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

Abstract

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.