RESEARCH General Home & Garden

HOME COOKING
Chef's personality, not recipes, key to whether meals are healthy

Mark Reutter, Business Editor
(217) 333-0568; mreutter@uiuc.edu

12/1/02

Photo by Bill Wiegand In his latest study, Brian Wansink "moved the focus from the consumers to the cook, and tried to determine the characteristics that define the cooks who are capable of changing the eating habits of their family."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Making family meals more healthy requires more than watching the Cooking Channel, according to a marketing researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A national survey of 770 adult cooks found that healthy meal preparation is linked to the personality of the cook more than to the recipes or ingredients used in preparing a meal.

"Most nutritional education is focused on the taste preferences and eating habits of food consumers," explained Brian Wansink, an Illinois professor of food marketing who conducted the study. "We moved the focus from the consumers to the cook, and tried to determine the characteristics that define the cooks who are capable of changing the eating habits of their family."

Three types of categorizing areas were studied – cooking behavior, food usage and personality.

Cooking behavior refers to whether a person cooks from recipes or by instinct, how often they entertain guests at dinner and how much they experiment with new spices. Food usage refers to the methods a cook uses to choose ingredients and the types of foods they emphasize in meals, such as meats or vegetables.

Wansink found that these dimensions did not have especially useful predictive values. However, the personality profiles of those who described themselves as "good cooks" were highly related to family food preferences and eating habits. Using open-ended questionnaires and asking the cooks to describe their personality as well as the dinners they had prepared over the previous two weeks, Wansink found the following:

o People who had the most influence over a family’s eating habits tended to be friendly, outgoing, giving, enthusiastic, nurturing and initiating. These characteristics most corresponded to Giving Cooks and also to Innovative Cooks, Competitive Cooks and Methodical Cooks.
o People who tended to be nature lovers, athletes and "earthy" most corresponded to Healthy Cooks.

o People who were predisposed toward new foods were curious, imaginative, innovative and adventurous. Healthy Cooks and Innovative Cooks were most correlated to these characteristics.
Methodical Cooks and Competitive Cooks tended to be somewhat less adventurous. Giving Cooks, while influential in their families, tended not to experiment with new foods on their own.

Targeting "good cooks" in the same way could be counterproductive in an educational campaign, according to Wansink’s findings. Nutritionists should devise a campaign that appeals to the personality subtypes among cooks who are committed to good cooking, he recommended. This is especially true when encouraging the use of unfamiliar foods, such as a soy-based products, to improve family diets.

Wansink’s study will be published in a forthcoming issue of Food Quality and Preference.