Lombardini & Lankoski (2013)

• Meat free Mondays

Lombardini, C., & Lankoski, L. (2013). Forced choice restriction in promoting sustainable food consumption: Intended and unintended effects of the mandatory vegetarian day in Helsinki schools. Journal of consumer policy, 36, 159-178.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10603-013-9221-5

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This paper discusses the use of forced restriction of food choice as an instrument of food policy by using the mandatory Helsinki School District weekly vegetarian day as a natural experiment.

• Overall, the results show that the initiative produced a mixture of intended and unintended effects.
• On vegetarian days, there were clear signs of non-compliance in the short term, manifested as a decrease in the participation in school lunches and in the amount of food taken to the plate and as an increase in plate waste.
• In the medium term, the only sign of non-compliance was a decrease in the amount of food taken to the plate.
• The difference between the short- and medium-term effects can be interpreted as a weakening of non-compliance, as a change in the way it manifested itself, or a combination of both.
• The effects of the vegetarian day differed between school levels. In the short term, the clearest indications of non-compliance were found in lower-secondary schools. However, these schools also registered positive spillover effects in the medium term.
• The best way to reduce the unintended effects of a policy involving forced choice restriction depends on the causes of such effects.
  • In the case of psychological reactance, default options may be preferable to forced choice restriction.
  • For hedonic dislike, menu development should be prioritized, and moral suasion and information campaigns may help where non-compliance stems from a disagreement with the objectives and effectiveness of the intervention.
• Thus, forced choice restriction should be accompanied by detailed data collection to understand the possible causes of intended and unintended effects and to tailor the intervention to the target group.