(P19-005-24) Differences in Household Cooking Practices by Food System Typology and Gender Across 135 Countries From 2018 to 2022

Objectives: To explore if cooking lunch and dinner at home is associated with food system typologies and whether these associations differed by gender.

Methods: A repeated cross-sectional sample from the Gallup World Poll (GWP), covering years 2018 to 2022, provided an analytic sample of 638,192 participants, aged 15-100 years in 135 countries. Unadjusted and adjusted negative binomial regression models overall and stratified by gender estimated differences over time and by five food system typologies in the mean number of days cooking lunch and dinner (meals) at home per week. Individual-level covariates were drawn from GWP, while country-level measures were drawn from the Food Systems Dashboard and the World Bank.

Results: Overall, the unadjusted mean number of days cooking meals at home ranged from 2.83 days (95% CI: 2.79, 2.88) in 2018 to 3.09 (95% CI: 3.04, 3.14) in 2021. Adjusted for all covariates,  participants from emerging and diversifying and industrial and consolidated food systems cooked meals at home on average 13% (95% CI: 1.10, 1.16, P < 0.001) and 5% (95% CI: 1.03, 1.08, P < 0.001) more in 7 days as compared to participants in rural and traditional food systems. Compared to males, females cooked meals at home 214% more in 7 days (P < 0.001). Pairwise comparisons suggest that across most food system typologies, the predicted mean number of days cooking meals at home gradually increased between 2018 to 2019, peaking in 2020 and 2021 (depending on gender) and then declined in 2022, trending towards pre-pandemic levels.

Conclusions: Across the globe, COVID-19 shocked food systems, shifted cooking behaviors and exacerbated gender disparities in frequency of cooking meals at home. Future research should examine differences in diet quality for meals cooked at home by food system type to better understand nutrition transition at global, national, and local levels.

Funding Sources: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. BC was supported by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research Banting Fellowship and Columbia Climate School Postdoctoral program. JAW was supported by the National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health.