The Situational Nature of Eating: An Exploration of Eating Situations and Their Relationship to Meat Consumption

Abstract

This dissertation investigates eating situations and their relationship to dietary behaviors, particularly meat consumption. Meat consumption was chosen as an example of a dietary behavior in the context of a dual crisis of human and planetary health. The research is presented in a conceptual article followed by two empirical articles. The conceptual article lays the theoretical groundwork for the empirical studies by addressing key challenges in research on (eating) situations, elaborating a novel approach for defining, conceptualizing, and measuring eating situations. The first empirical article describes the most common eating situations during meals and examines how often individuals eat in the same situations (i.e., situational stability). The second empirical article specifically explores the relationship between eating situations and meat consumption. The key insights and findings presented in this dissertation can be summarized briefly as follows. First, the conceptual article elaborates a comprehensive approach for researching eating situations. Based on a synthesis of previous efforts to define concepts in this field, the definition that I propose defines eating situations as comprised of combinations of various cues within multiple dimensions. Here I make the case for research to include both situational dimensions that are external to the individual (e.g., location) and internal (e.g., affect) and to confine its focus to concrete, brief, and dynamic dimensions rather than more abstract, longer-term, and static dimensions. To identify the dimensions that make up eating situations, I draw on and refine the taxonomy developed by Bisogni et al. (2007). Applying this taxonomy, the first empirical article finds that the most common breakfast situations comprise combinations of the dimensions “social”, “affect”, and “hunger”, whereas lunch and dinner situations are characterized by varying combinations of the dimensions “social”, “affect”, and (concurrent) “activity”. While indicating a moderately high level of situational stability regardless of the meal type, the findings show considerable variation among participants. The second empirical article finds that meat consumption is associated with multiple situational dimensions, specifically revealing that meat consumption is more likely if individuals eat meals in situations when they are hungry, together with others, and at noon or in the evening. This association is shown to be driven by situational rather than individual differences, suggesting, for example, that meat is more likely to be eaten when individuals are hungry regardless of their typical hunger levels. In addition to providing a coherent definition and conceptualization of (eating) situations suitable for future research, this dissertation contributes specifically to our understanding of eating situations and their relationship to dietary behaviors in several ways. Key contributions include introducing and applying a novel approach for researching this important relationship by combining a taxonomy-based measurement of eating situations with a diary study. By focusing on multiple dimensions simultaneously, this approach provides a holistic perspective on situations. As a further contribution to research, I develop a new index to measure situational stability. By applying this approach to the case of meat consumption, I demonstrate the influences of eating situations on a behavior highly relevant to human and planetary health. These theoretical and empirical insights have significant implications for behavior intervention research, potentially increasing its effectiveness in promoting healthy and environmentally sustainable diets.