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Home / Nature & Environment / Food Tech / Trust in Our Food: Understanding Food Supply Systems / Your voice

Your voice

In this video you'll meet a group of consumers who share their thoughts about nutrition and quality in food and what it means to them.
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4.6
To me, nutrition and quality have slightly different meanings, however, they are very much related. Nutrition refers to what is within the constitution of the food, what makes it up, and specifically in regards to the substances that my body will require for nourishment. For example, is what I’m eating a good source of protein or fibre? As for quality, I’d say this just refers to what standard the food meets in the more general or encompassing sense. However, I’d say that a food’s nutrition definitely plays into my judgement of the food’s quality. When I’m looking at nutrition and quality of my food, I tend to stick to whole foods, i.e. Just buying fresh produce.
58.8
I’ll still buy packet things and dried things, but as much as possible knowing that it is one ingredient or two or three ingredients. That way I know, at least to an extent, what I’m getting in my food. That said, I don’t think I fully understand how to work out what kind of nutrients and the quality of your food. So even though I am buying fresh foods, I’m just putting my trust into that they are of good quality. I don’t really know. I would normally use the traffic light system on food packaging to quickly see the calorie, fat, sugar, and carbohydrate, and salt content of a product.
111.1
Sometimes I also look at ingredients and the nutritional information in more detail on the back of the product. For example, to see things like the protein content. I don’t take the colour of the traffic lights too seriously, because I know some foods are naturally high in fat but are healthy in a balanced diet. I think that I know what it all means, but I also know it can be difficult to keep track of all the detail. For example, there’s lots of different types of fat molecule and these are different health effects. Also, popular opinion can shift on matters like health.
144.2
I remember when fatty foods were often blamed for a lot of problems with diet that were more likely to be caused by excessive sugar intake, for example. You really have to be quite motivated to get more information about food products. I would not go out of my way to look online for more information about a food product, unless I was very, very motivated to do so. For example, recently we were looking at– there’s been a lot of news at the moment about protein. So I personally went out of my way and googled about protein sources, but I wouldn’t do that usually. That was kind of a special circumstance.
182.5
In the ideal world, the government, or at least a trustworthy NGO or non-profit organisation should actually be the one who’s actually in charge of it. That being said, the lobbies should never have an influence over whether studies or research that they’re actually making, which I know is a really huge thing to wish for, given their power and their bargaining power in the market and in the political world, I think. I think the traffic light system is a pretty good source for knowing whether something is nutritional and how much salt is in there, how much fat is in there. If it’s too much, then you know not to buy these products or maybe use those products a bit less.
232.9
Sugar content is also an important thing, and just judging stuff with your own eyes is a good thing as well. You know what’s good for your or you know what’s bad for you. A lot of this is common sense.

In this video you’ll meet a group of consumers and hear their thoughts on what “nutrition and quality” means to them, as well as where they usually look for information on the nutritional value and quality of their food.

When you are looking for information about the nutrition and quality of the food you buy, do you use similar sources to those mentioned in the video? Where do you normally look and do you fully understand what it all means? Share your thoughts in the comments area below and don’t forget to ‘Like’ or ‘Reply’ if you read an interesting comment.

We would very much like to thank all the volunteers who took part in this video for allowing us to share their thoughts.

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This content is taken from EIT Food online course
Trust in Our Food: Understanding Food Supply Systems
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Trust in Our Food: Understanding Food Supply Systems

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