The gatekeeping metaphor was originally introduced by the German-American social psychologist Kurt Lewin in 1947. The key concepts in Lewin’s theory which primarily focuses on changing the food habits of a population are channel, gate, gatekeeper and force. For Lewin (1947, 144-145), the food moves through some channels in order to reach the family table, and there are certain areas (i.e. gates) within channels where decisions on what to select and what to discard are continuously made by individual gatekeepers.
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