Are Healthy and Unhealthy Foods Portrayed Differently in Top American Movies?

"No, I don't like green food. Have they got any chips?" "I did find bacon, which is about the most fantastic thing in history." These are just a few lines from characters in top-grossing Hollywood movies talking about food. Whether you've noticed it or not, food is everywhere in movies and past research suggests that movies tend to depict unhealthy foods more frequently than healthy foods.

But beyond just understanding what foods appear in movies, my colleagues and I wondered how healthy is the food that movie characters actually consume on screen? How do characters evaluate healthy and unhealthy foods? Do different types of characters tend to be associated with healthy or unhealthy food? And are these foods shown in different types of settings?

To answer these questions, we analyzed over 9000 food items that appeared in 244 top-grossing movies released between 1994 and 2018. For each food item, we recorded whether characters ever consumed or evaluated the food, the traits of these characters, and the setting the food was shown in—for example, in American versus foreign contexts or social versus nonsocial situations. Each food item was also assigned a Nutrient Profile Index score, a validated nutritional rating system which awards or subtracts points based on the food's nutritional composition. This way, we could see whether the healthiness of food varied based on whether characters ate or evaluated the food and the context the food appeared in.

In these movies, foods that characters actually consumed on screen were less healthy than foods that characters didn't consume. Furthermore, foods that characters evaluated positively were less healthy than foods that characters evaluated negatively. A positive evaluation like, "Try one of these, they are divine!" was more likely to be used to describe unhealthy food whereas a negative evaluation like, "What are you serving here? This stuff is nasty," was more likely to be used to describe healthy food.

We also found that foods depicted in American settings and in social situations were less healthy than foods shown in non-American and non-social contexts. Finally, we found that child characters (compared to adult characters) consumed more unhealthy foods, and evaluated unhealthy foods more positively, and healthy foods more negatively. There were no differences in the healthiness of food that was consumed or evaluated based on characters' gender or race and ethnicity. We did note, however, that there was a relatively low number of ethnically diverse characters interacting with food in the movies. For example, only three Asian characters ever evaluated a food item across all the movies we analyzed.

The negative portrayal of healthy food in movies may seem unsurprising, given that healthy foods tend to have a bad reputation in American culture. However, if Americans already hold negative attitudes towards healthy foods, then movies may only reinforce these beliefs and make them stronger and more normalized. But could movies help shape more positive norms and attitudes about healthy foods? Just as movies tend to show less smoking today than they did several decades ago, perhaps these depictions of healthy foods as less enjoyable, less American, and less social could one day be seen as a relic of the past.

For Further Reading

Turnwald, B. P., Horii, R. I., Markus, H. R., & Crum, A. J. (2022). Psychosocial context and food healthiness in top-grossing American films. Health Psychology, 41(12), 928–937. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0001215. A version of this piece was previously published in the APA Journals Article Spotlight.

Rina Horii is a graduate student studying social psychology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She is interested in the psychology of food and eating, with a specific interest in culturally-based beliefs about food.