Content area
Full text
European and Mediterranean trends and challenges in the 21st century
Edited by Rudi Kaufmann and Shlomo Tarba
1. Introduction
Healthy lifestyle is mainly based on carefully chosen food. Fast life pace and heavy media exposure led to a change in lifestyle in terms that consumers became more aware of the need to live healthy lives and eat healthy foods. Education, proper information, product availability and price, all influence healthy food buying decisions. However, despite a huge amount of information, there is still too little knowledge about healthy food, and let alone reasons for why people buy it. Generally speaking, buying decisions are influenced by a set of internal and external factors and the consumer's mind still remains a black box.
Primarily, it is important to define the difference between healthy food, eco food, bio food, and organic food. Specific definitions of health and healthy food have become available in health-related literature. The World Health Organization defined health as a "state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity" ([23] Murray, 1973). The term "healthy food" is not legally defined in most countries although it has been marketed for more than a century ([18] Hue and Kim, 1997; [21] Kwak and Jukes, 2001). In a Financial Times report, health foods are defined as "all food and drink products which consumers can consider to be beneficial or advantageous to their health" ([24] Northcroft, 1995; [21] Kwak and Jukes, 2001). This definition does not clarify the scope of healthy food, but explains how this term has been used in the real world.
Organic or bio food, unlike health food, is a much stricter and more clearly defined term. Organic food is a produce of organic farming, which is a type of farming that sets very strict limits on the amount of artificial synthetic inputs allowed. That is so because of what is claimed that these inputs do to nature and the body, and to a lesser extent, the environmental damage caused in producing the inputs. These inputs include the ones used in production (fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, etc.) and processing (food additives, including artificial flavourings, preservatives and colourings). In an organic farming, the crops per ha are 20-40 per...