Staff Publications

The quality and amount of the world food supply is crucial to the well-being of every human on the planet in the basic sense that we need food to live. It also has a profound impact on world economy, international trade, and global political stability. The choice of land used for agriculture, and the livestock and plants raised on the land, will impact the sustainable use of global resources. On a global scale, there are communities where insufficient food causes nutritional deficiencies, and at the same time, there are other communities eating too much food leading to obesity. Both conditions have accompanying diseases with associated financial consequences. The above issues relate to various scales, from local to global, and to a range of scientific disciplines. Moreover, their various elements are part of an interdependent, continuously changing, and adaptive system. This implies that the response of a combination of individual elements cannot usually be inferred from the response of each individual element or subsystem. This makes the identification of an appropriate intervention to change one or more elements a complex problem. We propose that a complex system approach should be used to address the global challenges of the agriculture and food system. The complex system approach accounts for the needs of stakeholders and policymakers in the agriculture and food system, and helps to determine which research programs will enable stakeholders to better anticipate and respond to emerging developments in the world. Moreover, the approach will enable them to determine effective intervention strategies to simultaneously optimise and safeguard their interests and the interests of the environment. The approach is formulated in terms of a roadmap of procedures. It encompasses an array of methods utilised in an integrative multi-scale and inter-disciplinary way

Eating, drinking and food choices are among the most frequent human behaviours. Although seemingly simple, they are complex behaviours that are determined by many factors and their interactions. The complexity of the research field stresses the necessity to attack problems in an interdisciplinary way. Unfortunately, truly interdisciplinary approaches are still rare in both sensory and consumer research. Although the number of publications has grown rapidly. there is little methodological progress and Much repetition of easy mono-disciplinary research. Furthermore. and perhaps worst of all, there is very little influx from the fascinating fundamental insights about human behaviour gained over the last two decennia in physiology and psychology. Thus, findings about intuitive reasoning and the clear demonstration of the unconscious nature of most of our decision making do not seem to have touched sensory and consumer research, although they probably play a more important role in food-related behaviour than anywhere else. Instead, people still strongly adhere to theories like the theory of reasoned action and planned behaviour that are based on the idea of rational and conscious decision making and have come under severe criticism on the basis of their low predictive validity, their weak methodology and their strong theoretical bias. Past behaviour, habit and hedonic appreciation are usually better predictors of actual food choice behaviour than psychological constructs like attitudes and intentions. New insights and especially the realisation that much decision making occurs at a non-conscious level, should lead to a rethinking of the methods used in sensory and consumer research. Situational analysis, observational methods and memory and expectation research have the advantage that they leave the interactive integration of the behaviour determinants with the subject, where it belongs, instead of dissecting and reconstructing it via isolated single factor research.