Human contact with food
Read the 4 human contact with food items: raw mean, concrete examples, missing responses and interpretation limits.
Add the 4 numeric 1–6 ratings and divide by 4, rounding to one decimal. Any unscored response withholds this part’s mean. The eight means are separate; no total, norm or cutoff is calculated.
The source human-contamination part
- The source calls this part Human contamination. Its four scenes concern food from a barely known neighbor, a friend biting your bread, a shared drinking glass and friends or acquaintances touching food. Here the label identifies those contact situations. It does not mean that a person is contaminated or that a relationship is unsafe.
- Rate the disgust you imagine, without having to accept or refuse any real food. Your reaction may depend on the person and circumstances you picture, but the questionnaire does not collect those details. If the scene cannot support a rating you wish to give, choose the unscored option and continue or stop.
All four contact ratings are required
- With ratings of 1, 1, 5 and 5, the sum is 12 and the raw mean is 3.0. Four ratings of 3 give the same mean but do not describe the same pattern. The source items remain separate in your response review, where you can see which scene received which rating.
- Each item accepts a numeric value from 1 to 6 or an unscored response. All four must be numeric for this part’s mean; one unscored choice withholds this part only. The website does not fill a missing rating from your answers to poor-hygiene items or from another person’s average.
Describe a reaction, not social trust
- A greater mean indicates greater stated disgust across the four contact scenes. It does not measure trust, generosity, friendliness or how much you value other people. Accepting food and imagining contact with it involve many considerations that these four disgust ratings cannot separate.
- A lower mean is not evidence of weaker boundaries or that every contact situation feels acceptable. One particular item may still evoke a strong reaction. There are no social-personality types or relationship recommendations attached to the mean, and no population norm is applied to call a response normal or abnormal.
A familiar friend and a barely known neighbor
- A person may give a lower rating to a friend sharing a glass and a higher rating to receiving food from a neighbor they barely know. Another person may react more strongly to the shared glass. Either pattern can arise from the specific imagined scenes; the average does not explain the reason.
- You do not need to enter a friend’s name, a neighbor’s identity or a private event. Keep any real example to yourself if you use one to understand the wording. The result cannot assess whether someone else has respected an agreement or violated a boundary.
Contact differs from a named hygiene scene
- Poor-hygiene items name preparation or utensil details; these contact items name another person’s involvement. The two parts may have different means for the same respondent. That does not make the response inconsistent, and one part cannot supply a missing rating in the other.
- Animal flesh and fish items concern different objects and sensory details again. Do not combine the eight means into a general avoidance identity. The published framework distinguishes food-related situations, while the website reports the eight complete-part means independently.
A counterexample about boundaries
- You can experience little disgust and still decline shared food for a practical reason. You can also feel disgust while choosing not to discuss it. Thus neither accepting nor declining is determined by the score. The questionnaire gives no rule about what you owe someone or how you should handle a social invitation.
- An imagined response is not a food-safety assessment, an infection estimate or a diagnosis of contamination-related distress. The test offers no assurance that a low-rated scene is safe and no conclusion that a high-rated scene reveals a condition. Real concerns require their own context.
Reflect without involving another person
- If useful, compare two of your own ratings and notice whether the imagined familiarity, contact or food detail differs. Leaving the reason uncertain is acceptable. You do not need to ask anyone to share utensils or recreate a contact scene to understand the result.
- You can finish here. Sharing a public title and link is optional and carries no private mean or answer record. If you choose to talk about a personal reaction, describe it as your own experience rather than using a scale label to characterize another person.
Source, edition and attribution
- The 32 English prompts come from Supplementary Table 2 of García-Gómez L, Romero-Rebollar C, Hartmann C, Siegrist M, Ferreira G, Gutierrez-Aguilar R, Villalpando S and Pacheco-Lopez G (2020), Food Disgust Scale: Spanish Version, Frontiers in Psychology 11:165, DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00165, reused under CC BY 4.0. The document was supplied through NLM’s PMC open-access collection. This page selects the complete English bank and the article’s 1–6 endpoints; the Spanish table’s printed 1–5 format is not used.
- Changes comprise a fresh Chinese working translation from English, optional unscored responses, complete-part missingness handling, one-decimal display and original explanatory readings. This is not the validated Spanish administration or a validated Chinese version, and source research does not validate this website. No original-author endorsement, norm, diagnosis or food-safety judgment is implied.