Nutritional Attitudes: A Comparison of Russian Millennials with Previous Generations

The current majority of Russians can be divided into 1) the Soviet generation, 2) the reform generation, and 3) the generation that socialized in the relatively stable conditions of modern Russia. That is Baby Boom (born in 1947-1967), 2) generation X (born in 1968-1981) and 3) generation Y (millennials) (born in 1982-2000). There are some spheres of life in which millennials differ from previous generations, including the nutrition practices. The relevance of the work is simple: millennials socialized in conditions of an abundance of products and the opportunity to purchase them, the previous generations didn’t have such situation. The main idea of this work was to explain the impact of market changes on the formation and consolidation of attitudes of “new” adults. This study focused not on nutrition itself, but attitudes toward it. The aim of the work was to identify the nutrition attitudes peculiarities of Russian millennials in comparison with previous generations. Based on literature review, three approaches of nutrition were distinguished: ethical, functional, and cultural-normative. The data were analyzed based on the hypothetical affiliation of statements to one of the approaches. K. Mannheim research was the theoretical framework of this study. The study was conducted on the database of the Russian Target Groups Index. T – test, factor analysis, cluster analysis, and discriminant analysis were applied in the work. Data was also analyzed using retrospective analysis. As a result, using a retrospective analysis, it turned out that the differences between generations are affected by the effects of period and age. When controlling the effects, it is noticeable that for some reason all millennials do not retain the attitudes formed in the formative years. Only the statement “I prefer vegetarian food” is characteristic of millennials when taking into account three types (cross-section analysis, analysis of temporary changes and long-term analysis) of the data measurements that were indicated in the retrospective analysis. Hypothesis 1 about the characteristic of ethical attitudes was only partially confirmed, since it cannot be said that the statement “I am willing to pay more if I know that the product is eco-friendly” is characteristic only of millennials, and the statement about vegetarianism is characteristic of millennials. Snacks are not typical for millennials, so hypothesis 2 has not been confirmed. Within the millennials, the vegetarian concept is related only to women, therefore hypothesis 3a was confirmed, and hypotheses 3b and 3c were disproved, since employment and type of work do not affect the increase in the proportion of agreement with this attitude. Hypothesis 4 was also not confirmed, since the share of ethical millennials decreased by 2016 year, as well as the share of those who agreed with functional statements. However, an explanation was proposed for this, which consists in the perception of vegetarianism as a health concern, which led to an increase in agreement with this statement in the generation Y in comparison with the previous generations. Accordingly, in the coming years, a slight progressive increase in the proportion of agreements with the vegetarian concept among millennials can be predicted, since millennials are more perceived as taking care of their health, millennials will age, and health care for people becomes more relevant at older ages, which also shown in this study.