Existing academic research has highlighted a connection between dietary habits and political beliefs. An individual’s dietary choices can mean more than just the need or pleasure of eating. Dietary choice can also be tied to a personal identity, in which food consumption reinforces through other beliefs and in-group identities, including partisan affiliation and political ideology. This study analyzes survey data from the Natural Marketing Institute’s (NMI) 2019 Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) survey and compares the results to Mosier and Rimal’s original evaluation using the NMI’s 2016 LOHAS survey data. The results show most Americans continue to have a meat-based diet irrespective of political party, with gender being the most consistent and robust explanatory factor for dietary choice. However, there are some notable shifts in dietary choice and significance for certain partisan affiliations that highlight how in-group dynamics may be reflective of attitude and behavioral norms.

This study examines the effect of a meal planner's nutritional awareness, exercise habits, and household socioeconomic characteristics on market participation and frequency of purchase of snack peanuts. Data are from a household survey of 2880 U.S. households collected by Gallup in 1997. Statistical tests showed that a double-hurdle or Cragg model best represented consumers' participation and purchase level decisions in the snack peanut market. The results indicated that meal planner's nutritional considerations while making food purchase decisions had little effect on the participation level decisions, but did affect purchase frequency of snack peanuts. Those household meal planners who were overly concerned about undesirable nutritional factors tended to decrease their purchase of snack peanuts. Promotion of snack peanuts on the basis of nutritional benefits through health professional and media is a useful tool to increase purchase frequency.

Ecosystem restoration planning poses many challenges in deciding what the objectives of restoration will be and how to achieve them. Multiattribute utility choice analysis was used in this study to identify public preferences in Florida for restoration of the Everglades/South Florida ecosystem. The analysis utilized both structural (species populations) and functional (water levels and timing) attributes to represent states of the ecosystem in conjunction with other attributes to represent social tradeoffs in restoration planning. Statistical results on the relative weighting of different attributes indicated strong preferences for Everglades restoration were tempered by concern for the consequences of restoration decisions on municipal water users and agricultural landowners. Multiattribute choice approaches provide a framework to integrate the work of natural and social scientists in adaptive management of ecosystem restoration planning and to provide better information for resource managers about public preferences for different types and levels of restoration.