Mythological Images of Food Security in the Consumer Behavior of Youth in Megacities: a Typology and an Empirical Study

In the modern world, there is a high degree of engagement of young people in megacities with the digital environment, which contributes to the formation of ideas and mythologemes in their public consciousness regarding food security and has a significant impact on the consumer behavior of young people. The aim of the article is to empirically identify and statistically verify the typology of consumers of food security mythologemes in the minds of young people in megacities, as well as to further assess their relationship with consumer behavior. The tasks include: describing the methodology of typologization based on a system of indicators; presenting the distribution of respondents across the identified types of consumers of mythologems; verifying the statistical relationship between the type of consumers of mythologems and consumer behavior. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the development and subsequent empirical verification of four types of consumers of food security mythologemes, including: «advertising eaters», «consumer followers», «realists» and «advertising opponents», using a large-scale online survey of young people in Moscow and St. Petersburg (N = 1460). The practical significance is due to the possibility of using the obtained results to segment the audience in educational programs aimed at improving the media literacy of young people in megacities. Based on the results of the empirical study, the following was established: among the pure types, «consumer followers» predominate (24 % of the sample); the strongest statisticalassociation with the type of consumers of mythologems is characteristic of the variable reflecting the influence of blogger recommendations (Cramer’s V = 0.506, p < 0.001).