Food purchasing and eating patterns: Assessing the role of people’s mobility, social networks, and attitudes on healthy diets

A poor diet has crucial impacts on individuals and society as a whole. In addition to individual preferences, there is evidence that people’s diet is related to their social, economic, and geographical environment, including their mobility context. However, few studies have an empirical, integrated perspective of these previous dimensions. This paper presents an empirical effort to understand people’s food purchasing and eating preferences concerning their mobility dynamics, social networks, habits, perceptions, activities, and sociodemographics, going beyond a static distance-based food supply perspective. The case study corresponds to the city of Concepción, Chile, using data that included nutrition, mobility, social networks, habits, perceptions, activities, and sociodemographics. The relationships between people’s eating and shopping patterns and these different contextual dimensions were analyzed through joint multivariate statistical modelling.

The empirical findings suggest that greater spatial proximity to the purchase of food does not significantly impact the quality of the diet. However, greater proximity to food supply affects the frequency and characteristics of the transport mode to the shopping trips, impacting the diet quality, especially in the case of open street markets. This relationship shows that mobility patterns play an essential role in the impact of spatial accessibility on the purchase of food and the quality of people’s diets. The results also confirm that food consumption and purchasing decisions go beyond individual sociodemographics and are influenced by other aspects of people’s overall mobility patterns, social capital, and attitudes.