found three distinctive overarching concepts of health to be present in the theoretical as well as the empirical scientific literature – a finding that corresponds to an extent with earlier overviews of the literature (Chrysochou, Askegaard, Grunert, & Kristensen, 2010). In an attempt to synthesize the literature, we have named the three concepts to reflect their conceptual foundations, i.e. the distinctive way in which the healthiness of food is assessed in them. The concepts are: Health as nutritional value; Health as pleasure; and Health as purity.
According to the understanding of health as nutrition, the healthiness of a food product is determined by its nutritional value. This approach is sometimes termed the ‘functional discourse’ or ‘nutritionism’, and it is rooted in a biomedical understanding of health and in the scientific discipline of human nutrition (Chrysochou et al., 2010, Bouwman et al., 2009, Pollan, 2008). In light of this understanding, organic food products will be considered healthier than conventional products, if the content is of better nutritional value, perhaps because they have a higher level of essential micronutrients or because they have a better composition of macronutrients (e.g. lower levels of fats) as compared with alternatives.
According to the second understanding, the healthiness of foods is defined by the sensory pleasure it brings you, and the experience you enjoy while eating it. The logic is that it is healthy to have a ‘happy’ body, to experience pleasure, and to enjoy food as a part of a social community; and that good quality foods satiate better than food of low quality and thus make one eat less, but better (Fischler, 2011, Vogel and Mol, 2014). This approach, which is sometimes called the ‘culinary order’, incorporates notions of gastronomy and commensality in our understanding of healthiness (Chrysochou et al., 2010, Fischler, 2011). In this understanding organic food products are healthier than their conventional counterparts if their taste, texture or other sensory characteristics are superior.
According to the third understanding, the purity of food is the essential factor when assessing healthiness. In this context purity can be taken to indicate an absence of food additives, preservatives and residues, or the naturalness of a food product (Rozin et al., 2004, Rozin et al., 2012, Douglas, 2002). Purity and naturalness are interchangeable concepts: unsullied and untampered-with nature is often viewed as equivalent to purity (Dickson-Spillmann, Siegrist, and Keller, 2011). Thus purity is typically inferred from the absence of pollution (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983). From this perspective organic foods are regarded as healthy to the extent that they are uncontaminated and purer than conventional foods – i.e. not altered or polluted by artificial additives or by excessive human interference (Schifferstein and Oude Ophuis, 1998, Dickson-Spillmann et al., 2011).
0 Comments