The recall of food experiences in a real life context: a qualitative data analysis

The current context characterized by a global obesity epidemic amongst young population requires a better understanding on the way we can change the eating habits and the factors that influence eating self-regulation. In general, children and young adults are the ones that consume the most unhealthy products, so this part of the population remains the most vulnerable. In this paper, our aim is to synthetically review research on the role of cognitive processes such as memory in eating behavior. Our main purpose is to conduct a qualitative analysis on the memories of young Romanian students who attend a students' restaurant and to investigate this text’s corpus through Tropes a software program especially designed for content analysis in the Romanian language. The results indicate that specific features of the memories that deserve to be mentioned are the words related to time and space, which suggests that most of the participants activated episodic memories. In the future research, we will investigate the role of these memories on food consumption.