Does cooking matter? Exploring the impact of food processing on French adults’ implicit attitudes toward plant-based products

Exploring our attitudes towards food is of great interest to identify barriers and opportunities in the consumption of healthy and sustainable products, such as pulses. The present study investigated French adults’ implicit attitudes toward raw and cooked pulses and cereals, using an implicit methodology: the Sorted Paired Feature Task (SPF). Ninety-one participants completed two online SPF tasks one week apart. The stimuli in each SPF task were words and images. The words represented attitude attributes (positive and negative) and the images represented the two food categories (pulses and cereals). In the center of the screen an image-word pair was presented and, in the four corners, the four possible pairs were displayed, along with their response key. Participants had to classify each pair as quickly as possible into one of the four possible pairs. The difference between the two SPF tasks was the images used, which depicted either cooked or raw foods. Participants also rated the images in terms of valence, familiarity and frequency of consumption. The results revealed that participants showed more negative implicit attitudes toward pulses than cereals, although they rated the two food types similarly, reflecting previous findings. The predicted beneficial effect of cooking on attitudes toward pulses was not observed as we did not find an improvement in implicit attitudes toward cooked pulses versus raw pulses. Our results highlight the persistent negative implicit attitudes toward pulses among French adults, suggesting that automatic processing may continue to hinder the wider acceptance of these sustainable and healthy foods.