Foodscapelab studies
Understanding and modelling food choice is of significant interest to food retailers, food caterers as well as food and nutrition researchers. Behavioural nutrition and the study of pathways leading to food choice is a growing field of scientific inquiry and with recent developments in IC technology new avenues have opened for researchers in the field. In 2012 AAU developed a lab facility to study behavior and food choice. The Lab was planned by Bent Egberg Mikkelsen and his co-workers and both real and virtual food realities can be used for the food choice and behavioural nutrition experiments that are carried out in the lab. The lab is one of the three cases of lab-generated data in the EU Richfields study on research infrastructure.
The foodscapelab is a food lab where behavioral studies can be performed Its divided into a COOK, SERVE and EAT part depending on where you want to study food choice. In the foodscapelab experiments with virtual food and real foods can be conducted. It serves as a base camp and a docking station for maintenance and calibration of the devices that are used to collect data on food choice behaviour. Conceptually the lab is founded on the idea that it is possible to define foodscapes as conglomerate of food, people and spaces and the purpose of the lab is to make it possible to study the interactions taking place in foodscapes. Common for all the data that comes out of the lab is that it all come in very structured format. All analytics are done in the ANALYTICS section where collected data is interfaced with background data, for instance from food composition databases or databases on carbon equivalents or ingredient prices.
