A Life Course Perspective: Understanding Food Choices in Time, Social Location, and History

A life course perspective provides a framework for understanding how food choices develop in changing temporal, social, and historical contexts. This article describes the application of life course concepts to food choices, including trajectories, transitions, turning points, lives in place and time, and timing of events in lives. A life course approach to food choice can contribute to understanding the social and biological pathways of health risk and resilience over the life span. Life course analysis is a useful research and practice tool because of the many ways in which foods, the individuals choosing them, and food choice environments are changing.