i3food: Information, Interventions and Inequalities in the UK food system

每一天，英国都是由零售商、制造商、餐饮商、运输商、农民、海关官员、环境卫生官员、科技公司和其他许多人组成的网络养活的。这种食物系统非常复杂，但并不能提供最佳效果——英国的饮食通常是饱和脂肪、盐和糖含量高，水果和蔬菜含量低，并且与不可持续的环境破坏水平有关。在英国，获得食物的机会是不平等的，更多的弱势群体不太可能实现健康、可持续的饮食。这种精细平衡的系统可能会被新技术（例如食品配送服务应用程序）所破坏，这些新技术会在短时间内给购买带来巨大变化。从远处看，英国的食品体系就像一条平静的河流，蜿蜒在全国各地，但近距离观察，它却是一个动荡、不断变化的大漩涡。这个由研究人员组成的新联盟将进行多学科研究，旨在捕捉大漩涡的动力，了解湍流并重新引导河流的流动，以便为英国各地的每个群体提供健康和可持续的食物系统。要了解食物系统，你必须了解与之互动的人的动机。我们将与食品工业、公共卫生政策制定者和弱势群体的公众成员建立牢固的联系。这将确保我们的研究集中在有可能大规模实施的食品系统的合理变化上。现代消费者希望能够方便地获得食品服务和做出明智的购买决定所需的信息。这导致大量关于食品系统的数据在网上免费提供（例如超市和快餐店网站，食品配送服务应用程序）。与此同时，零售商收集食品购买数据，为他们的营销策略提供信息。我们将收集这些数据，建立一个不断更新的食品系统的图片，包括全国各地的食品系统如何变化，以及不同社会群体的食品购买行为如何不同。我们将利用这些数据来监测粮食系统的变化如何影响该国不同地区和不同社会群体的消费者购买决策。这些变化可能是由于“系统冲击”，比如英镑贬值，伴随着“无协议”脱欧的可能性。也可能是由于新政策的实施，例如对基于数量的价格促销（例如买一送一）的监管。在公众代表的指导下，我们将开发新工具，帮助消费者做出健康、可持续的食品购买决策，比如一款智能手机应用程序，让人们能够监测购物篮的营养质量和环境足迹。在针对目标群体进行用户测试后，我们将使用实验研究来测试工具的有效性。除此之外，我们还将与食品行业的合作伙伴一起改变零售食品环境，例如将健康和可持续食品的位置改变为商店内的核心销售区域。我们将使用商店销售数据来衡量这些变化对食品购买行为的影响。我们收集的数据和这些研究的结果将为粮食系统模型提供信息，这将使我们深入了解什么将对健康、不平等和医疗保健成本产生持久的积极影响，以及粮食系统中哪些关键领域可能对整个粮食系统产生重大影响。我们将通过举办公众参与活动，如学校参观、酒吧讲座、科学会议摊位和购物中心活动，将我们的结果反馈给公众。我们还将确保我们收集的新数据集可供英国学术界使用，以加强整个英国的公共卫生研究。

Every day, the UK is fed by a network of retailers, manufacturers, caterers, transporters, farmers, customs officials, environmental health officers, tech companies and many others. This food system is highly complex but does not provide optimal results - diets in the UK are often high in saturated fat, salt and sugar, low in fruit and vegetables, and are associated with unsustainable levels of environmental damage. Access to food is not equal in the UK, with more disadvantaged groups less likely to achieve healthy, sustainable diets. This finely balanced system can be disrupted by novel technologies (e.g. food delivery service apps) which create huge changes in purchasing over a short space of time. From a distance, the UK food system resembles a calm river threading its way around the country, but viewed closely it is a turbulent, ever-changing maelstrom. This new consortium of researchers will conduct multidisciplinary research aimed at capturing the dynamism of the maelstrom, understanding the turbulence and redirecting the flow of the river so that the food system is channelled towards healthy and sustainable outcomes for every group across Britain. To understand the food system you must understand the motivations of the people who interact with it. We will develop strong links with the food industry, public health policymakers and members of the public from disadvantaged groups. This will ensure that our research is focussed on plausible changes to the food system that have the potential to be implemented at scale.The modern consumer expects easy access to food services and to the information required to make informed purchasing decisions. This has led to abundance of data about the food system being made freely available online (e.g. supermarket and fast food outlet websites, food delivery service apps). Meanwhile, data on food purchases are collected by retailers to inform their marketing strategies. We will harvest these data to build a constantly updating picture of the food system, including how that food system varies around the country and how food purchasing behaviour differs for different social groups. We will use these data to monitor how changes in the food system affect consumer purchasing decisions in different parts of the country and in different social groups. These changes may be due to 'system shocks', such as the fall in the value of the pound that has accompanied the possibility of a 'no deal' Brexit. Or they may be due to implementation of new policies, such as the regulation of volume-based price promotions (e.g. Buy One Get One Free).With guidance from representatives of the public we will develop new tools to help consumers make healthy, sustainable food purchasing decisions, such as a smartphone app to allow people to monitor the nutritional quality and the environmental footprint of their shopping basket. After user testing with targeted groups, we will test the effectiveness of the tools using experimental studies. Alongside this, we will work with food industry partners to develop changes in the retail food environment, such as changing the position of healthy and sustainable foods to core selling areas within the shop. We will measure the effect of these changes on food purchasing behaviour using store sales data.The data we collect and the results of these studies will inform models of the food system which will give us insight into what will have a lasting positive impact on health, inequalities and health care costs, and where are the critical areas of the food system that can trigger large impacts throughout the food system. We will feed our results back to the public, by running public engagement events such as school visits, pub talks, stalls at science conferences and shopping centre engagements. We will also ensure that the novel datasets that we collect are made available to the UK academic community, to strengthen public health research throughout the UK.