Decision Tree Analysis of Sustainable and Ethical Food Preferences of Undergraduate Students of Gastronomy and Culinary Arts

Gök Demir Z., Şahin E.

SUSTAINABILITY, cilt.15, sa.4, ss.1-13, 2023 (SCI-Expanded)

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 15 Sayı: 4
  • Basım Tarihi: 2023
  • Doi Numarası: 10.3390/su15043266
  • Dergi Adı: SUSTAINABILITY
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, Aerospace Database, CAB Abstracts, Communication Abstracts, Food Science & Technology Abstracts, Geobase, INSPEC, Metadex, Veterinary Science Database, Directory of Open Access Journals, Civil Engineering Abstracts
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1-13
  • Akdeniz Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

The increase in the world’s population is driving consumption, leading to the rapid destruction

of natural resources and thus raising concerns about the future state of resources. Agriculture and

livestock activities, which can be considered under the heading of food, are one of the most significant

factors having effects on sustainability. Animal welfare and ethical food selection have become

important issues along with sustainability as people’s awareness has increased. As restaurants are

an important part of the food industry, chefs have the power to influence sustainability and ethical

food choices and set trends with the choices they make. In this respect, it is important to predict

the sustainable and ethical food preferences of gastronomy and culinary arts (GCA) undergraduate

program students who have the potential to become the chefs of the future, and to evaluate to

what extent they regard chefs as responsible for these issues. In this study, the data obtained from

GCA undergraduate students were analysed with the decision tree method using lavaan and rpart

packages in the R program. The main objectives of this research are to determine the importance

of the independent variables in the decision tree classification and the effects of these independent

variables. The analysis suggests that the most important factor in the decision tree classification of

the independent variables is the attitude towards sustainable food choice. It is concluded that the

independent variables are effective in classifying students as high and low in terms of behavioural

intention. It is also seen that attitude towards sustainable food choice is more effective in predicting

whether behavioural intention is high or low.