Chapter 4 - Gastronomic systems research

Abstract

Achieving healthier diets requires a thorough understanding of the drivers of food choice. We developed a toolkit to capture diversity and drivers of food choice of a target population and identified entry points for introducing novel food products or nutrition interventions. The toolkit is based on the gastronomic systems research framework, which embeds food choice in a context- and culture-specific system of occasions for food consumption that command certain dishes, the shape of which derived demand for food ingredients carrying certain cooking and eating qualities and nutritional attributes, which eventually lead to dietary and nutritional outcomes. Diversity and drivers of food choice are captured and analyzed through a three-stage mixed methods research approach in the qualitative–quantitative continuum: (1) expert elicitation, (2) consumer surveys, and (3) behavioral experiments. We demonstrate the toolkit’s flexibility and potential for application in gastronomy, food science, nutrition and health science, consumer research, and policy making through two case studies.