Appetite, 1992, 19, 56-60 Commentary Towards Scientific Realism in Eating Research D. A. BOOTH School of Psychology, University of Birmingham Herb Meiselman has unique quantities and variety of data on frequencies of choice among foodstuffs and the average amounts consumed at real meals in real situations. Although he purports to exclude verbal data from his review (don’t fieldworkers make records?), he has also been known to ask the customers questions, in writing at least. Meiselman (1992) pleads eloquently for more use of real-life methods like his. It’s unclear to me, though, how this will help “theory in human eating research” which is coupled with methodology in the title of his article. Field studies to date have unfortunately been even less help than laboratory studies in understanding factors that control eating by people, to which Meiselman (1992) states his research interests have shifted. The diagnosis of mine he quotes, that “The study of human food consumption [is] subscientific” (Booth, 1987a), was applied to uptakes and ratings from catering situations no less than to observations from sensory tests or test-snack intakes. I was pointing out that current research of all sorts typically confounds the factors liable to be controlling eating. Often, important sources of influence are not even measured, let alone factored out, be they sensory, somatic or social. Even how the eater’s thinking is affected by particular factors is generally not assessed. That is, the quotation was not referring in the first instance, as Meiselman takes it, to neglect of individualized causal analysis-essential though that is to character- ize interactions among factors where they really operate. Nonetheless, it should be noted that individual methodology is not limited to ‘laboratory-based experiments on simple food models” (Meiselman, 1992); we have applied it to ethnographic (open-ended) interviews (Figure l), as indicated in papers alluded to by Meiselman (Booth, 1987~; Booth & Blair, 1989) and elsewhere (Booth, 1988a, 1990); it is applicable to food uptake observations in the field, as indicated indirectly in different ways in the work Meiselman cites by de Castro et al. (1990) and our within- subject experiments in animals (e.g. Baker et al., 1987; Booth & Davis, 1973; Gibson & Booth, 1989). The first prerequisite for scientific understanding of eating and drinking is not individualization. It is observations that separate out the different factors operating within and across perceptions of the foods, the body and the social and physical Address correspondence to David Booth, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, U.K. 0195-6663/92/040056+05 %08.00/O 0 1992 Academic Press Limited