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The study was conducted within the framework of the chair of “Food Studies: Food, Cultures and Health” created jointly by Taylor’s University (Malaysia) and the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès (France). The Malaysian Food Barometer (MFB) is a recurrent survey focusing on the transformations of food patterns of the Malaysian population. MFB works with national representative samples from a socio-anthropological theoretical standpoint. Since the 1990s, two major nutrition surveys namely the first Malaysian Adult Nutrition Survey MANS 2003 (1), which was repeated in 2014. However, these studies focus on individual food consumption, assessed in terms of nutritional composition of the diet, including some basic sociodemographical characteristics. MFB is a complementary survey to MANS (2003 and 2014) that explore in depth the sociological and ethnological dimensions of Malaysian food habits. The MFB collects face-to-face data on food-related practices including social norms, attitudes, cultural representations, and routines and their supposed sociocultural and demographic determinants. The focus includes the repartition of food practices at home and away from home, sources of food, food socialization of the meals and food intakes, food temporality, and perception of risks in food. A series of indexes were assigned to individuals within the phenomena of transition (demographic, nutrition, food, and protein) and of “compacted modernization” experienced by some Asian countries (2–5).

The theoretical objective of the project consists of studying the social, ethnic, and cultural diversification of food patterns of Malaysians and its changes …