What is gastronomy? An exploratory study of social representation of gastronomy and Mexican cuisine among experts and consumers using a qualitative approach

The aim of this work was to explore, based on language of experts and consumers, how they define the concept of gastronomy and Mexican cuisine applying the Theory of Social Representation. Gastronomy has become very relevant in the recent years and numerous researches on the matter have been published. Likewise, gastronomy has become one of the main drivers for tourists to travel to a certain destination, such as Mexico, whose traditional cuisine has been included within the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of UNESCO. This research was carried out in two phases: the first one through 22 semi-structured interviews with chefs who work in public and private schools of gastronomy in Mexico, and the second one through a convenience sampling in Central Mexico with a sample of 329 Mexican consumers. Information was obtained through Open-Ended questions, Word Association technique (WA) and Free Listing (FL) task. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and analyzed through content analysis. The words or terms obtained from the WA were grouped into categories by means of lemmatization process. Through FL, there were obtained the main foods, ingredients or dishes of Mexican cuisine and Cognitive Salience Index (CSI) was calculated. Results of this research establish that gastronomy is a complex concept and that the social representation of chefs and consumers are related with traditional and human aspects, sensory characteristics of foods, apart from techniques, methods and forms of food preparation. In this sense, the categories, foods, and ingredients that characterize Mexican cuisine are discussed based on the language of experts and consumers applying the Theory of Social Representation.