Eating Maps: Places, Times, and People in Eating Episodes

Abstract

This project developed a method for constructing eating maps that portray places, times, and people in an individual's eating episodes. Researchers used seven consecutive days of qualitative eating recall interviews from 42 purposively sampled U.S. adults to draw a composite eating map of eating sites, meals, and partners for each person on a template showing home, work, automobile, other homes, and other places. Participants evaluated their own maps and provided feedback. The eating maps revealed diverse places, times, and partners. Eating maps offer a flexible tool for eliciting, displaying, validating, and applying information to visualize eating patterns within contexts.

Keywords:

• diagrams
• eating
• episodes
• environment
• maps
• situations

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project was funded by Cornell University Agricultural Experimental Station USDA-CREES Hatch Project #NYC399422 and NIH Training Grant #2 T32 DK07158-27. The authors thank Patrick Blake for data collection assistance, Jared Bisogni, Elizabeth Madore, Karen Gunderson, and Oshri Adri for data management assistance, and Patrick Blake, Laura Falk, and David Sharp for comments about the manuscript. An earlier version of this article was presented to the Study of Food and Society (ASFS).