How Involved Are You With Food?
For some people food is a central part of life; for others it is fuel
Food involvement is the degree to which food occupies your attention, conversation and planning, independent of how much you weigh, how healthily you eat, or how adventurous your palate is. Two people can eat exactly the same meal - one thought about it all morning and will describe it in detail tonight, the other barely noticed what was on the plate. Neither is doing it wrong; the scale that measures this was built to separate that dial from everything else food research usually asks about.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about your everyday relationship with food and meals, not about any one special occasion.
What it measures
The first bar is the published Food Involvement Scale: how much attention, thought and conversation food gets in your life. The other two are related but separate everyday tendencies from the same area of research: curiosity about new food, and how much care you put into preparing meals. This is about interest and attention, not about restriction, cravings or body image, which our eating-style and food-choices tests cover, or fear of new foods, covered by our food-neophobia test.
Based on: Food Involvement Scale (Bell & Marshall, 2003)
Possible results
Food involvement
How much attention and thought food gets in your daily life.
Food curiosity
How drawn you are to trying dishes and ingredients you have not had before.
Meal preparation
How much time and care you put into planning and cooking meals.
Common questions
Is high food involvement the same as being a foodie?
Roughly, yes, though 'foodie' carries a social label the scale does not measure. Food involvement is simply how much attention food gets in your thinking and conversation - it says nothing about income, cooking skill or how much you know about cuisine, only about how present food is in your mind.
Does low food involvement mean I have a bad relationship with food?
No. The scale measures interest, not health, and low involvement is common among people who eat well and feel entirely at ease with food - they simply do not spend much mental energy on it. A poor relationship with food shows up as anxiety, restriction or preoccupation, which this test does not screen for; our eating-style test looks at those patterns instead.
How is this different from food neophobia?
They are almost opposites. Food neophobia is a reluctance or fear of unfamiliar foods, and someone high in it can still be highly involved with food - thinking about it constantly while sticking firmly to what they know. Food curiosity, one of the bars here, is the positive pull toward the new, which is related to low neophobia but measured separately and for different reasons.
Sources
- Bell, R., & Marshall, D. (2003). The construct of food involvement in behavioral research: scale development and validation. Appetite. doi:10.1016/s0195-6663(03)00009-6
- Marshall, D., & Bell, R. (2004). Relating the food involvement scale to demographic variables, food choice and other constructs. Food Quality and Preference. doi:10.1016/j.foodqual.2004.06.003
An honest note The first bar, Food Involvement, corresponds to Bell and Marshall's published scale, written here in Quinthea's own wording - scores are not comparable to published norms. The other two bars, food curiosity and meal preparation, are related everyday tendencies from the same area of research, not validated factors of that scale. Food attitudes are also culturally shaped: what counts as 'a lot' of attention to food varies enormously between food cultures, so compare your bars to each other, not to some universal average.