The aim of this thesis is to facilitate the understanding of how community at-home food choice can be influenced by both economic and non-economic factors with a particular focus on crucial elements observed during the process of fast socio-economic development. China is a developing country that has been undergoing rapid and massive social changes and is experiencing a substantial population nu-trition transition. It thus provides a case study to investigate the mechanism of how social transformations can shift food consumption patterns.
Previous literature tends to focus on one aspect of diet transformation, be it the economic effects of social changes, shifts in demographics, transformations in living environment, or the responses of food consumption to changes in price and expenditure in China. This thesis intends to differentiate itself from the extant studies from two aspects. First, this thesis takes into consideration economic factors and key aspects of social transformation simultaneously to depict shifting food consumption patterns, and this is projected further into the future as the foundation of the possible situations of food patterns in 2050 urban China. Second, recent studies focusing on the effects of economic factors on food consumption in China follow an economic approach. They apply structural demand models to household level food data. However, by looking at observations at household level, their aim is to recover individual preference and behaviour. As a consequence, the more general potential influencers embedded in social development that may exert similar effects on groups of individuals are usually neglected. Rather than investigating the behaviour of individuals, households or provinces, “community”
is taken as the unit of analysis in this thesis. “Community”, which is a collective of households living in the same area, is a unit with generality in between individuals, households and provinces. It is thus expected that the understanding of a more collective food pattern compared with that of households and individuals would benefit local governments or social workers in the design of community targeted food and nutrition related promoting instruments. Also, compared with analysis conducted at provincial and national level, it is hoped that this approach will provide a more detailed picture as evidence for the policies made at national level that intend to address the negative dietary outcomes in the process of population nutrition transition.
Understanding the link between economic factors, social development and di-etary patterns at the community level is meaningful because theoretically it will
shed new light on the mechanism of transforming dietary patterns in China, and practically it will provide reference to local governments that normally function as policy implementers to design community level nutrition and health related policies. This thesis intends to fill the gap of knowledge about the drivers of com-munity level food choices, by using the comcom-munity as unit of analysis and both economic factors and social development factors are examined within the frame-work of an economic model.
The first goal of this thesis is to formulate community at-home food choice by taking into account both economic and non-economic drivers. This serves to set up the foundation for the testing and projecting of the impacts of social transfor-mation on food decision. Three specific objectives are within this goal:
1. The first objective is to test if communities located in areas with different level of urbanisation would have varied food demand. This question is trig-gered by the fact that the urbanisation process is often accompanied by a shifting lifestyle where food choice is one of its key components. Evidence from China has shown that there is a divergence in food consumption pat-terns between urban and rural areas and that areas at different stages of the urbanisation process have varied dietary choices. This thesis focuses on the situation in urban, suburban and county towns where food markets are relatively well-developed and most foods consumed-at-home can be sourced from local markets. It is assumed that differences in the level of urbanisation of communities can be summarised in either a city(urban and suburban) or a town environment. It is expected that results from this objective would add evidence to the link between the urbanisation process and its dietary outcomes.
2. The second objective is to investigate if the ageing population would change food consumption patterns. This topic is of particular interest at community level since compared with households, observed behaviour of a community as a whole is likely to be closer to the behaviour at national level. Shift-ing demographics of the Chinese population have been shown to affect the consumption of meats and grain equivalent. However, there appears to be limited research on its impacts on overall food patterns. Taking community as a unit of observation, it is expected that findings will shed new light on this topic.
3. The third objective is to examine whether more convenient supermarket ac-cess relative to that of fresh markets affects community dietary patterns.
This is proposed in the context of the “supermarket revolution” in China where modern food retailers are replacing traditional food outlets and con-sumers are diversifying their shopping patterns to multi-platform purchase.
Empirical evidence in developing countries tends to blame supermarkets for the increasing consumption of highly-processed foods at the expense of fresh produce, however there is a lack of evidence in China to confirm or refute such findings.
Built on the results from the entire model, community at-home food choice is then projected to the year 2050. Based on the literature on the forecasts of social-demographic changes in China, the progressing urbanisation level and the ageing population are taken as two irreversible trends and therefore their situa-tions in 2050 are taken with no uncertainty. In contrast, the transformation of the food environment may be influenced by government policies and such less cer-tainty is reflected by the two projected scenarios in 2050. Meanwhile, nutrition knowledge could directly affect food choice and its related education programmes are potential means to ameliorate the negative nutritional effects of shifting food patterns. Therefore, projected social environments in 2050 are augmented by a projected level of improved dietary knowledge to see if better dietary knowledge might contribute to the alleviation of the negative impacts of social changes on nutrition. The examination of the nutritional aspect of the at-home diet focuses on the choice of vegetables and fruits, and on oils and sugars. These two groups of foods are chosen because they are relatively unambiguous: the former can be con-sidered as a representative of the positive side of diet while the latter is normally taken as a potential risk. Specifically, the fourth research objective is articulated as follows.
4. The fourth objective is to formulate four scenarios of at-home food choice for 2050 urban China, and to examine food decisions under each of the sce-nario situations. The first two scesce-narios projected will represent two different types of food environment: one is dominated by supermarkets run according to the modern business mode (relatively large-scale chained food retailers), the other is dominated by modernised traditional fresh markets that are mainly composed of relatively small-scale vendors. These two scenarios are then augmented by improved dietary knowledge respectively, which form the
knowledge can be influenced by government policies and food environment is regarded as the main source of uncertainty, the comments on the four sce-narios focus on the potential of dietary knowledge to promote more healthy food choices under different food environments.