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The purpose of this study is to conceptually and empirically verify the meaning of the food construct, while adapting and validating the Meaning of Food in Life Questionnaire proposed by Arbit et al. (2017) into Spanish and comparing groups with specific and non-specific eating patterns in relation to the meaning of food.

Confirmatory factor analysis and multivariate analysis involving groups with specific and non-specific eating patterns.

Results show that the adapted version of the scale retained the five food meaning factors, although four items from the original version had to be removed. Multivariate analyses of variance show that there are significant differences in the moral and sacred factors of food meaning when comparing people with specific and non-specific eating patterns. Significant differences in the moral, sacred and social factors were found when comparing between people with a specific diet, vegans/vegetarians and people who do not consume gluten/lactose or are on a diet.

Differences in the meanings attributed to food can be observed among the different ways people eat. This could have implications on ethics, sustainability and well-being by considering the characteristics of the five factors of food meaning.

This study suggests that food meaning is a complex and rational process, where eating patterns play a key role in the attribution of meaning.