COVID-19 as an Opportunity for a Healthy-Sustainable Food Transition. An Analysis of Dietary Transformations during the First Italian Lockdown

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

It was a pleasure to read your paper.

Very well written

A huge contribute to the academy and to the overall managers

Author Response

Many many thanks for the nice compliments

Reviewer 2 Report

The sample used in this study is problematic for two reasons. It is a convenience sample, and it is not representative of the greater Italian population. The authors must do a better job of explaining why this is not an issue in interpreting and ultimately relying on the study results to inform policy. I wonder if the authors would consider using population weights to improve their methodology.

Given that COVID-19 is soon to be largely behind us, I believe the authors must do a better job of motivating this study and framing the potential impacts of the findings, moving forward.

The table headings are often forced onto two lines and must be fixed.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We would like to express our gratitude for your helpful and insightful comments. You actually raised two points that were already a source of concern for us. The methodological strategy was borne out of a quite difficult process in which we tried to conciliate time constraints as well as multidisciplinary prerogatives. Similarly, the uncertainty related to the development of the pandemic inspired a reflection about how to operationalize our results. We believe, however, that the insight provided by our study is much more than a snapshot of a transient moment, and will prove useful in guiding future analyses.

In the following, you will find a further elaboration of this argument in the form of a detailed response to your comments, also referring to and justifying the modifications to the main text of the manuscript. We hope you will judge the revision thus realized as an overall improvement of the paper.

 

 Given that COVID-19 is soon to be largely behind us, I believe the authors must do a better job of motivating this study and framing the potential impacts of the findings, moving forward.

We reckon the need to provide a better justification to the study, although we contend that the assumption that inspires this comment is partially misleading. Firstly, because so far most countries are still living a critical situation – albeit to different degrees. Especially, regulation limiting (if not banning) social contact (i.e., among the ‘features’ of the pandemic, the one that more strongly unleashes the behavioral transformations our study looks at) is still enforced in most places of the world. Secondly, it is undoubtedly very hard to foresee the long-lasting effects of the pandemic, and to estimate whether or when social behavior and practices – and regulatory bodies’ orientations, as well – will get back to ‘normal’, that is, to what they used to be before the pandemic. Actually, there seems to be ground to argue that some new configurations of collective life introduced by the pandemic are here to stay. We refer in particular to daily life and dwelling space organization, with remote/flexible working and multifunctional private and public spaces appearing to take hold as future points of reference. To this, we must add that a stronger sensitivity towards sustainability (especially in the food sector) was already establishing itself prior to the pandemic, and it seems unlikely that the latter will not act as a catalyzing energy on the former.

For these reasons, a study conducted during the lockdown is motivated by the (unique) opportunity to capture potential social innovations in the making, when they are suddenly brought about by an event that shakes the world. So, even if there is no statistical inference allowed (re: next point) we deem that our study was just a first step – yet essential – to understand what will be the legacy of the pandemic and, at the same time, provide a prompt account of the positive changes that can be glimpsed. The purpose, then, is to inform in a timely manner policies aiming to govern the change, and also lay the foundations for further more empirically- and/or theoretically-focused research.

Therefore, following your suggestion we revised parts of sections 1 (Introduction), 2 (Research aims and background), 5 (Discussion) and 6 (Conclusions) to make our view more explicit to the readers and better illustrate the motivation of the study and its potential impact.

 

The sample used in this study is problematic for two reasons. It is a convenience sample, and it is not representative of the greater Italian population. The authors must do a better job of explaining why this is not an issue in interpreting and ultimately relying on the study results to inform policy. I wonder if the authors would consider using population weights to improve their methodology.

In coherence to what said above, the method was chosen to quickly valorize from a specific angle phenomena that were extremely visible and also reported in literature, while in the making. Surely, further research to provide more structured insights is needed (which is also what we are working on right now) but we think that our findings allow for a sound analysis of several relevant issues. Section 3 (Methods) has been thoroughly revised to justify our methodological strategy.

 

The table headings are often forced onto two lines and must be fixed.

I guess here you refer to the word “Count” that in the tables is forced onto two lines. I believe that is a formatting issue that will be dealt with by MDPI during the production stage.

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript sustainability-1132999 entitled "COVID-19 as an opportunity for a healthy-sustainable food transition. An analysis of dietary transformations during the first Italian lockdown" is an interesting study related to dietary transformation during the first Italian lockdown.

Congratulations to the authors for the high response rate obtained!

It would be interesting to include in manuscript how you motivated the participants in order to get such a response rate.

Please include in the manuscript what is the sample accuracy. 

Line 443: Please write p < 0.05 instead of p-value<0.005.

Please reformulate the Conclusions section. The references need not included in the Conclusions section, but in Discussion section.

Also, the English language must be revised by a native speaker.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We would like to express our gratitude for your kind compliments and helpful comments. We had extensively reflected on the methodological strategy, because it was borne out of a quite difficult process in which we tried to conciliate time constraints as well as multidisciplinary prerogatives.

In the following, you will find a detailed response to your comments, also referring to and justifying the modifications to the main text of the manuscript. We hope you will judge the revision we realized as an overall improvement of the paper.

 

It would be interesting to include in manuscript how you motivated the participants in order to get such a response rate.

We revised Section 3 (Methods) to provide a clearer account of our methodological strategy. We also added a sentence referring to response rate. However, there was no motivation system in place, we managed to recruit a large convenience sample thanks to both professional (university-related) and personal social networks.

 

Please include in the manuscript what is the sample accuracy.

It is not possible to estimate accuracy because our sample was a convenience sample, insusceptible to statistically-significant inference. The reason for choosing such a method was that the lockdown was a (unique) opportunity to capture potential social innovations while in the making. We therefore wanted to quickly valorize from a specific angle phenomena that were extremely visible and also reported in literature. The purpose, then, was to inform in a timely manner policies aiming to govern the change, and also lay the foundations for further more empirically- and/or theoretically-focused research.

However, Section 3 (Methods) has been thoroughly revised to justify our methodological strategy.

 

Line 443: Please write p < 0.05 instead of p-value<0.005.

It was unclear to us whether your comment was exclusively about the mistake in the number (0.005 instead of 0.05 – thanks for that) or you also suggested to substitute the expression “p-value” with just “p” throughout the text. We obviously fixed the number, but we didn’t change the expression. If that was your intention, please let us know and we will provide in the next round.

 

Please reformulate the Conclusions section. The references need not included in the Conclusions section, but in Discussion section.

The Conclusion section has been reformulated to clarify the scope and utility of our study. Following your suggestions we removed references, because they were actually mentioning already cited research and therefore redundant. We only kept two references to an EU institutional document, because deemed useful to introduce and contextualize the argument contained in the section.

 

Also, the English language must be revised by a native speaker.

The paper had actually been already edited by a mother tongue professional, anyway it went through another round of language revision to enhance its clarity.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The revised manuscript "COVID-19 as an opportunity for a healthy-sustainable food transition. An analysis of dietary transformations during the first Italian lockdown" was evaluated and I consider that can be published in Sustainability journal.