Whether married or single, male or female, Americans have nearly identical views about food, according to a Purdue survey of adult consumers. Taste topped the list as the most desirable attribute among grocery shoppers, followed by nutrition, affordability, availability, environmental impact and social responsibility, said the monthly Consumer Food Insights report.
“We often focus on differences in these reports, but the similarity between men and women in some of our data is notable,” said agricultural economist Jayson Lusk. “Some might think that men and women go about shopping in different ways with different priorities.”
The survey of 1,200 consumers nationwide found that only 38 percent of respondents said they knew what “regenerative” meant when applied to food and agriculture. “We found that most people associate ‘regenerative’ with ‘sustainable’ and least associate it with ‘no-till,'” said the report. Participants in the poll were given 13 possible terms to define “regenerative” and most received low scores, “indicating the lack of a clear consumer consensus.”
Regenerative agriculture “is an approach to farm and ranch management that aims to reverse climate change through practices that restore degraded soils,” says California State University-Chico. “Practices involved in regenerative agriculture include no-till/minimum tillage techniques, the use of cover crops, crop rotations, compost, and animal manures, the inoculation of soils with composts or compost extracts to restore soil microbial activity, and managed grazing.”