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The purpose of this paper is to describe students’ self-reported learning from engaging in an experiential learning task designed to develop their understanding of sustainable food systems and dietary practices.

In all, 143 first-year students enrolled in an entry level food and nutrition subject undertook a three-week eco-friendly food challenge (1. Reduce food (and food-related) waste; 2. localise food purchases; 3. eat seasonally and sustainably; or 4. reduce meat consumption). They blogged about their experience and respond to an action-orientated reflective question each week. Content analysis of the blogs was undertaken using NVivo 10. Content was systematically coded and categorised according to action/activity, learning and response to reflective question.

Students reported undertaking a range of self-selected practical activities throughout the challenge. Self-reported learning suggested students gained self-awareness and knowledge and demonstrated problem-solving abilities. The importance of planning and preparation was the most common theme in students’ blogs when responding to the action-orientated reflective question in Week 1. In Week 2, students identified socially mediated barriers and the time and energy required to undertake their challenge as the most likely barriers preventing others engaging in the challenge. They provided advice and solutions to overcome these barriers. In Week 3, a range of community, government and multi-sector initiatives to support consumer food-related behaviour change were identified.

This approach presents a possible means for engaging nutrition undergraduates with environmental sustainability.

The importance of food education in primary schools has been globally recognised. However, more detailed definitions of its learning objectives are rarely found. The study aimed to define multisectoral themes and learning objectives for food education in primary education in Finland.

A descriptive three-round Delphi study was conducted with experts in food education in various organisations. In the first questionnaire, the participants were asked to define possible objectives for food education related to general objectives for basic education. Respondents of the first questionnaire formed a research panel (n = 22). These panellists were then invited to complete the second (n = 16) and third questionnaires (n = 12), where the objectives were further modified. Qualitative content analysis and Bloom's taxonomy were applied in the process of creating the learning objectives.

In the iterative process, 42 learning objectives for food education in primary schools were defined. Further, “Sustainability and ethics of food systems” was defined as the cross-cutting theme of food education. In addition, 13 subthemes were defined, which fell into three thematic categories: personal (e.g. feelings), practical (e.g. eating) and intangible (e.g. culture) issues.

The defined learning objectives for a holistic food education may be used in advancing primary school curriculum in Finland and perhaps other countries.

Food waste represents a major sustainability challenge with environmental, economic, social and health implications. Institutions of higher education contribute to generating food waste while serving as models in championing sustainability solutions. An experiential learning project was implemented as part of two university courses in a buffet-style university dining hall with the objective to reduce food waste while building student capacity to contribute to transformational food system change.

Partnerships were developed with university dining services. Students were trained to conduct a needs assessment in a university dining hall through food waste measurements. Students were facilitated through the process of applying baseline data on food waste to design, implement and evaluate a multi-component food waste intervention that consisted of offering reduced portion sizes, use of smaller serving utensils and educational messaging. Participant reflections were elicited to evaluate the effectiveness of the experiential learning experience.

The food waste intervention led to a 17 per cent reduction in total food waste, with a large portion of waste attributed to post-consumer plate waste. While the reduction in food waste was not statistically significant, it highlights the potential for food service operations to address food waste through reduction techniques while providing students an experiential opportunity that meets multiple learning objectives including systems thinking, collaboration and motivation for leading change in the food system.

This study highlights the opportunity of building student capacity to address sustainability challenges through an experiential learning model for reducing food waste in an institutional setting that other educators can adapt.

This paper aims to describe an ethnographic research study conducted within French families in order to examine the transfer of food learning between parents and children.

An ethnographic study in the respondents' home was conducted. Semi‐directive interviews with children and parents and observation were carried out in heterogeneous families.

Results indicate that food meal time is a way of socializing family members in consumption skills related to food. Food learning took place in two ways: from parents to children and from children to parents. Through different socialization factors, children will discover new food products or food practices and will be able to bring them to the home. By sharing these new experiences, children teach (directly or indirectly) parents new consumption skills related to the food domain. The food environment (e.g: familial atmosphere, interactions around the meal), more than the act of eating itself allows for a better understanding of food transmission within the family.

These findings would be of benefit to public policy as well as to investors and food manufacturers by integrating the reverse socialization aspect. Limits and research perspectives are discussed after the presentation of the results.

The paper investigates interactions between parents and children within their natural setting: their home.

Drawing on Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, this research aims to investigate the interweaving of the socialization systems within which children learn eating practices, in order to open up new paths to build prevention and care programs against childhood obesity.

Children were interviewed using semi‐structured interviews, including projective methods. The data were analyzed by both a manual content analysis and the use of qualitative analysis software Nvivo. Nvivo enables to cross verbatim and contributes to highlight the joint effects of socialization agents in terms of children's eating learning.

The study clarifies the interrelationships between social contexts in which children learn food practices. It points out that the different social spheres may sometimes exert contradictory influences and that food learning cannot be limited to the transmission of nutritional information, but also involves emotional and social experiences.

By showing that eating habits stem from complex processes, the research suggests measures against children's obesity that take into account the interrelationships between social contexts. It invites the policymakers and the food companies to implement actions based on social relationships involved in food learning.

Whereas the traditional consumer socialization models focus on interactions between child and one socialization agent, this research's findings shed light on the entanglement of social spheres concerning eating socialization. They show that using a social‐ecological approach is useful to policymakers, researchers, marketers, and other constituencies involved in developing solutions to the obesity problem.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and examine discrepancies of food aesthetics portrayed on social media across different types of restaurants using a large-scale data set of food images.

A neural food aesthetic assessment model using computer vision and deep learning techniques is proposed, applied and evaluated on the food images data set. In addition, a set of photographic attributes drawn from food services and cognitive science research, including color, composition and figure–ground relationship attributes is implemented and compared with aesthetic scores for each food image.

This study finds that restaurants with different rating levels, cuisine types and chain status have different aesthetic scores. Moreover, the authors study the difference in the aesthetic scores between two groups of image posters: customers and restaurant owners, showing that the latter group tends to post more aesthetically appealing food images about the restaurant on social media than the former.

Restaurant owners may consider performing more proactive social media marketing strategies by posting high-quality food images. Likewise, social media platforms should incentivize their users to share high-quality food images.

The main contribution of this paper is to provide a novel methodological framework to assess the aesthetics of food images. Instead of relying on a multitude of standard attributes stemming from food photography, this method yields a unique one-take-all score, which is more straightforward to understand and more accessible to correlate with other target variables.

Examines aspects of the child′s early experience with food and eating in order to reveal how these experiences shape children′s food acceptance patterns. The transition from suckling to consuming an omnivorous diet is critical to the child′s growth and health. Despite the necessity of a varied diet, children do not readily accept new foods, and are often very neophobic. Repeated experience is necessary to transform the initial neophobic response. The social contexts and physiological consequences of eating also shape children′s food acceptance patterns through associative conditioning, in which foods′ sensory cues are associated with the contexts and consequences of ingestion. Children are responsive to the energy density of foods and can adjust intake based on foods′ energy density. Such responsiveness is easily disrupted when parents employ child‐feeding tactics to control what and how much children will eat. Limited evidence suggests that such child‐feeding practices may focus the child away from hunger and satiety, impeding the development of internal controls of food intake in children.

In the reduction of food waste and the provision of food to the hungry, food banks play critical roles. However, as they are generally run by charitable organisations that are chronically short of human and other resources, their inbound logistics efforts commonly experience difficulties in two key areas: 1) how to organise stocks of donated food, and 2) how to assess the donated items quality and fitness for purpose. To address both these problems, the authors aimed to develop a novel artificial intelligence (AI)-based approach to food quality and warehousing management in food banks.

For diagnosing the quality of donated food items, the authors designed a convolutional neural network (CNN); and to ascertain how best to arrange such items within food banks' available space, reinforcement learning was used.

Testing of the proposed innovative CNN demonstrated its ability to provide consistent, accurate assessments of the quality of five species of donated fruit. The reinforcement-learning approach, as well as being capable of devising effective storage schemes for donated food, required fewer computational resources that some other approaches that have been proposed.

Viewed through the lens of expectation-confirmation theory, which the authors found useful as a framework for research of this kind, the proposed AI-based inbound-logistics techniques exceeded normal expectations and achieved positive disconfirmation.

As well as enabling machines to learn how inbound logistics are handed by human operators, this pioneering study showed that such machines could achieve excellent performance: i.e., that the consistency provided by AI operations could in future dramatically enhance such logistics' quality, in the specific case of food banks.

This paper’s AI-based inbound-logistics approach differs considerably from others, and was found able to effectively manage both food-quality assessments and food-storage decisions more rapidly than its counterparts.

Research on consumer socialisation emphasises the role played by different agents as well as the influence of the context in which socialisation takes place. As part of the fight against obesity, this study on the nutritional learning of children seeks to focus specifically on social interactions in the standardised context of the school cafeteria in France. It aims to show how and through what social interactions children learn the rules related to food consumption to identify levers by which to promote healthy eating.

The study was conducted in a French school cafeteria among children aged seven to 11. A qualitative methodology was used. It included direct observations of children when selecting and eating their meals and open interviews. A systematic survey of the components of children's food trays completes this work.

This work demonstrated the existence of various types of rules and social interactions. Adults appear to be the guarantors of institutional rules (related to the composition of the plates) and cultural rules (not to waste). Peers were marginally involved in the selection of products. The standards of taste and individual preferences indeed appear to be the background to the choices.

From an academic point of view, the paper supports consumer socialisation studies and emphasizes the importance of a systemic approach to human development. In particular, it enriches the research on food learning by showing how social interactions are involved in compliance with institutional rules and cultural norms.

This paper aims to explore the parental role in children’s food socialization. More specifically, it explores how the legacy of the past (i.e. experiences from the participant’s own childhood) works to inform how parents, in turn, socialize their own children within the context of food, drawing on theories of consumer socialization, intergenerational influence and emotional reflexivity.

To seek further understanding of how temporal elements of intergenerational influence persist (through the lens of emotional reflexivity), the authors collected qualitative and interpretative data from 30 parents from the UK using a combination of existential–phenomenological interviews, photo-elicitation techniques and accompanied grocery shopping trips (observational interviews).

Through intergenerational reflexivity, parents are found to make a conscious effort to either “sustain” or “disregard” particular food practices learnt from the previous generation with their children (abandoning or mimicking the behaviours of their own parents within the context of food socialization). Factors contributing to the disregarding of food behaviours (new influencer, self-learning and resistance to parental power) emerge. A continuum of parents is identified, ranging from the “traditionalist” to “improver” and the “revisionist”.

By adopting a unique approach in exploring the dynamic of intergenerational influence through the lens of emotional reflexivity, this study highlights the importance of the parental role in socializing children about food, and how intergenerational reflexivity helps inform parental food socialization practices. The intergenerational reflexivity of parents is, thus, deemed to be crucial in the socialization process.