Week 1
Chapter 1: A conceptual model of the food choice process over the
life course
Food choice involves the selection and consumption of
foods and beverages considering what, how, when, where
and with whom people eat as well as other aspects of their
food and eating behaviours. Food choices can be
conceptualized using existing (developed to explain other
topics), deductive (top-down approach) and inductive
(bottom-up approach) models. The (inductively developed)
Food Choice Process Model described represents a broad
and integrated perspective for thinking about food choices
incorporating:
1. The life course
The life course perspective provides additional insights by considering a person’s agency in
determining their own food choice trajectory, the accumulation of experiences over time, the
anticipation of the future, and the importance of changes in contexts at specific points in time.
Definitions of the key concepts:
Trajectories include a person’s ‘persistent thoughts, feelings, strategies and actions over the
lifespan’ (e.g., bearing children, mid-life). People develop food choice trajectories within
specific situational and historical contexts that become persistent exhibiting their own
momentum and continuity.
Transitions are shifts in a person’s life that led to changes or solidify the continuation of
behaviours, including food choice patterns. Major life events such as entering or leaving
school represent transitions may become turning points that have major impacts on food
choices.
Timing represents when a particular transition or turning point occurs in the life course of an
individual, with the specific timing of an event influencing whether and how it may influence
food choices (e.g., childbearing among young adolescents).
Contexts represent the environments within which life course changes occur, including social
structure, economic conditions, historical eras, and the changing physical environment.
2. Influences
A wide variety of influences operates to shape food choices, each of these values is embedded within
and fluctuates over the life course of a person making food choices, interacts with all of the other
influences, and is operationalized in the personal food system of the individual as they engage in
specific eating practices. Five categories of influences:
Ideals are the standards people have learned through socialization and acculturation that
they use to make food choices.
Personal factors are characteristics of the individual that influence food choices, including
physiological factors (e.g., sensory, genetic), psychological/emotional characteristics (e.g.,
preferences, phobias) and relational factors (e.g., identities, self-concept).
Resources are assets available to people for making food choices, including tangible physical
capital (e.g., money, transportation, space); intangible human capital (e.g., time, skills,
knowledge); and intangible social capital (e.g., help from others, advice, emotional support).
Social factors are relationships in which people are embedded that influence food choices.
Roles, families, groups, networks, organizations, communities and other social units provide
opportunities and obligations for constructing eating relationships and food choices (e.g.,
both partners converging together on food selection).
, Contexts are the broader environments within which people make food choices, including
physical surroundings and behaviour settings, social institutions and policies, and seasonal
and temporal climate.
3. Personal food systems
The mental processes whereby people translate influences upon their food choices into how and
what they eat situations. Personal food systems represent ways that options, trade-offs, and
boundaries are constructed in the process of making food choices. Personal food systems include the
processes of constructing food choice values, classifying foods and situations according to these
values, negotiating these personally defined values in food choice settings, balancing competing
values, and developing strategies for food selection and eating in different situations. Research finds
that five types of values consistently emerge as salient among many people:
Taste: related to the sensory perceptions in eating and drinking
Convenience: time and effort considerations that people employ in constructing food
choices
Cost: monetary considerations (also includes the concept of ‘worth)
Health: food choice considerations constructed in relationship to physical well-being (e.g.,
immediate responses like allergic reactions and longer-term responses like weight control)
Managing relationships: how someone considers the interests and well-being of other
people involved in a person’s social world (e.g., food is central to family harmony).
Other values: e.g., quality, variety, symbolism, ethics, safety, and waste.
This Food Choice Process Model is not all-inclusive (does not explicitly consider some factors,
developed in post-industrial Western society) and may not meet the needs of every food choice
analyst (in contexts where multiple food options are not available), but it may be useful as roadmap
for identifying and drawing attention to potential factors involved in food choices and as a more
focused model representing the ways that people construct food choices.
Chapter 2: The integration of biological, social, cultural, and
psychological influences on food choice
The biggest determinant of what individual eats is availability. The determinants of what is available
to any individual are biological, psychological, social, cultural, and historical.
Preadaptation and the food domain
Food is complex for humans, because food has become integrated into many functions and activities
that have nothing to do with nutrition. The process through which this has occurred is referred to as
preadaptation in biological evolution. Preadaptation is the major source of innovation in evolution
and consists of the use of features already evoked to serve a particular function, to now serve a new
function. The process, the original function may be displaced, or there may be a sharing of function
(e.g. human mouth as an excellent example).
Preadaptation and food: In cultural evolution, preadaptation is even more important than it is in
biological evolution. In the preadaptive history of food in human cultural evolution, food moves from
its original function (nutrition) to assume many others: social marker, art form, metaphor or moral
entity.
Preadaptation and disgust: The cultural evolution of disgust,
illustrates the co-opting of a food function of a wide range of
cultural purposes. The prototype of disgust is the rejection of
foods from the mouth based on a negative oral experience.
This response (called distaste response) transforms into a
response that is basically about rejecting food because of its
nature, as opposed to its sensory properties. We call this ‘core
disgust’, and it accounts for the principal food disgust, such as
,response in most cultures to specific spoiled foods. The original distaste system becomes
disconnected from the disgust system. In cultural evolution, the powerful rejection response has
been co-opted by cultures to many things that are rejected by the culture. The major step in the
cultural evolution has to do with disgust becoming attached to reminders of our animal nature.
What is food choice?
Food intake is motivated in part by preference and liking. Liking is a major determinant of
preference, and preference is a major determinant of intake. Preference has to do with a comparison
of two or more foods, as part of a set from which a choice can be made. The preference-liking
distinction motivates a psychological taxonomy of foods. We can identify three basic motives for
choosing or refusing potential foods: sensory properties, effects of ingestion and ideational
concerns. These three motives define four categories of food rejection: (1) distates are motivated by
sensory properties, (2) dangers are motivated by concerns about the consequences of ingestion, (3)
inappropriates are potential foods that just do not fit within the cultural definition of food
(ideational rejection), and (4) disgusts are multiply motivated rejections: are primarily rejected
because of their nature but are also usually believed to be both harmful and bad tasting. There is a
corresponding division of accepted foods into those accepted because they are liked on sensory
grounds (good tastes), because they are thought to have positive consequences, because they are
just classified as food (appropriates, e.g., turkey on Thanksgiving) and what we will call transvalued
foods, enhanced because of their nature and origin, and thought to be desirable on both sensory
features and effects. Finally, any food liking or preference is heavily dependent on context.
Biological (physiological and evolutionary/adaptive) influences
Biological approaches to food choice take two forms:
1. The physiological approach focuses on physiological mechanisms and its focus is explaining
what is going on in the body and the brain when a food choice occurs. The physiological
approach has two aspects, metabolic (processing of nutrients and the metabolic events that
become the stimuli for action) and neural (focuses on the brain, and how and where
information about metabolic state is integrated with information about the environment).
2. The adaptive/evolutionary approach places an animal in its ecological niche, and in the
context of its evolutionary history attempts to understand food choice, feeding strategies
and the like. The critical frame for humans, in this respect, is as a food generalist. As such, it
is impossible to make adaptive decisions about the safety and nutritional quality of a
potential food on just sensory properties, most knowledge about the food world must be
acquired. There are some biological predispositions that help the generalist to negotiate the
world of literally thousands of potential foods and poisons (e.g., taste biases, internal
detection system for specific nutritionally food). Nonetheless, the human generalist must for
the most part learn about what (combinations) is good to eat, and what is not (e.g., social
learning).
Psychological influences
Origin of preferences: Individuals within a culture vary widely in their food preferences. What is the
source of this within-culture variation? The four most likely accounts are: genetics, early experience
with parents, peer influences and other more general influences, such as the media.
Acquisition of preferences: There are three documented avenues to preference change:
1. Mere exposure: The more one is exposed to something, the more one likes it.
2. Evaluative conditioning: Contingent pairing of things like tastes and appearances with
biologically meaningful outcomes (e.g., sweet, or bitter tastes) can cause acquired likes to
occur by a Pavlovian mechanism.
3. Social influence: There is some evidence indicating that approval of admired others,
experiencing the enjoyment of others on eating a particular food, and things of that sort can
produce enhanced liking.
, Food choice in the moment: Acquisition aside, at a given moment human face food choices, and a
host of factors influence the selection. Among them are the physical arrangements of the foods,
beliefs about the foods including their taste and health values, value systems, knowledge about and
experience with the food available, and simple cost and convenience. An important perspective on
the moment of choice is the distinguishment between anticipated, experienced, and remembered
pleasure. This research has shown two important things: (1) Valanced episodes are remembered
quite differently from the way they are experienced. Duration of experience, a major determinant of
the total pleasure received from an experience is not recorded well in memory. (2) People are poor
at predicting their hedonic trajectories. Generally, they do not know whether repeated sampling of a
given entity will increase or decrease their liking.
Context: Understanding of any food choice must consider both the surroundings (context) and the
recent history of the person involved. Judgements are heavily influenced by the setting and foods
recently consumed.
Social influences (sociology)
Sociologists have a particular interest in demographic variables as within-culture determinants of
food choice (e.g., modest effects of age and gender on food preferences). Sociological concerns also
deal with important influences on food choice and intake at the institutional level. And finally, one of
the major influences on food choice is current fad movements (e.g., vegetarianism).
Cultural influences (anthropology)
In human food choices, culture is almost certainly the predominant influence. We can describe the
complex of cultural traditions that bear directly on food as cuisine. Some of these traditions are
about the foods one eats, the kind of things that appear on the table from day to day (e.g., Mexican
food). But there is much more to cuisine than the individual dishes. There is the meal: what
constitutes an appropriate meal, order of serving, and the like. And then there are table manners,
the social organization of the meal, food and ritual, and the meaning of food in life and social
intercourse.
Five examples of the integration of biological, psychological, and cultural factors: (1) chocolate
(culturally created super food), (2) chilli pepper (biological paradox), (3) maize (highlights the
importance of unique and chance events in culinary history), (4) milk (the biological and cultural
response permitted the appropriation of milk for adults) and (5) meat (most favoured and most
tabooed food).
Chapter 3: Social psychological models of food choice
Expectancy-value (EV) theory
EV theory is a general model of human decision making that has been widely applied to
understanding food choice. EV theory assumes that individuals are motivated to maximize the
chances of desirable outcomes occurring and minimize the chances of undesirable outcomes
occurring. The EV theory is being used to understand attitudes to food.
The attitude-behaviour relationship
Attitude is defined as ‘a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity
with some degree of favour or disfavour’. Commensurate with the amount of research attention
directed at the attitude-behaviour relationship in general, many studies have examined this in
conjunction with food choice. However, this relationship seems to be weak. There have been two
dominant approaches towards explaining this lack of correspondence:
1. Moderating variables: variables that affect the relationship between attitudes and
behaviours (e.g., imprecise measurement): The principle of correspondence stems from the
finding that attitudes are most predictive of behaviour when two measures are congruent
with respect to action (e.g., eating), target (e.g., an apple), time (e.g., this afternoon) and
context (e.g., during a meeting). Thus, the principle of correspondence states that to
