Thinking Fast and Slow about Food: Health, Environmental Impacts, and Choice of Pulse-Based Foods

Pulses provide well-documented health and environmental benefits, yet remain underconsumed. In fact, pulses are a critical element in the movement to shift diets towards plant-based foods to improve human and environmental health: they are both a protein food and a vegetable food. While surveys and choice experiments show significant percentages of consumers interested in pulse-containing foods, sales data do not reflect these claims. A potential explanation is that simple research environments eliminate cognitive or search costs for attributes that constitute a small percentage of products. Recent work on rational inattention theory predicts that these costs will lead decision-makers to limit the set of items/information they consider. In the food retail environments, attention is likely to be driven by individual priorities (e.g., taste, health, price sensitivity, etc.). To examine these mechanisms, we conducted an online experiment with 831 U.S. adults in which participants selected foods in large product sets (50 items/category) across six product categories under two pulse-prevalence conditions (10% vs. 20% of products). Immediately after completing the food choices, participants completed an ecological momentary assessment-style question capturing what they were actively thinking about while making food choices. They then rated how important taste, food prices, healthiness, and environmental impact are when making food choices. Mixed-effects logit and mediation analyses indicate that both environmental and health importance ratings are positively associated with pulse product selection. Environmental importance also exhibits a statistically significant indirect effect through active consideration of environment during choice, while the indirect pathway through active consideration of health is not statistically significant. Increasing pulse prevalence more than doubles the odds of choosing pulses without affecting self-reported consideration. Overall, the findings suggest that policies highlighting environmental attributes while increasing the availability of pulse-based products may be particularly effective in encouraging sustainable food choices, as they target both attention to sustainability information and the accessibility of sustainable options.