Culture
Will Shoppers Buy Healthier Food if They See Nutrition Data on Their Receipts?
A designer’s plan to curb the obesity epidemic, one piece of paper at a time.
The link between grocery stores and health is a complicated one. As Vicky Gan noted in a CityLab story about a rural Wisconsin town’s effort to encourage healthy food choices: “Any healthy eating initiative has to start with access to healthy food, but it can’t end there.”
It can’t end there because, as numerous studies have shown, access to healthy choices does not guarantee that shoppers will bring those items from the shelf into their kitchens. And although we live in an age when the nutritional value of individual food items is obsessively tracked and qualified, there are far fewer ways to account for the totality of a purchase.