For the most part, the career of CUBE researcher Ana Isabel Costa has revolved around food consumption behavior – not only what people choose to eat, but, more importantly, how they choose to eat it. Chiefly among her research interests is home cooking: a behavior which research shows to be associated with better diet quality and family well-being. The challenge is then: how can people be persuaded to cook more at home?
“In an ironic twist of events”, the researcher writes in the presentation of her new project, “Make Do”, “it was Covid-19 that best answered this challenge, and is now effectively forcing millions to stay at home, coping as best as they can with the daunting tasks of planning meals, buying foods and cooking for themselves and their households, day in, day out, in very dire circumstances”.
The “Make Do” project, started by this researcher at the Food Behaviour Lab of Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, together with CUBE researchers Cláudia Simão e Ana Rita Farias and the collaboration of the Online Research Panel - PEO, aims to understand how people are making do with the food they have under tough circumstances, including restricted outdoor mobility, compromised food availability and grocery shopping routines, and scarce away-from-home meal options.
“Make Do” will study the short and long term changes observed in household meal provisioning and preparation behaviors in the aftermath of Covid-19 in Portugal. Find out more about the work being done by the Food Behaviour Lab here, and read all about the studies planned for the “Make Do” project at the FCT’s Science4Covid-19 webpage.