Consumer behaviour in Italy. Who spends more to buy Mediterranean diet?

Mediterranean diet is a term used to describe the traditional eating habits of people around the Mediterranean and that refers to a healthy eating model, with significant nutrition and health benefits. However, many studies have emphasised an increasing erosion of the Mediterranean diet heritage, also in Italy. Starting from the assumption that evolution of human nutrition, if it occurs rapidly, can only be conceptualised as a social phenomenon, this study intends to explore the relationship between purchase behaviour for typical Mediterranean diet food and some socioeconomic and geographic characteristics of the Italian households. Italy’s food purchase microdata in 2013 were used to describe three different purchasing behaviours among households and a multinomial logit model was applied to model nominal outcome variables in relationship with socioeconomic variables. Results suggest that families with older and more educated respondents have a higher probability to purchase Mediterranean diet food, while spending more on out-of-home eating or living far away from an urban area, seems to reduce this probability.