How can we shop consciously, healthily and sustainably?

Every day we are confronted with a massive amount of information about nutrition and shopping. Some fitness influencers advertise clean eating, the new documentary on TV promotes a vegan diet, and your best friend exclusively buys organic products. How can we manage to shop healthier? What do all those different organic seals mean? And why on earth do some supermarkets sell insects?

The new massive open online course, created by the university of Bayreuth’s “faculty of life sciences: food, nutrition and health” at Kulmbach, deals with these questions among others. The professors at the campus in Kulmbach as well as the University of Bayreuth’s MOOC-Team have poured lots of interdisciplinary knowledge (and love) into the creation of the course “Conscious Grocery Shopping: Sustainability, Nutrition, Health and Law”. The course sends its participants on a journey through the supermarket, which is accompanied by the protagonists Sophie and Ben.

Starting at A as in apple, to Z for Zucchini - supermarkets offer a huge variety of products, and oftentimes we don’t pack our shopping carts consciously. At the same time, the products that we end up buying can have a huge impact on our health as well as our environment. The decisions we make on a daily basis are affected by scientific, juridic, and economic aspects, as well as psychological and sociological influences. During our trip through the supermarket we will make several stops in order to let Prof. Dr. Kai Purnhagen, Prof. Dr. Susanne Baldermann, Jun. Prof. Dr. Tina Bartelmeß, Prof. Dr. Stephan Clemens, Prof. Dr. Christian Fikar, Prof. Dr. Janin Henkel-Oberländer and Jun. Prof. Dr. Laura König share their knowledge and expertise on how to make more informed and conscious decisions when shopping for food.

Throughout six chapters, Ben and Sophie will gain broad insights into the research behind nutritional science, and become able to apply them to everyday life. The newfound interdisciplinary knowledge is deepend through entertaining scenes and in-video quizzes. By conveying highly up-to-date and application-oriented content, experts help course participants to improve their practical and theoretical competences.

This MOOC qualifies participants to make more conscious decisions while grocery shopping, and provides an extensive insight into the research fields of the newly founded faculty of life sciences. At the faculty’s core lies the combination of various disciplines: scientific perspectives, methodical revolutions in the field of life sciences, and modern concepts of jurisprudence as well as economic-, social- and behavioral science. This kind of interdisciplinarity is unprecedented in Germany, and is reflected within the research and teaching at the campus in Kulmbach - as well as in its new MOOC. The course will be launched in March 2022 on edX, and from then on can be completed at your own pace. No matter whether you are a student or not, anyone who wants to start shopping consciously can attend!