Food choice: beyond the chemical content

Abstract

How are food choices formulated? Which are the factors that mostly affect food choice? These questions are crucially important both for efforts in food innovation and for institutions that face consequences and costs of diets that are harmful to human health and to the environment. On these matters, several reports have been developed following the angel of various disciplines, focusing on the analysis of the factors affecting food choices. Large-scale research on consumption behaviours has neither stopped the growing number of unsuccessful products entering the market, nor provided adequate support for institutions that are taking elaborate actions towards promoting health-orientated behaviours. These preliminary remarks highlight the need to think about the approaches and categories with which research programmes on food choices should be updated. This article discusses the reasons why food choices are determined by beliefs and identity, are conditioned by social images that influence preferences by indicating to individuals what foods are ‘good’ and ‘right’; belong to the field of individual choice, and therefore, cannot be assimilated into medical prescriptions or merely reduced to a question of rules. Taste involves beliefs and identity as well as perceptions. This is why it has to be analyzed as a cultural and relational object. This paper aims to explore the complex mix of influences on food choice stressing that food choice is a matter of identity.

Keywords::

• food choice
• consumer behaviour
• culture
• preferences
• social representations

Notes

¹The intent to widen the disciplinary approach prevents in-depth explanation of the categories used belonging to different disciplines (sociology, psychology, neuroscience).

²Scripts are the rules for food behaviour in specific familiar situations.

³It is known, for example, that when you are hungry you tend to prefer high-energy foods to low-energy foods (Havermas et al. 2008).

⁴Intentions are the conscious orientations to a behaviour.

⁵Taste is the sum of a complex sensorial stimulation that is connected to food ingestion. Neurophysiology explains taste by referring to the receptor mechanisms and the transmission of stimuli (Holley and Pizzone 2009).

⁶This explains the flourishing of sites that discuss food experiences, share tastes, exchange experiences and generate ‘knowledge’.

⁷An experiment about preference for Coke over Pepsi, showed that this preference was dictated by image rather than taste (McClure et al. 2004). Nearly 85% of participants said the cup labelled “Coke” tasted better. Later, participants were given two unlabeled cups, one with Pepsi and one with Coke. There was no preference (half liked Coke, half liked Pepsi). The results suggest that if cultural messages or beliefs become strong enough, they can override facts.

⁸Having a medium-quality Bordeaux divided in two different bottles, one labeled “Grand Cru” and the other labeled “Normal table wine”, experts gave different evaluations. The first was pleasant, woody tasting, complex, equilibrated and full, while the table wine was weak, short, light, plain and defective.

⁹An fMRI study (Wicker et al. 2003) revealed that the observation of faces expressing disgust activated the anterior insular in the same way that strong smells produce a strong sensation of disgust.

¹⁰In the case of unknown foods, facial expressions give information about a food's taste, so other people's expressions indicate whether a given food is ‘good’ or not.

¹¹Students who had taken drinks with the brand best-known had better performances that students who had taken unlabeled drinks (Ariely 2008).

¹²The expression ‘flexible food’ hints at the food's extraordinary adaptability to support needs, tendencies, behaviours and cultural changes (Franchi 2009).

¹³The expression ‘Omnivore's dilemma’ indicates that people are between two fires: on the one hand, they need to change and diversify their diet; on the other hand, they have the imperative of caution, because any unknown food is a potential danger. The expression, proposed by Fischler (1988) to describe the food scares from the anthropological point of view, has been revived by Pollan (2006) to emphasize the need to strengthen the sense of food.