Schutz (1988) reports that measures of appropriateness (i.e. the perceived
suitability of a given food to the time and place of consumption) outperform
preference scales. Thus appropriateness scales would seem to have considerable
scope for studying eating conventions and situational factors, and it appears that
context influences food choice even more than hedonic factors (Marshall, 1993).
Cardello et al. (1996) studied consumers’ expectations of various institutional foods.
Subjects consistently rated military food as poor in quality, even though most of
them had never tried it, and they expected to like institutional and airline foods less
than equivalent dishes bought in a restaurant. Collison and Turner (1988) used a
hedonic scale and multiple regression to compare two types of meal experience. They
report that tangible food was the dominant factor in the quality of everyday meal
experiences, but for ‘‘special’’ meals, such as Christmas dinner, environment and
atmosphere were more important.