Classification of Food Challenges and Values Based on Open-ended Responses
Authors: Ito Kyoko , Fukuda Yosuke 
Published: January 2025

Emerging technology refers to new, unestablished, and not widely recognized science and technology, and differs from existing science and technology that has widely penetrated society and occupies a definite position . One of the emerging technology is genome-edited crops. In terms of climate change risks and population growth, the potential of novel foods has a significant impact on food security. On the other hand, it has not been fully accepted by society at this time. In order for attitudes toward genome-edited crops to be formed in the future, it is believed that adequate information must be provided to the general public. In doing so, it is expected that providing information tailored to the orientation and values of each person, rather than providing the same information to all people, will lead to effective information provision. This study aims to analyze each person's food challenges and values considering their acceptability and knowledge of genome-edited agricultural product, and personality characteristics, and to derive findings that will lead to the provision of appropriate information.As a first step, the purpose of this study is to classify the challenges and values toward food based on the open-ended statements in the questionnaire survey and summarize the characteristics of each.2.MethodIn this study, a questionnaire survey was conducted on the following items:-Attributes (gender, age, place of residence, marital status, family composition living together, occupation)-Acceptability of genome-edited crops (8 foods)-Knowledge related to genome-edited crops (5 items)-Personality (10 items)-Food Challenges (Are there any new foods or dishes you have tried recently? Tell us about that experience)-Food Values (What factors do you think are most important in your food choices? Please be specific, indicating your own experiences) The survey was conducted on 2000 Japanese men and women in February 2024 via a research company. The age range was 20s to 60s, each comprising 20% of the total population, with half of the male and half of the female population in each age group.The respondents were asked to answer the questions “Food Challenges” and “Food Values” in free-text form, and to write at least 140 characters in Japanese.3.ResultThe two questions answered in the open-ended responses were classified using BERTopic, a natural language processing technique. BERTopic is a method of topic analysis using sentence vectors obtained with Sentence-BERT. Here, UMAP is used to reduce the dimensionality of the sentence vector and HDBSCAN is used for clustering. This allows for the creation of clusters of semantically similar responses. Here, clusters with a sample size of 5 or more were extracted. As a result, 75 and 57 clusters were obtained for “Food Challenges” and “Food Values,” respectively. Mapping in two dimensions also allowed us to identify broad categories of responses to “Food Challenges” and “Food Values,” from which 10 and 9 categories were extracted, respectively.4.Conclusion This study targeted genome-edited crops as one of the emerging technology, and aimed to provide appropriate information to promote social acceptance. Specifically, we categorized “Food Challenges” and “Food Values” based on free-response statements in a questionnaire survey of 2,000 Japanese men and women. As a result, 10 and 9 categories were found, respectively.In the future, we will analyze the results together with the results of other questionnaire items and consider how to provide information suitable for each orientation and sense of values.