It’s not Just Numbers: Nutrition Information as Cultural Contaminant

France is worldwide known all over the world for its passion for cooking to such an extent that the French gastronomic meal has been recently declared as a world intangible heritage (UNESCO 2010). However, despite its world renowned reputation, the French food model suffers from relative isolation. The hedonistic approach to food is far to be shared by all cultures. For example, in the United States, food choices are mainly driven by utilitarian concerns in which health holds a central place (Rozin, Remick, and Fischler 2011). Based on this utilitarianistic view of eating, many Western countries have established public health plans in order to increase health-conscious food choices. France does not escape this process of food utilitarianization. By introducing the National Nutrition and Health Program in 2001, the French ministry of health hoped to improve the health of the French population. Thus, French consumers are encouraged to place a greater emphasis on the relationship between their food choices and overall health. There is reason to believe that this focus on the utilitarian aspects of eating may decrease the French cultural enthusiasm for food. For instance, the French start to consider food more as a basic necessity than a pleasure (Hébel 2008). Borrowing from recent research on the social psychology of globalization and on the effects of cultural mixing (Morris, Mok, and Mor 2011; Torelli et al. 2011), we argue that these attempts to enforce healthy eating can be perceived by French consumers as something that is both foreign to their culture and symbolic of utilitarian values that are inconsistent with the Frenchness of food enjoyment. In this research, we focused on the case of nutrition information because this is one of the most visible and noticeable aspects of public health plans designed to fight obesity. Indeed, in France, most food items display nutrition information (Storcksdieck genannt Bonsmann et al. 2010).