The Hierarchical Influence of Personal Values on Attitudes Toward Food and Food Choices

It is estimated that humans could continuously immersed themselves in making roughly around 200 food choice decisions in a single day. Making and deciding on the choice of food are relatively complicated and varied greatly between people. Food is and has always been an important source of energy to the human body and studies on identifying key factors affecting consumers’ food choices have attracted many interests from various fields of expertise since they are somewhat closely related to the individuals’ motivations, preferences and habits. Among the factors, the cultural environment has been attributed as an important element in consumer's food choices however; extant studies have also suggested the underlying motives of individuals’ food choice behaviors are influenced by both external and internal factors. Hence, this study aims to reveal and understand the influence of personal values on attitudes toward food and food choices among urban Malay Muslims by employing the value-attitude-behavior (VAB) model.