‘We have to acknowledge the food system as a whole’

I notice you've got Swansea in your Twitter name.

Yes, just to let people know that I'm in Swansea, and we've got Swansea in our research group name: the Swansea Nutrition, Appetite and Cognition group, SNAC. But I do have an attachment to South Wales. Originally, I'm from southwest London. But my husband is from Wales, my children identify themselves as being Welsh, and I just absolutely love it down here. I found a really welcoming community: the people are warm and friendly.

Do you think there is something particular about the Swansea psyche?

Not necessarily about Swansea, but maybe being outside of London and the home counties, which is where I'm from originally. I lived in Bristol and went to the University of Bristol for my PhD, and I would say similar things about the Bristolian identity as well. 

Is the work you're doing grounded in the community?

I'm working with lots of Welsh small to medium-enterprise food manufacturers. There are some really innovative food manufacturers in Wales, who are trying to create foods that are healthy and sustainable, and contributing in a positive way to our food system. Some of these things are well suited to being in South Wales; for example, we've been doing lots of work on algae. Laverbread has been traditional cuisine in Wales, so I think there is an openness to some of these ingredients.

I've been working with manufacturers to look at consumer acceptability of different ingredients, different foods, how we present the foods, things like that. A lot of the time when people think about consumer acceptability, they're thinking about a focus group, asking people, 'What do you think about eating algae?'

That has a valuable place, especially at the very beginning of the product development journey, when you are trying to make decisions about where you want to position yourself as a food manufacturer. But quite quickly, you can go beyond that to use other tools to understand things like the trade-offs between different attributes.

You can use modelling techniques like conjoint analysis to do that. If a product has a price, a perception of how sustainable it is, and how novel it is, as we change these values, how do they trade off against each other to influence whether somebody will not only buy it and taste it, but keep buying it and keep eating it? 

One of your main areas is around variety.

Absolutely. When we talk about variety, we're talking about taste, colour, smell, our whole experience of eating different foods. And the idea is from an evolutionary perspective, the more variety of foods that we eat, the more exposure we have to different micronutrients and things like that. It's the whole 'eat the rainbow' idea.

And that is true when we're eating things like fruit and vegetables. But very quickly, it is no longer true when, say, we've got six different flavours of ice cream. They're nutritionally very similar to each other, but they might have very different flavours.

The underpinning mechanism here is sensory-specific satiety, which means that as you eat one food with a particular flavour, your experience of desire to eat that food and pleasantness of that food declines, but your desire to eat and perception of the pleasantness of other foods with different flavours remains intact. And so you end up switching flavours. That's very much the idea behind why we always have room for dessert.

What can happen is you end up eating more because you've got this variety. If it's vegetables, then you're looking at additional micronutrients at a low energy density. But if you're talking about ice cream, you're looking at no additional micronutrients and taking on a lot more high-energy-density foods.

It's like me at a conference buffet.

Yes, one of the ways that the variety factor has been talked about is in terms of that buffet effect. And certainly, a lot of the meetings that I go to, which are about eating behaviour, there seems to be a drive towards making the buffets more nutritious, and vegetarian as well. In fact I'm a vegetarian myself, although I would never admonish someone for not having gone the full way to vegetarian. From a sustainability perspective, even if somebody reduces their meat intake a bit, that's something positive. 

That's an interesting thing for me in terms of eating behaviour in general. To what extent are you advocating small shifts in behaviour and habits, rather than seeing changing eating behaviour as something that needs to be done wholesale and dramatically?

First of all, we have to acknowledge the food system as a whole and not bring it all down to individualistic choice. We're living in a food system, and a society, that means you need convenience. If you're a shift worker, then you need convenient food. And the availability of high fat high sugar food is extremely high.

So I'm cautious to not take a food stigmatising or weight stigmatising point of view, I will never demonise a single food. You have to take a whole diet approach, and a whole food system approach, and not say, 'You as an individual need to make all of these changes, it's all down to you and it's your fault if you can't do it'.

But, for those people who do want to make changes, the best diet for you is the one that you can stick to. Let's stop having diet wars, and think about what will help me to up my fruit and vegetable intake? If having a takeaway once a week helps me to eat plenty of fruit and veg, and a high-fibre diet which I know is good for me, then do it, that's great. It's about being realistic about the goals you set for yourself. And creating an environment around you that buffers that overall eating environment.

You say 'which I know is good for me', but to what extent do you think people do know that? Is a lack of knowledge stopping people from eating well? 

From a very categorical perspective, I think people know that fruit and veg are good and eating mountains of chocolate is probably less good. When you start to get into some of the minutiae, about eating something very specific in a specific way, then people may not know that.

But then also, for some of these things, there's a lack of efficacy to support that eating behaviour as a widescale thing to do. So I think keep it simple – encourage people, across the whole of their diet, have some balance and think about eating enough fruit, veg and fibre and wholegrain, and maybe not quite so much of those discretionary foods.

But that's not to say that those foods are 'bad' foods… they have a place.

Is it about mindful eating: being aware of what you're eating, why, when and how much? I feel my own eating is probably quite emotionally driven, not really thinking in the moment about what I'm eating and why. Just stuffing it in.

I'm going to flip the question around completely. If we were living in a food system that promoted nutritious consumption, then we wouldn't be thinking so much about what we eat, and we wouldn't have to. There's this restraint disinhibition cycle, where actually trying to restrict and think about what you're eating and stuff can be counterproductive. So I understand where your question is coming from, but I think about it in quite a different way.

It's interesting because I've just been talking with Ian Walker, and he's saying that he's increasingly realising that psychologists don't have the solutions, because so much of what we do is driven more by the environment than our actual mind and behaviour.

That's why I've shifted my work more towards working with food manufacturers as the target. The idea is to try to impact the food environment via a different pathway than consumer behaviour change. Cross-disciplinary working is absolutely essential, especially when it comes to food. You've got to think about the impact across the system, there's just no two ways about it. I don't really care about disciplinary ego, I'm more concerned about seeing a problem and then working with people to find the best possible solution, or at least a way forward. 

And how do the food manufacturers respond to that input?

We've just finished a grant which was Welsh government funded, with BIC Innovation as our partner in this. We worked with five food manufacturers to look at the consumer acceptability of fortified foods. We think of fortified foods as being kids' cereal perhaps, but fortification as a strategy can be really helpful for others too.

Our target audience was around older adult health. We did a consumer insight workflow, looking at different aspects of how the food was received by the consumer. And then we were able to feed that information back to the manufacturer, but also to inform scientific research.

We learned a lot about what was useful, and what was maybe less useful. I'm now working on refining some of our approaches to make sure that they are as effective as possible for different groups. One of the most popular things we did, that we're going to be presenting at Taste Wales next week, was our VR supermarket.

Participants literally walked around our supermarket and were able to pick up objects. We could label our manufacturer's product in different ways, ask participants to interact with the food and the labelling and tell us about why they were doing what they were doing.

You've also looked at 'multicomponent foods': can you explain that?

Again, I'm a pragmatist. Unless something happens with the way that society works at large, we are going to need some convenience in our foods. So can we make certain foods better, either by reformulating the foods themselves or by thinking about the way that those foods are presented to the consumer in such a way as to engender a kind of healthier incorporation of that food from a whole diet perspective?

Then it's a case of what you target. Because I have a background in food variety, I was thinking a lot about foods which are well-known in the food science literature as multicomponent foods. That's where you have different components that have been processed, or ultra-processed, to be brought together into a single food.

Take a chocolate chip cookie, for example. You can say to me, that's a chocolate chip cookie. But you can also say that's a chocolate chip, and that's a bit of biscuit. You recognise sensorially distinguishable components within that food, but you recognise it as a single food product.

There's food science literature on how to produce those products, but there's almost no psychology eating behaviour literature on multi-component foods versus single-component foods as a concept. So we laid out what multicomponent foods were, drawing on theories that exist within the literature that could help us understand how people might interact with these foods from a psychology of eating behaviour perspective. 

We looked at food variety and sensory complexity and how they might come together. And then we also looked across the literature at studies that spoke to the concept in some way. So whilst there were very few studies looking at multi-component foods, there are studies out there looking at assortments – if we put chocolates in a bowl, we know that if there's more variety, people end up eating more. But what happens when you process them in such a way as to make them into a single food product? 

It feels intuitively as if most foods are multicomponent foods.

Yes, these foods are ubiquitous. And one reason why studies don't exist in this area is that it's really difficult to make a control food for an experiment involving a comparison. So I've worked with food technologists up at Aberystwyth Uni to create a matched food set, where I've got single-component ice cream, and then three multicomponent ice creams matched for calories. We've done a bit of validation work on the participant perception of this food set, and now we're trying to get funding to do some larger studies.

Perhaps people will prefer the multicomponent food items, partly from a sense of value for money.

There's a whole raft of drivers for how people are perceiving multicomponent foods. That's something that I'm hoping to explore in the next few years. But the upshot might be that if we want a better ice cream, that promotes appropriate portion size, a multi-component one may not necessarily be the way forward. A manufacturer might reformulate their food product to have fewer components, for example.

What is the future of food? I wonder if there are generational differences in the perception of things like fortified foods, and multicomponent foods.

In our fortification focus groups, one of the first questions that we asked people was what they knew about nutrition that has stayed with them, that they still live by. It was really influenced by messaging that they had received over the years… so for some people, it was just 'five a day'. So, taking a really optimistic point of view, I'm hoping the idea that a lot of us are trying to put forward – to not be really restrictive and demonise foods, but to think about making our diet nutritionally dense – might get through. Think about what we are having, rather than what we cannot have.

I do think there have been some shifts in those views, but perhaps mostly for particular demographics, who can afford it. We have to acknowledge a widening gap for some people who are nutritionally food insecure. That has to be part of the conversations that we have about food systems.

It's great that there is a really active food-oriented community in Swansea, collectives and cooperatives around picking unwanted fruit, the redistribution of food, and the sustainable use of land. That doesn't have to be a super-middle-class thing.