Food & Culture

Choosing appropriate foods is a difficult and evolutionarily ancient problem. Food choice can serve as a social shibboleth, whereby information about what a person eats affords insight into her likely cultural background and social relationships. That is, people decide not only what they should eat, but also how, when and with whom to eat, and human cultures converge on radically different food choices and eating practices. Although infants do not always seem to be the smartest food consumers (they are willing to put disgusting, and even dangerous things into their mouths), we find that infants have an early emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food selection. Infants’ reasoning about food preferences is intimately linked to their thinking about social groups: they expect people from the same social group to converge in their food preferences, but expect people from different social groups to potentially disagree. In this line of research we are also interested in questions about how reasoning about food differs from their reasoning about non-food domains (whether food is a specialized domain for social learning), how infants’ reasoning about third-party food choice is connected to their own decisions about what to eat, and how social information surrounding food may be used across development to create interventions that support healthy eating practices.