Food Marketing

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Abstract

A lot of qualitative research have been done and have established a link between food craving and the psychology of the person. The aim of this study is to understand the food craving experience on people who are starting their working life. This paper could help medicine aspects and professional who wants to focus on the fact of reducing food craving and also doctors interested by the psychological aspect and disease link to this phenomenon. This study focused only on people between 25 years old and 45 years. All of this people are just entering in the working life. A sample of 20 people was called to do two in depth interview. The interview was done in two times: the first one, just after the experience of food craving at work and the second one was just before the fact of having a food craving and this during two different days. To conclude, we can say that this analysis has highlighted the gap that we had in food craving of people who are entering in their working life but also the medical implication of this phenomenon.

Key words: food craving, work, experience, phenomenology

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Background

Food craving is a very common experience nowadays and this maybe because of the lifestyle of the society but this phenomenon occurs some health damage. As our world is changing, the mentality is also changing and the phenomenon of food craving is always increasing. This part is to provide some background information about food craving. The food craving behaviours have been characterised as ‘a motivational state where a person feel necessary to seek and to eat a particular food’ (Baker, Morse, & Sherman, 1986). The phenomenon of eating a particular food is different of the feeling of hunger. Food craving experience is commonly associated to depression, the feeling of guilt, negative mood and many others psychological disorder. The role of mental imagery in this kind of experience is announced that is playing an important role in food craving. Food craving is linked to eating disorders, binge eating and permit to explain some disease as for example Anorexia Nervosa or Bulimia Nervosa. But now, the experience of food craving is very developed in all around the world even if there is too many researches on general food craving experience, the part of the population entering in the working life is one of the most populated and we have to do something.

Management problems

Regarding the previous research which has been done and only focused on: women food craving ((Hill & Heaton-Brown, 1994 and Schlundt et al, 1993), Food Craving in Egypt (Parker et al, 2003), the relationship between stress and healthy behaviour (Debbie M. Ng & Robert W. Jeffery, 2003) and finally some research about the role of the mental imagery in food craving experience (Tiggeman, M. & Kemps, E, 2005). Here, we can see that there has been no research of food craving experience on people entering in the working life. Still without research which explains the relationship between general work and food craving that why it could be very helpful to do this study. Trying to do this research, we have seen a need to learn about common experience with the phenomenon of food craving on people which are starting there working life and this can be very useful in our world for example to prevent some disease and to improve the quality of life on this person and finally to help medical findings to solve health problem. So we are going to see how this study can solve some medicals problems.

Research objectives

In this following research we want to deepen the phenomenon on food craving and especially we would like to try to highlight this common experience on people who are entering in the working life and we want to understand the experience, problems and cause of this phenomenon. It’s important to clarify the question. Although this can give some additional explanations on the research of Hellerstedt, W. L., & Jeffery, R. W. (1997) and Debbie M. Ng & Robert W. Jeffery (2003). This study is done on a sample of adults which are entering in the working life.

Therefore, the purpose of this phenomenological study was to discover and understand the reason of food craving experience on people who start their working life.

Research questions

The central research question of this research was: What is the essence of the phenomenon of food craving on people starting their working life, so we would like to know their experiences and thoughts with this phenomenon.

In relation to this central research question, we have also explored some sub questions as: How do they feel after having this craving? How the participant has viewed himself throughout this? What are the associated experiences to this? And the participants views and experiences of the link between their food craving and their behavioural attitudes.

Literature reviews

To situate the study of the phenomenon of food craving on people which are entering in their working life others researches have been done and it’s for that, that it’s a need to understand this phenomenon on a particular sample.

Food craving is distinguishable from a normal hunger and from a food choice and its phenomenon is associated to the link between people and food and more commonly associated to chocolate (Pelchat, 2002). In addition, some surveys have shown that the experience of food craving is very common and every occasion are good to experiment the phenomenon and, chocolate is the first product which is craved in Western Countries (Lafay et al, 2001). A research on Egyptians adults have been done by interweaving young and older adults and they have seen that the culture is one of the factors which affect the element which is craved because the principal response during the interview was that Egyptian people prefer to eat vegetables or pasta (Parker et al, 2003).

Also, food craving is very present in the daily life experiences even if we don’t name the phenomenon (Hill & Heaton-Brown, 1994). Weingarten & Elston (1990) have found that even if the craving is commonly associated to food sometimes the craved moment is related to others substances as alcohol and nicotine.

Food craving is also implicated in some health disease such as anorexia bulimia, obesity, diabetes and many other diseases. For example; Schlundt et al. (1993) had studied 80 obese women and showed that the need to crave something sweet was due to boredom and envy was not related to being hungry. Several studies have noted that the fact of eating unhealthy food and stress are related (Hellerstedt & Jeffery, 1997; McCann, Warnick, & Knopp, 1990); another study has showed that for women they eat more sweet food as chocolate, candy and soda (Steptoe, Lipsey, & Wardle, 1998), and for men, stress increase the food intake in term of pizza, soda and beef (Spillman, 1990).

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