Adopting Boltanski and Thevenot’s Conventions approach as the point of departure for the empirical analysis, this study explored organic consumers’ ideas, justifications and negotiations in focus groups. The focus group method is particularly useful where the aim of research is to examine the ways in which people debate their actions and preferences with others (Halkier, 2016).
When the focus group participants presented their individual reasons for preferring organic food products they expressed four recurrent motives (one sensory and three non-sensory): Health concerns, Environmental concerns, Animal welfare, and Taste. In this focus group study, as in most other studies of organic consumers, health was an important driver of consumer choice.
In an analysis of organic food and moralities of food provisioning among Danish consumers, Andersen (2011) found that justifications for buying organic food mix arguments from different moral conventions. The same kind of complexity is present in the results presented above, where the four identified health perspectives can be seen as conventions with distinct criteria for evaluating the healthiness of a food product.
In this study we found three different understandings of health in consumers’ justifications of their preference for organic food products: Health as purity; Health as pleasure, and a Holistic perspective on health. Health as purity was found to be the most common understanding of health among the participants when health was being discussed in relation to organic consumption.
This study is part of the interdisciplinary OrgHealth research project carried out by researchers from Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen. The research was funded by the Organic RDD 2.2 program, coordinated by ICROFS, International Centre for Research in Organic Food systems. The authors would like to thank our colleagues from the project and the OrgHealth expert monitoring group for useful and constructive comments during various phases of the research.
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