I ran across this interesting ethnographic study of how people conceptualize different foods. It’s a small sample of only 27 people, so one might take the results with a grain of salt, but nonetheless, I found the following figure interesting. The results are from a “pile sorting” exercise where people were asked to group 42 different foods in terms of their similarity to one another in as many groups as they wanted.
Source: Fox, E.L., Davis, C., Downs, S.M., McLaren, R. and Fanzo, J., 2021. A focused ethnographic study on the role of health and sustainability in food choice decisions. Appetite, p.105319.
I thought it was interesting that plant-based burgers and milk were neither classified as “meat” or “dairy” or “plant” but in categories of their own; by contrast the in-vitro meat burger was closer to the meat category.
They also found that:
“the most salient considerations cited by our participants were price, health, taste, and time.”
These findings are consistent with the broad literature on food values; I should note that we have published several papers in the past where we asked larger samples of consumers to rate and rank different foods along multiple dimensions (e.g., here, here, or here)