Piloting Zooniverse for food, health and sustainability citizen science

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There is a food knowledge disconnect between food and nutrition researcher community, and general population. Likewise, policy makers have detailed information about food, but cannot measure easily what citizens understand or perceive to know about food, or how large the disconnect is between these two knowledge bases. This information disconnect has implications for how to address a wide range of food related subjects from food safety, and health education, as well as how to communicate complex issues ranging from environmental sustainability, and animal welfare and human rights.The STFC funded Zooniverse platform is a proven method of engaging citizens with complex scientific issues. A recent STFC food network + Collaborative Scoping Project "Piloting Zooniverse to help us understand citizen food perceptions" (2018) has shown that the Zooniverse citizen science platform can be a solution to the measurement of citizens perception of food information (and might also act as a way to inform and discuss food information with citizens). As a result of this pilot government departments (FSA and DEFRA) are now interested in working with a multidisciplinary research team to co-develop a publicly facing citizen science pilot using Zooniverse.The previous pilot tested the Zooniverse interface, and refined the citizen science methodology for food related questions. It relied on a small private sample of participants, asking questions on 10 food types and 2 variables (greenhouse gas emissions and energy density). Before a large citizen science campaign can take place, an additional phase of piloting to further refine the methodology needs to occur.This pilot will be publicly facing, engaging and educating a minimum of 400+ UK citizens over 3 month operational period. It will extend the prior research, measuring citizen perceptions of 30+ foods on topics of sustainability (including geographically and technology associated impacts) and healthiness; risk and trust in the food system; food habits (such as shopping cooking, preparation and storage); and animal welfare and human rights. In addition, this pilot will provide methodological benefits for Zooniverse as it will 1) Compare Zooniverse to traditional survey methods. 2) Measure behaviour and dietary change of engaged citizens over the 3 month period. These two factors have not been measured previously and will benefit the larger research community.