Taste, Cost, Culture, and Today’s Food Environment

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This chapter examines how social, biological, and economic factors intersect with the food environment to influence dietary choices. Taste is the main factor in wealthy countries, which is based on genes and early diet—and food marketing and advertising. Other variables include cost, health, convenience, environmental sustainability, climate change, and animal welfare. The agrifood system (Big Food, Big Ag), food industry, food policy, and trade comprise the global food environment, while culture, tradition, and social norms (gender roles, women’s rights) shape how sapiens cook and eat. It explores whether fast food and food deserts cause obesity and how COVID-19, geopolitical conflicts and wars, and bird flu combine with corporate greed to drive high food prices that make healthy eating unaffordable. The chapter highlights contemporary dining, like street food, fast food, and food trucks amid the fall of cooking and eating three meals daily, the rise of snacking—and girl dinner.