Mental representation of domestic cooking operations among Japanese consumers

Cooking is a daily undertaking that ensures the proper ingestion of food. However, mental representations of home cooking have yet to be quantitatively elucidated. The primary purpose of the series of three studies presented here was to quantitatively describe the conceptualization of cooking among Japanese consumers by employing Internet surveys. The first study extracted superordinate categories of cooking-related operations, (1) core cooking, (2) subsidiary cooking and (3) convenience food preparation, for 100 Japanese consumers by utilizing an exploratory factor analysis of 30 presumably cooking-related operations. The second study made further sub-categorizations within each superordinate category by utilizing hierarchical cluster analyses in 500 newly recruited Japanese consumers. Core cooking was sub-categorized into “to pickle”, “to cut and heat”, “to season”, and “to mix”. Subsidiary cooking was sub-categorized into “to preserve”, “to acquire”, and “to arrange”. Convenience food preparation was not further sub-categorized. In Study 3, based on the fit indices obtained from structural equation modeling, the appropriateness of the categorizations and sub-categorizations of Studies 1 and 2 was confirmed using 500 newly recruited Japanese consumers. Thus, the current study is the first to quantitatively examine the conceptualization of cooking by elucidating the relationships among a variety of cooking-related operations.