The ecology of eating : a comparative, cross - cultural perspective on material and immaterial cues in the environment

There is growing scientific consensus that we are not as much in control of our behaviour as was commonly taken for granted. The role of the environment increasingly appears to be essential in shaping eating behaviour. Humans in the developed world have altered their environment and created an « obesogenic environment », which seems to modify behaviour to a large extent. The omnipresence of food around us, for one thing, tends to increase our consumption. In order to be able to control our behaviour, we cannot just depend on strong individual willpower: We need to understand the ecology of eating.
In the ecology of eating, an important dimension, of course, is the social and economic environment, and the constraints it exerts. We know that obesity (in the West) is to a very large extent associated with lower socioeconomic status, particularly in women.

Another, essential, dimension of our eating environment is immaterial, made of « culture » (norms, implicit rules, “traditions” and habits”). Most approaches to improving diet have been based on what is eaten (a difficult thing to know by any method, with often considerable margins of error). Empirical data from the social sciences show that it is important to take into account not just the what but also the how.
This paper presents and discusses empirical evidence that context, food and eating patterns, implicit cultural rules and categories applied to food and eating, play an important part among the determinants/regulators of food intake - one that has been generally underestimated or not taken into account. Such rules and categories may include, for instances, time frames assigned for meals, the composition and order of dishes in the meal, etc.