Neglected and Underutilized Legumes (NULs): Exposure Assessment, Habitual Cooking and Eating Habits and Consumers’ Characteristics

Abstract

Many people usually consume neglected and underutilized legumes (NULs) as stop gap diets, making the legumes a critical food security resource. In order to ensure their sustainability, a survey was designed to study the characteristics of 534 respondents towards NULs processing and consumption. The survey questions covered habitual thermal processing times of NULs seeds, the quantities of NULs dishes consumed and the number of times they were consumed per week. Other questions covered consumer characteristics such as age, body weight, educational background, occupation, marital status and household numbers. The statistical analysis used Palisade @Risk software to fit each study item to the most adequate probabilistic distribution, based on their Akaike information criterion. Subsequently, the central tendency characteristics of the studied items together with their variations and uncertainties were recorded. The results showed quantified exposure assessment of each NUL, obtained as an integration of the product of the amount of NULs dishes consumed and the exposure frequency of each NULs dishes consumed per body weights of consumers. Similarly, the output of consumer characteristics were recorded along the statistical distributions of each specific NUL’s consumption. These were linked to the ages of individuals consuming it, the household numbers of consumers, the educational levels, marital status and the occupation of the respondents.