Making Food Policy Personal: How Community Workshops Shaped Our Climate Game
Our SHIFT research team are taking an innovative approach to tackling food sustainability. In partnership with Manchester residents and digital designer Rachel Briscoe, they’re co-creating an interactive game for Manchester Museum to spark conversations about the challenges of creating a healthier, more sustainable food system. Find out more about their project and the recent community events the team held to help develop the game.
Should school dinners be vegetarian? Do meat-eaters in the UK want to reduce the amount of meat they eat? Should the UK government subsidise beef production? The food system can seem vast and overwhelmingly complex so how do we talk to people about this in a way that offers interesting and productive ways in? This is exactly what our team of SHIFT researchers, alongside Rachel Briscoe, a digital interactive designer from Fast Familiar, have been exploring in various church halls and food pantries and at community events in London and Manchester during April and May this year.
The SHIFT research project, run by the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, works with the public and policymakers to design interventions to make the food system more environmentally sustainable. We focus on increasing consumption of cereals, fruit and vegetables, and reducing consumption of meat and dairy products to promote healthy, sustainable diets.
As part of this project, in conjunction with the people of Manchester, we’re co-creating a digital interactive, which will be displayed in Manchester Museum. This will take the form of an engaging game to share SHIFT research and engage visitors in the challenges of making the food system better for health and the environment. So, what better way to design this than by working with people who are often less consulted about the food system?
Individuals often think that they need to change their diets in order to make the food system more sustainable and, of course, they do but this shouldn’t obscure the larger structural issues that are at play in the choices people make and largely determine what kind of diets are possible.
What we did
We ran six sessions in South London which took place at a range of locations from community kitchens and food banks to vegetable growing projects. At these sessions our team facilitated discussions in 1-on-1s or small groups, as well as running gamified activities and voting exercises. We also asked participants ‘if you could wave a magic wand in order to change one aspect of the food system, what would you choose to change?’. Our aims were to understand what influences people’s food choices, how people understand the link between climate change and food and what people understand about the food system.
Next, we ran two sessions in Gorton, in Greater Manchester, working with Healthy Community Healthy Me, then one at PINC College which is a specialist college for 16 – 19-year-olds. At both sessions, we facilitated discussions around food and climate change and the groups undertook drawing challenges or played a beta version of the game on tablets and fed back.
What we learned
The sessions showed us that people’s food choices are influenced by cost, taste and perceptions of what is ‘healthy’. In general, people do not link food to climate change or if they do, it’s a general ‘impact on the environment’, for example, mentioning issues such as pesticides and chemicals in the soil.
It was also very clear to us that the idea of reducing meat consumption is difficult for people who already feel like they barely eat any meat, because of its cost. This was a hugely important reminder about sensitivities when creating messaging for groups most impacted by the cost of living. But overall, people seemed to enjoy learning new things about the food system, and we had long and rich chats with many.
One of the most important take-aways was that food and climate change are different to other climate change related issues. Fast Familiar have worked extensively in public engagement on climate change. They’ve noticed that while lots of climate change policies receive extensive media coverage, which means people already have an opinion on them, food seems to be different: even relatively well-informed people do not connect food policy with climate change. This was a crucial reminder in the development of our game to take our time explaining food and climate change, both the link between the two and the impacts of this.
So, what did this mean for the game?
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We need to explain the food (meat) and climate change link more. We need to place players within the narrative frame of the experience, to scaffold against the ‘us and them’ feeling.
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The experience needs to be a mix of learning and giving opinions. This maps well onto our dual aims of sharing research and gathering information.
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This content is complex and dense. A structure of four episodes of the game (covering different food system policies in each episode) will help us cover this without overloading people.
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Co-creation with the participants of our sessions helped to flag some accessibility issues around the game, including adding a seat and headphones to make sure we’re removing any barriers to people who want to engage/ access this.
How do we feel about the project?/ Our final thoughts
We were really pleased to have such thoughtful and engaging conversations with people and to have developed a format that makes people feel inspired to engage with these complex topics.
Co-creation made us much more confident that we are representing the experiences of people who are affected by the cost-of-living crisis and structural discrimination. We were excited by the potential of this approach as a way of doing dynamic two-way research and deepening relationships with audiences.
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