Cognitive Integration. Varieties of Food Acceptance Behavior. Scientific Concepts Related to Food Acceptance

A. Varieties of Food Acceptance Behavior. A variety of human actions can coherently and usefully be regarded as accepting a food.

I. Purchase Acceptance. Taking a product off the shelf and to the checkout counter of a food store is the act that is crucial for commerce. To explain and predict sales adequately, we might need to understand more about the influences on food acceptance in the form of purchases.

Elaborate statistical modeling of preference data and/or sensory or other descriptive scores from consumer panels has increasingly been used in attempts to solve this problem. This is not, however, a mere data-analytic matter. The issues are the scientific ones of characterizing the causal processes within the behavior of consumers (Fig. 1). Research on the determinants of food acceptance therefore requires the science of cognitive psychology, which has also been applied in other technologically complex areas (e.g., human-computer interaction and ergonomics) more broadly.

FIGURE I. Immediate, mediating, and background sources of variation in people’s food acceptance, with the classificatory (solid lines) or causal (dashed lines) links between sources within and outside the individual mind

2. Eating Acceptance. Food is almost always bought to be eaten. People selecting for their own consumption from a store, buffet counter, or restaurant menu are effectively choosing what to eat. Furthermore, eating quality is likely to be a major influence on subsequent repurchasing behavior. Also, foods cannot affect health without being eaten.

Therefore, the preparation, serving, and ingestion of food already purchased (or grown domestically) are further examples of acceptance. Arguably, eating acceptance is the foundational criterion, or at least the central type, of food acceptance.

B. Scientific Concepts Related to Food Acceptance. Food acceptance, both at ingestion and during the “search” for food in shops and restaurants, is a phenomenon that has long been of major interest within the biological, medical, behavioral, and anthropological/sociological sciences.

I. Terminology in Behavioral Disciplines. Eating habits and their social roles (e.g., food symbolism) are a major part of every human culture, both rural and industrialized. They have therefore been a focus of attention by many anthropologists and some sociologists.

The intake of materials resulting from food acceptance behavior is also a crucial influence on physiological processes (e.g., exchanges of water, sodium, energy, nitrogen, and other nutrients between the organism and the environment). However, studies of the intake of solids and fluids in regulatory physiology often lack the perceptual data to justify use of the behavioral concept of the sensory, physiological, or social control of food acceptance. As a result the physiologists and biopsychologists of food intake have often seriously distorted commonsense, but scientifically usable, concepts such as palatability, hunger, thirst, appetites, and satieties.

In the science of behavior itself, attention to food-oriented behavior has declined along with the dissolution of the specialism of “motivation” in psychology. Food intake has become a topic for neuroscientists. Food reinforcement is merely a tool for dissecting out learning mechanisms. Food attitudes only occasionally interest contemporary social psychologists. This lack of interest is paradoxical since eating and drinking are the most common cognitively rich human activities.

2. Terminology in Nutrition. Foods and beverages cannot affect health or disease unless they are in a diet (i.e., people eat and drink them). Dietary choices, sequences, and patterns, as perceived by the eater, are behavioral structures in the minds of individuals, equivalent to food acceptance. Dietary intakes are entirely the result of these cognitive-behavioral processes. That is, usual nutrient intakes result from decisions made in terms of cultural constructs of foodstuffs and eating practices.

There is concern over the effects of fermentables on the teeth, the timing of energy choices on the waistline, and preferences for foods high in saturates on the heart. Data on these dietary patterns are lost when weights of foods are totaled across the day. Clinical and community nutrition would advance by integrating soundly behavioral (and sociological) concepts equivalent to food acceptance into their research and practice.

3. Appetite: Cognitive Organization in Food Acceptance Behavior. Appetite is the disposition to eat and drink, including the approaches to food in a shop, restaurant, or refrigerator.

This basic psychological sense of terms such as “appetite,” “hunger,” “thirst,” and “satiety” must be distinguished from ad libitum dietary intake. Food intake is relevant to appetite, but only as a measure of the cumulative effect of expressions of appetite in the changing circumstances of a series of food acceptances. Thus, without full specification of the sensory, physiological, and social contexts influencing each momentary acceptance that contributed to the recorded total intake, the physical disappearance tells us nothing about the organization of the behavior.

It also must be appreciated that it is logically incoherent to take the word “appetite,” even in its everyday usage, to refer to subjectively conscious mental processes alone. The appetite is in the directedness of what we actually do, and only secondarily in the private experiences that go with that observable performance.