CHALLENGES FOR THE NEW RURALITY IN A CHANGING WORLD. PROCEEDINGS FROM THE 7TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LOCALIZED AGRI-FOOD SYSTEMS

Social studies on human food consumption are recent with just over thirty years, with the largest advances in the Francophone and Anglophone schools, and to a lesser degree, the Spanish school. In contemporary Western societies, the distance between the consumers and the preparation of their own food makes the global agri-food industry and its distribution system as symbols of a current void (Díaz and Gómez, 2005; Álvarez, 2008), increased suspicion on the manipulation of food by these industries (Aguilar, 2007), and generating interest for differentiated foods where consumption is not ruled by economic aspects, but also by values as health, quality, tradition, culture, the environment and ethics (Espeitx, 1996).Social studies of eating habits have less than thirty years, the main advances has taken place in the Francophone and Anglophone schools. In Mexico, for the first time, the analysis of food choice has been addressed. The objective of this work was to identify segments of Mexican consumers from the motives for their food choices, through the Food Choice Questionnaire, and through multivariate factor and cluster analysis. The results show that there are signs of different consumers, Mexican consumers have other priorities, particularly in terms of taste, in general expressing low sensitivity to issues of health and nutrition, even more so towards animal welfare and products that are friendly to the environment