Religion, Religiosity, and the Consumption Of Timesaving Foods

This paper studies the effect of the intensity of religiosity within a specific religion affiliation on the consumption of food inputs. Religions set a system of rules that established social norms; religiosity determines the degree of conformity with these social norms. Religion’s norms affect the choice of meals directly by forbidding certain foods and indirectly by imposing cultural and social norms that affect income, time constrain and attitude toward leisure. The paper combines the family production framework with the concept of social norms and derive several hypotheses that are tested with data collected in Israel on purchases of four types of chicken: fresh whole, fresh cut , frozen whole and frozen cut. Frozen versus fresh stands for modernity versus convenience, whole versus cut confronts price, cooking time, income and perception of morality of leisure. We find that in some cases, preferences for traditional lifestyles dominate immediate economic considerations.