Leveraging LLMs for Predictive Insights in Food Policy and Behavioral Interventions

Food consumption and production contribute significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions, making them crucial entry points for mitigating climate change and maintaining a liveable planet. Over the past two decades, food policy initiatives have explored interventions to reshape production and consumption patterns, focusing on reducing food waste and curbing ruminant meat consumption. While the evidence of "what works" improves, evaluating which policies are appropriate and effective in specific contexts remains difficult due to external validity challenges. This paper demonstrates that a fine-tuned large language model (LLM) can accurately predict the direction of outcomes in approximately 80% of empirical studies measuring dietary-based impacts (e.g. food choices, sales, waste) resulting from behavioral interventions and policies. Approximately 75 prompts were required to achieve optimal results, with performance showing signs of catastrophic loss beyond this point. Our findings indicate that greater input detail enhances predictive accuracy, although the model still faces challenges with unseen studies, underscoring the importance of a representative training sample. As LLMs continue to improve and diversify, they hold promise for advancing data-driven, evidence-based policymaking.