By Naomi Arbit, PhD, NLC
You know which vitamins your dinner delivers and how much protein is on your plate. But have you ever thought about what that salmon or broccoli you’re enjoying means to you and how that meaning might affect your food choices?
According to new research, connecting with how you derive meaning from food could change how and what you eat—and therefore impact your overall health.
The Background
What do we mean when we say “food meanings”?
My research team and I have defined it as encompassing the ways food is embedded in non-food related aspects of people’s lives and worlds.
In fact, seeing and evaluating our food in terms of the calories and nutrients it provides is a relatively new way of orienting to food. For much of human history, food was evaluated in terms of its spiritual value, purity, ecological availability, and social and cultural implications. Think about the importance of the sacrament, or the laws of kashrut and halal, all of which heavily emphasize the spiritual or religious symbolism of foods.
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Even in our modern food system, there are ways of connecting to food that transcend its nutritive and health aspects. For instance, in recent years there has been increased attention on food’s moral and environmental implications, its cleanliness, and its aesthetic, artisanal, or creative taste profile.
These approaches all capture different food meanings, and this is important because, as our research has shown, the meaning that food holds for people matters greatly when it comes to food choice.
When you see food only in terms of calories, nutrients, taste, availability, and convenience—which is how the majority of Americans relate to food—you miss connections between food choice and the important aspects of a person’s life and world.
The Research
In our research, we found five primary domains of food meanings: aesthetics, health, moral, sacred, and social. We are currently investigating cultural identity as well.
Our key finding is that the domain that is a source of meaning for you will very much inform which foods you eat, as well as the potential environmental situations where you might be cued to eat more.
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Connecting food to important aspects of your world may help you orient yourself more appropriately to the multitude of food options available, make better food choices, and generally feel less anxious about selecting foods. It is important to note, though, that not all domains are associated with healthier dietary intakes.
While the sacred, moral, and health meanings are generally associated with healthier dietary patterns, in the US, the social and aesthetic meanings are associated with slightly less healthy dietary patterns.
This will differ from person to person and across cultures, but the key point is that the meaning matters.
What This Means For You
A meaning-based approach to food takes into account what food means to you and why, and makes the relationship more conscious, to inform the selection of better food choices and increase your overall wellbeing.
For example, people who derive meaning from the social aspects of eating might use their knowledge of this to more purposefully structure their meals around social occasions and reduce their food intake in non-social settings, such as when snacking.
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Similarly, people who find meaning from the moral aspects of their food choices might think about deliberately aligning their food choices with their ethical principles, if they are not already so aligned. This might involve eating more local or organic food, vegetarian or vegan food, or simply less meat.
Overall, a shift away from the caloric and weight-loss implications of food choice to the meaning-conferring benefits of people’s relationships with food might not only alleviate some of the anxiety around food and eating, but can help people orient to food in a healthier, more constructive way.
