Abstract
Background: Complementary feeding is the transition from an entirely milk-based diet to solid foods. The food choices made during complementary feeding begin to establish long-term eating patterns. Commercial infant foods are often used during complementary feeding, which are now mostly packaged in a soft plastic pouch. Pouches are single-use plastics - a growing issue for waste management in New Zealand. Previous research has shown consumers perceive plastic food packaging as unsustainable, yet the global sales of pouches have doubled in the past five years, demonstrating a gap between environmental attitudes and behaviour. To date, there have been no studies that have investigated the relationship between parents’ environmental attitudes and how these influence food choices made for their infants.
Aim: To describe the environmental attitudes of New Zealand parents, and whether this is associated with perceptions and use of commercial complementary foods.
Methods: Parent and infant (aged 7.0 to 9.9 months) pairs (n=625) were recruited from Auckland and Dunedin into the First Foods New Zealand study between August 2020 and February 2022. All participants had three main visits, the first visit in the participant’s home, a second visit at a clinic on campus and the third visit was a blood test. During the study, participants answered two questionnaires, the first at home during the first visit, and the second questionnaire was emailed to participants after the second visit. This thesis used environmental attitude, food choice and pouch use data from the second questionnaire as well as demographic variables self-reported in the first questionnaire. Environmental attitudes were assessed using Dunlap’s 6-item New Environmental Paradigm. Possible scores ranged from 6-30; participants were categorised as “anti-environment” if they scored 6-18, mid-environment for scores 19-24 and pro-environment for scores 25-30. This thesis summarises data collected from August 2020- July 2021, which was 80% of the total sample, as was available at the time of data analysis.
Results: From 433 participants, 15% were categorised anti-environment, 55% as mid-environment and 30% as pro-environment. Pro-environment individuals were more likely to be New Zealand European, have a university education and have only given birth to one child compared to mid-environment and anti-environment individuals. Pro-environmental individuals were more likely to rank environmental sustainability as important when deciding what to feed their baby, compared to anti- and mid-environmental individuals, who were more likely to rank convenience and cost as important. All pro-environmental parents perceived ready-to-use pouches as not very sustainable, compared to 90% of mid-environmental parents and 84% of anti-environmental parents. There were no significant associations between environmental attitudes and baby having ever eaten from a ready-to-use food pouch or being a frequent user of ready-to-use pouches (use more than 4-5 times/week). While there was a non-significant trend of decreasing ready-to-use pouch use with increasing environmental attitudes, the majority (72%) of pro-environmental parents/caregivers had used ready-to-use pouches.
Conclusions: The results of this study show environmental attitudes and intentions do not align with infant food choice behaviour; the convenience of pouches was prioritised over environmental intentions. Given that convenience is likely to be a strong driver of behaviour, a solution to overcome the waste associated with pouches could be access to soft-plastic recycling for all households.