Technology increasingly mediates our everyday interactions with food, ranging from its production and handling to the experience of preparing and eating it with friends and family. However, it is unclear whether these technologies support decisions conducive to a healthy diet. In this work, we devised the first heuristics for evaluating a technology’s support for food literacy: the interconnected combination of awareness, knowledge, and skills to empower individuals to make informed food choices. We applied an iterative, expert-driven process to derive and refine our heuristics, starting with an established food literacy framework. We then conducted evaluations with Nutrition and HCI experts to show how the heuristics support the summative and formative design and evaluations of food-related technologies. We show that the heuristics are valuable design tools and that they help participants reflect on food literacy challenges. We also discuss tensions between nutrition and HCI best practices.

Establishing healthy eating patterns early in life is critical and has implications for lifelong health. Situated interventions are a promising approach to improve eating patterns. However, HCI research has emphasized calorie control and weight loss, potentially leading consumers to prioritize caloric intake over healthy eating patterns. To support healthy eating more holistically, we designed a gameful app called Pirate Bri's Grocery Adventure (PBGA) that seeks to improve food literacy—meaning the interconnected combination of food-related knowledge, skills, and behaviours that empower an individual to make informed food choices— through a situated approach to grocery shopping. Findings from our three-week field study revealed that PBGA was effective for improving players' nutrition knowledge and motivation for healthier food choices and reducing their impulse purchases. Our findings highlight that nutrition apps should promote planning and shopping based on balance, variety, and moderation.