Interpreting Nutrition Authority in the Dairy Aisle: A TrioCanon Conceptual Framework for Un- derstanding Responses to Competing Claims About Milk

Milk is rarely encountered by shoppers as a purely nutritional product. Instead, it may function as a complex symbolic and informational object situated within a landscape of competing institutional messages, commercial claims, ethical concerns, cultural traditions, and personal belief systems. This conceptual paper presents the Trio Canon framework, an exploratory behavioral model proposing that shoppers may interpret nutrition authority through three interacting psychological orientations: Deference to Expertise, Skepticism of Institutional Narratives, and Alignment With Personal or Cultural Values. Within this framework, authority is conceptualized not as a fixed or universally accepted construct, but as a dynamic negotiation involving trust, doubt, identity, emotional reassurance, and meaning-making. The paper examines how shoppers may interpret labels, certifications, endorsements, nutritional claims, ethical messaging, and cultural signals while navigating the dairy aisle under conditions of informational complexity and cognitive load. The framework further explores how emotional states, personal experience, social influence, and symbolic food meanings may shape authority interpretation and food-related decision-making. Through conceptual analysis, illustrative behavioral simulations, and psychologically informed interpretation, the dairy aisle is presented as a behavioral microcosm reflecting broader contemporary negotiations involving expertise, institutional trust, identity, and uncertainty within modern information environments. Although exploratory and conceptual in nature, the TrioCanon framework offers a structured perspective for examining authority interpretation in food behavior and may support future research involving nutritional communication, consumer psychology, retail environments, and behavioral science.