Thinking of food: The mental representation of healthy foods as unprepared

We find that people implicitly and explicitly represent healthy foods they categorize as healthy in their purest, least prepared forms but represent foods they categorize as unhealthy in their most prepared forms (e.g., a veggie patty is represented as frozen while a beef burger is represented in a bun with melted cheese and ready to eat). We find this effect across several studies using both image and word sorting measures in explicit tasks and implicit association tasks. The effect results from the perception of health and taste as two conflicting goals. Preparation (e.g., cooking, adding toppings) makes food more delicious, which creates categorization ambiguity. Hence, healthy food is thought of as unprepared. Indeed, individual differences in perceived health-taste goal conflict moderate the effect. Critically, the representation of healthy foods matters for food decisions. In an experiment that manipulated the descriptive language on a restaurant menu, emphasizing the preparation of foods increased participants’ preference for healthy foods (with no improvement for unhealthy foods).