Seeing Stories, Feeling Impact: Narrative Transportation in Empathy and Heroism Framings of Climate-Affected Produce

Extreme climate change affects the organoleptic qualities of horticultural produce. While climate-affected food (caused by frost, hailstorm, drought) shares a few common characteristics with “ugly” or “odd bunch” food (i.e., smaller shape, paler colour/ bruising on fruits), it also has a significant effect on its organoleptic qualities (e.g., texture-more granular; and taste-less sweet and juicy or more pungent, such as with melons, onions and apples). Despite growing awareness of climate-affected food, consumers still opt for aesthetically-looking produce avoiding foods with alternative organoleptic properties, which causes food waste along the supply chain, loss of income for farmers, increasing the risks of food insecurity. Building on Dr. Tarabashkina and Dr. Ho’s research on climate-affected produce developed in collaboration with growers across Western Australia, this project aims to develop effective marketing strategies that employ narrative-based resilience framing to encourage trial and acceptance of drought-affected food. This project is motivated by Australia’s current waste of imperfect, yet edible, climate-affected produce, as well as the lack of research on consumers’ acceptance of such produce. It focuses on low/moderate drought-affected produce because severe droughts alter food’s organoleptic qualities, making it inedible. This project represents an extension of two experimental studies already conducted in 2023-2024, where we identified the effectiveness of “resilience framing” on consumers when empathy towards farmers (advisory role) was low, as well as the encouraging effectiveness of empathy when the importance of organoleptic qualities was lower. Our 2023-2024 research resulted in the development of two manuscripts – one already published in Food Quality and Preference (ABDC: A) and The Conversation in 2025, and the other is currently under review with the Journal of Cleaner Production (ABDC: A). Insights from this work have been and will further be presented at two international conferences – Korean Scholars of Marketing Science Conference 2025 and the International Congress on Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition 2025 Singapore, Dec 8–10) to advance cross-disciplinary dialogue and impact. As we brought to the spotlight the currently overlooked climate-change-spurred issue of food waste, our findings received wide media coverage, including ABC Radio Regional Drive, Radio Canberra, ABC South East NSW, 2Ser.com, Sky News Weather, The National Tribune, Viable Earth, Pomewest, Genetic Literacy Project, Austrian TreeCrop, Business Daily Media, Nutrition Insights, Australian Business Deans Council, and ParentsForClimateAU.