Applying AI to Change How a Population Eats
By: Michael Yorke
Tags: Climate Action, Sustainability, Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change, Food

So how can recommendation engines be used to change how people eat and as a result reduce agricultural land area?

As mentioned previously, land use has been shown to be directly attributed to consumer behaviour, behaviour that can be shaped and changed by recommending certain products and not others. I propose a recommendation engine based on customer profiling and purchasing history that suggests product substitutes with a lower land area requirement than previously purchased items.

Over time the objective of these recommendations would be to steer consumers towards lower land use alternatives, and generate eating habits that develop into the medium and long term of a customer’s lifecycle. This could be done overtly if, for example, a customer chose to have less land intensive substitutes suggested to them, or more subtly by changing how customers see products both in store and online, or by providing vouchers for more environmentally friendly products.

There are a number of key success factors, in addition to a well crafted recommendation engine, that are required to make such an idea have its desired impact.

Collecting land use SKU data

Being able to suggest lower land use products requires knowledge of the land use requirements of all products in the first place down to a stock keeping unit (SKU) level. This data would be relatively easy to obtain for simple products such as oats, milk and apples but gets seemingly more complicated when products like cakes, with multiple ingredients, are involved. As far as I am aware no dataset like this exists, and will be both time consuming to collate and to verify its accuracy, however it is essential to providing legitimate and impactful recommendations.

Photo by Stijn te Strake on Unsplash

Understanding why people buy certain foods

Why do people eat the foods they do? Is it because they like the flavour, texture or nutritional value? Is it a sign of status, or culture, or just sheer habit? Developing a fundamental understanding of why people eat what they eat will be essential in suggesting substitutes that are actually valid. A Beyond Meat burger is going to do a better job than a big mushroom if I’m really into my beef patties. Crowdsourcing feedback on the effectiveness of substitutes as they are recommended will enable incremental improvements to the quality of recommendations over time.

Photo by Alex Munsell on Unsplash

Incentivising people to keep up behaviour

Behaviour has to be sustained over a period of time to make a real impact and for this a mechanism for incentivising customers to keep buying lower land use alternatives would need to be concocted. This could involve providing metrics showing individual positive impact over time, gamifying the process by introducing badges (earn a badge for every 10 fields you re-wild) and providing information on other customer behaviour and impact to create a “we’re in this together” mentality. It’d be cool to know that all the people who shop at your local supermarket contributed to reforesting a national park equivalent area over the course of a year. The same incentives would need to be extended to retailers who may be sacrificing margins by selling more cheaper products (e.g. selling beans instead of steak), however providing accurate metrics on impact would allow for external reporting which may grow a more environmentally conscious customer base.

Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash

If implemented at scale I genuinely believe that this type of recommendation system could fundamentally change how populations eat and as a result reduce global agricultural land requirements. Re-wilding that land with forests and grasslands to its former glory could help to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Yes there will be some people that don’t buy into it, but by informing conscientious customers through providing information on alternative products and the tangible impact that their decisions are having, I believe enough people would get on board to make it worth doing.