Margaret Jastran

The Construction of Eating Episodes, Food Scripts, and Food Routines

As traditional eating practices change, researchers and practitioners need new ways to understand how people adapt daily eating behaviors to their needs, preferences, lifestyles, and environments. The inductive Food Choice Process Model emphasizes understanding food and eating from people’s perspectives. In this model, food behavior is shaped by life course events and experiences and five types of influences: ideals, personal factors, resources, social factors, and contexts. The personal food system represents the many cognitive processes through which a person translates life course experiences and the influences into food behaviors. The personal food system includes construction of food choice values (e.g. taste, health, managing relationships, cost, convenience), negotiation of values, classification of foods, and development of strategies to achieve food choice values. A qualitative study of situational eating enabled researchers to elaborate upon additional components of the model. People experience situational eating as involving more than food. The concept of eating episodes recognizes the multiple dimensions of eating situations (i.e. food/drink, time, location, social setting, mental processes, physical condition, and other activities). Derived from schema theory, the concept of food scripts addresses the cognitive processes that guide food behavior. Food scripts represent the detailed knowledge that people construct related to specific situations including values, expectations, and how to proceed. Food routines are recurring episodes of food behavior and sequences of episodes that people engage in because these episodes have become the best-fit solutions for their food choice values and their schedules. Food routines simplify decisions and provide stability to people’s lives, but food routines are also modifiable as people’s circumstances change. The concepts of eating episodes, food scripts, and food routines advance the understanding of food choice by articulating some of the individualized cognitive and behavioral processes that are involved when a person is asked to modify behavior for health promotion.

Eating maps: places, times, and people in eating episodes.

This project developed a method for constructing eating maps that portray places, times, and people in an individuals 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.