Which came first, the Big Mac or a consumer culture built on the need for immediate gratification in super sizes? In How We Eat: Appetite, Culture, and Psychology of Food, Leon Rappoport unveils social, psychological, spiritual, and political motivations for eating behavior. He initially became interested in the topic when he was learning the practices
The McDonaldization of Society
The McDonaldization of Society was first proposed by sociologist George Ritzer in an article for The Journal of American Culture and expanded in his 1993 book of the same name. Ritzer suggests that in the later part of the 20th century the socially-structured form of the fast-food restaurant has become the organizational force representing and extending the process of rationalization into the realm of everyday interaction and individual identity. McDonald's of the 1990s serves as the case model. The book introduced the term McDonaldization to learned discourse as a way to describe a social process which produces "mind-numbing sameness", according to a 2002 review of a related academic text.
A History of Menus is a Menu of History
What do America’s earliest restaurant menus teach us about America?
Feed Logic and the Failure to Thrive
Two disquieting works of fiction I encountered this spring feature the same menacing figure: a young girl that refuses to eat. In Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription (2026), doctors inform a couple that their waifish, picky-eating daughter is, in fact, “failing to thrive,” suffering from ARFID (avoidant/restrictive food
The art of simple food : notes, lessons, and recipes from a delicious revolution
ix, 405 p. : 25 cm; Here you will find Alice's philosophy on everything from stocking your kitchen, to mastering fundamentals and preparing delicious, seasonal inspired meals all year long. Always true to her philosophy that a perfect meal is one that's balanced in texture, color, and flavor, Waters helps us embrace the seasons' bounty and make the best choices when selecting ingredients.--From publisher's description; Subtitle from cover; Includes index
Family Style — Oakland Public Library
Family Style — Pham, Thien, — "Told through the lens of meaningful food and meals, this graphic novel chronicles the author's childhood immigration to America, where food takes on new meaning as he and his family search for belonging, for happiness and for the American dream."--
From cultures to aesthetics between Asian and Western UX design
Since I moved to Europe from Asia and used to work for European company from Asia. I feel like I have to discuss the topic of design aesthetics, cultural influences and user behaviours.
Time-inconsistent Preferences and Consumer Self-Control
Abstract Why do consumers sometimes act against their own better judgment, engaging in behavior that is often regretted after the fact and that would have been rejected with adequate forethought? More generally, how do consumers attempt to maintain self-control in the face of time-inconsistent preferences? This article addresses consumer impatience by developing a decision-theoretic model based on reference points. The model explains how and why consumers experience sudden increases in desire for a product, increases that can result in the temporary overriding of long-term preferences. Tactics that consumers use to control their own behavior are also discussed. Consumer self-control is framed as a struggle between two psychological forces, desire and willpower. Finally, two general classes of self-control strategies are described: those that directly reduce desire, and those that overcome desire through will power.
The Effect of Partitions on Controlling Consumption
The authors demonstrate that partitioning an aggregate quantity of a resource (e.g., food, money) into smaller units reduces the consumed quantity or the rate of consumption of that resource. Partitions draw attention to the consumption decision by introducing a small transaction cost; that is, they provide more decision-making opportunities so that prudent consumers can control consumption. Thus, people are better able to constrain consumption when resources associated with a desirable activity (which they are trying to control) are partitioned rather than when they are aggregated. This effect of partitioning is demonstrated for the consumption of chocolates (Study 1) and gambles (Study 2). In Study 3, process measures reveal that partitioning increases recall accuracy and decision times. Importantly, the effect of partitioning diminishes when consumers are not trying to regulate consumption (Studies 1 and 3). Finally, Study 4 explores how habituation may decrease the amount of attention that partitions draw to consumption. In this context, partitions control consumption to a greater extent when the nature of partitions changes frequently.
Measuring the Hedonic and Utilitarian Dimensions of Consumer Attitude
This article reports the development and validation of a parsimonious, generalizable scale that measures the hedonic and utilitarian dimensions of consumer attitudes toward product categories and different brands within categories. The hedonic/utilitarian (HED/UT) scale includes ten semantic differential response items, five of which refer to the hedonic dimension and five of which refer to the utilitarian dimension of consumer attitudes. The authors conducted six studies to establish the unidimensionality, reliability, and validity of the two HED/UT subscales. In reaching the final scale, the authors also develop and implement a unique process of paring down a psychometrically sound but otherwise too large set of items. Nomological validity is established by replacing a typical, one-dimensional attitude toward the brand measure with the hedonic and utilitarian dimensions in a central route processing model. Results suggest that the hedonic and utilitarian constructs are two distinct dimensions of brand attitude and are reliably and validly measured by the HED/UT scale.
On the virtues of eating dog food - in limited quantities
I've been fairly clear at various points that a big part of the reason I wrote Jacquard in the first place was because I was trying to write something else, ...
Behavioural economics, consumer behaviour and consumer policy: state of the art
Counter to the traditional assumption of neoclassical economics that individuals are rational Homo oeconomici that always seek to maximize their utility and follow their ‘true’ preferences, research in behavioural economics has demonstrated that people's judgements and decisions are often subject to systematic biases and heuristics, and are strongly dependent on the context of the decision. In this article, we briefly review the transition of research from neoclassical economics to behavioural economics, and discuss how the latter has influenced research in consumer behaviour and consumer policy. In particular, we discuss the impacts of key principles such as status quo bias, the endowment effect, mental accounting and the sunk-cost effect, other heuristics and biases related to availability, salience, the anchoring effect and simplicity rules, as well as the effects of other supposedly irrelevant factors such as music, temperature and physical markers on consumers’ decisions. These principles not only add significantly to research on consumer behaviour – they also offer readily available practical implications for consumer policy to nudge behaviour in beneficial directions in consumption domains including financial decision making, product choice, healthy eating and sustainable consumption.
Yielding to Temptation: Self‐Control Failure, Impulsive Purchasing, and Consumer Behavior
Abstract. Self-control is a promising concept for consumer research, and self-control failure may be an important cause of impulsive purchasing. Three caus
