The Study of Villagers’ Perception of Local Food and Why It Is Not Welcomed (Case Study of Rural Communities in Dashtestan County)

Local food is a mixture of culture and lifestyle of the people of a region, which has a high value in terms of nutritional value and health of food. But in recent years, the use of these foods has been forgotten for various reasons and most of them are outdated. Therefore, in order to keep them in people’s food culture, it is necessary to study the reasons of their elimination in order to develop a basic program to revive the forgotten traditional and local foods. In this regard, the aim of this study, in the paradigm of qualitative research, is to investigate the definitions and obstacles to the use and promotion of local foods in rural communities of Dashtestan County. Therefore, knowledgeable individuals and theoretical experts in the rural areas of Dashtestan County formed the statistical population of the study, which was subjected to in-depth semi-structured interviews. To determine the number of samples, the snowball technique was used and interviews continued until data saturation. Finally, the number of participants in the study reached 25 subjects. Data were collected and analyzed based on both phenomenology and grounded theory methods. The results show that the rural communities studied have different understandings of the concept of local food. After collecting definitions and knowledge, barriers to the use and promotion of local food were discussed, leading to the identification of 53 concepts. The forgetting of customs, the forgetting of old recipes, the change of cultural tastes, the disappearance of some plants, the unwillingness of the new generation to live in modernity, the unfamiliarity of the new generation with the way of preparing old foods, the rejection of local foods by children, and the emergence of semi-prepared foods Prepared foods and fast foods were identified as the most important obstacles from the point of view of rural communities. Finally, 12 mechanisms were designed to get out of this problem. These mechanisms included governmental, media, technological, educational, informational, economic, motivational, environmental, cultural, social, and human mechanisms, which were put in the form of Strauss and Corbin's theory.