Exploring the dynamics of food routines: a practice-based study to understand households’ daily life (original) (raw)
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1 Designing for Sustainable Food Practices in the Home
2016
Activities around food have implications for the environment, personal nutrition, identity, and social relationships. As a way of understanding how daily routines evolve, practice theory (a theory of social action from sociology) provides a framework through which the complexities around consumer food habits can be understood and reveal avenues for design interventions. The theory considers practices themselves as the basic unit of enquiry, where “practices ” are routine activities made up of materials, conventions and skills and the relationships between them. This paper explores households ’ food-related practices using a practice theory approach, as well as methods by which the theory can be applied in the design process. On the one hand its explicit inclusion of the material world in shaping practice has clear relevance for design. However, the complex ways in which materiality interacts with abstract notions such as convention and skill raise challenges regarding its applicatio...
Designing for sustainable food practices in the home
2010
Activities around food have implications for the environment, personal nutrition, identity, and social relationships. As a way of understanding how daily routines evolve, practice theory (a theory of social action from sociology) provides a framework through which the complexities around consumer food habits can be understood and reveal avenues for design interventions. The theory considers practices themselves as the basic unit of enquiry, where "practices" are routine activities made up of materials, conventions and skills and the relationships between them. This paper explores households' food-related practices using a practice theory approach, as well as methods by which the theory can be applied in the design process. On the one hand its explicit inclusion of the material world in shaping practice has clear relevance for design.
Journal of Consumer Culture, 2011
In this article, we discuss the challenges of analytical translations between practice theory and empirical research methods in consumption research. We argue that a social constructivist interpretation of practice theory can be particularly useful in enabling consumption researchers to carry out empirical studies that are different from mainstream approaches to consumer culture. Such mainstream approaches typically privilege either individual consumer choices or cultural structures outside of the reach of consumers. We highlight two analytical affordances from social constructivist practice theory. The first is to enable consumption researchers to analyse ways of consuming and how these are entangled in webs of social reproductions and changes. The second is to allow consumption researchers to understand ways of consuming as continuous relational accomplishments in intersectings of multiple practices in everyday life. We discuss the methodological implications for data-production and data-analysis from these two analytical affordances on the basis of our empirical qualitative study of the handling of nutritionalized contestation of food consumption among Pakistani Danes.
Everyday life: A home economics concept
This paper discusses the concept of everyday life and suggests that the everyday sustains humanity. As a concept, the everyday differs from family well-being, quality of life and standard of living. To illustrate these differences, lay notions of time (repetition/routine), space (home) and modality (habits), which comprise the concept of the everyday, are reinterpreted. Rather than assuming everyday life is a time of week, a set of activities or a setting for activities habitually performed within a family unit, this paper frames the everyday as a new philosophical stance, intending that the everyday become sacred, to be held in awe, respect and reverence. The everyday lives of families are the very basis of humanity; hence, they warrant our attention as a key focus of our practice.
The social meaning and function of household food rituals in preventing food waste
Journal of Cleaner Production, 2018
Many studies have blamed consumers for their behaviors leading to food wastage, and a growing body of literature is analyzing the specific dynamics of everyday domestic food practices in terms of food waste. This study draws on these recent social practice theory studies to analyze the social meaning behind the practice of discarding food and the role that household food rituals play: (1) in shaping the social meaning of food and (2) in spurring care about food waste (and ultimately reducing the amount of food wasted). Both Q-methodology and semi-structured interviews are applied to analyze the food rituals of 21 households in an Amsterdam neighborhood. The findings show that in ten out of the 21 households analyzed household food rituals help not only to shape the meaning households give to food but also to institutionalize care about food waste, thereby contributing to the decrease of the amount of food wasted at the household level. Despite its small sample, this research contributes to enlarge the body of literature that analyzes the potential role of household food rituals in institutionalizing a change in meaning regarding food waste. Also, by combining Qmethodology with semi-structured interviews, this study explores innovative methodological avenues for practice theory research investigation of household food waste.
Waste Management and Sustainable Consumption, 2014
Waste reduction is a substantive problem, and one that reflects broader societal challenges posed by the ideal of sustainable consumption. Consistent with dominant approaches to sustainable consumption, there is a tendency to treat waste either as a matter of production-side inefficiencies or the responsibility of consumers (either individuals or households) who need to be encouraged or empowered to adopt pro-environmental behaviours and lifestyle choices. Regardless of orientation, debate is firmly rooted in attempts to render today’s ‘normal ways of life’ more efficient and less wasteful. As with broader debates about sustainable consumption, today’s ‘normalities’ are rarely questioned or examined with respect to alternative arrangements for the organization of daily life. The consequence is a fractured, often domain or sector specific, and piecemeal approach to tackling sustainable consumption that fails to consider the inter-connections between the multiple processes and practices from which contemporary everyday lives are configured. This chapter seeks to locate and explore food waste through the application of a practice theoretical lens. As the next section shows, accounts of food waste tend to focus on the acquisition of food for household consumption, and the impacts of packaging and food standards on the ways people appreciate food. It is suggested that such approaches present consumption as primarily a matter of individual action and food consumption as an almost entirely private domestic affair. Section three introduces theories of practice as a corrective to these over-emphases before exploring how we might begin to conceptualize eating practices and what light such understandings can shed on food waste. Section four briefly demonstrates the potential application of these ideas using a recent survey of eating patterns conducted in the UK (N=2784) to show how the context of meal occasions hold significant explanatory value for predicting the production of surplus food. The chapter concludes by suggesting that a conceptual framework developed from theories of practice offers new avenues for research that circumvents the current myopic focus on particular aspects of food consumption, and the conceptual tendency to default to methodological individualism. This framework has three principle lines of enquiry: 1) to explore eating as a compound practice; 2)to examine the sequential organization of constituent activities from which compound eating practices are comprised, and 3) to take account of the inter-connections across the broader practices that make up everyday life.
Nature and Culture, 2014
Based on empirical data on “green” practices according to household size, this article questions the role, if any, given to close personal relationships by social practice theories in sustaining or not daily life practices. Data are mainly drawn from an Internet survey conducted in Belgium in 2006 by WWF-Belgium on daily practices, related to food, energy consumption, mobility, and tourism. Results show that smaller households carry out more numerous “green” practices than larger ones. The concluding discussion underlines the relevance of including social interactions—namely within the household—into the conceptual framework derived from the social theories of practices, to take into account the rearticulating role of social interactions and domestic power claims when carrying out a practice or a set of practices, and when changing it.
Conceptualising everyday practices: composition, reproduction and change
Carbon Neutral Communities working paper, 2010
Behaviour change and demand management strategies currently overlook the reasons why people use resources, how these 'needs' and 'wants' are constituted, and how they are changing within the broader context of everyday life, where day-to-day practices, such as bathing, cooking, laundering and house cleaning, take place. This oversight is concerning because practices are continuing to shift and change, often in more resource-consuming directions, potentially negating the resource savings achieved.
Managing routine food choices in UK families: The role of convenience consumption
Appetite, 2006
The paper explores the meaning of convenience food for UK mothers, investigating the relationship between mothers and their families’ food. The study examines the role of convenience food within the food strategies of contemporary UK families, and aims to elicit consumption meanings in the broader social context of family relationships with food, their rituals, routines and conventions. The findings reveal convenience has multiple meanings for UK women, and that convenience food has been incorporated into reinterpreted versions of homemade and “proper” meals. A hierarchy of acceptable convenience food is presented by the mothers, who tackle complex and conflicting family routines by introducing convenience solutions. Rules of eating have evolved, yet remain essentially controlled by the mother in terms of nutrition. While the traditional model of “proper” food remains aspirational, contemporary family lifestyles require that convenience food become part of the equation.
Devising food consumption: complex households and the socio-material work of meal box schemes
Consumption Markets & Culture, 2020
The aim of this paper is to explore how digitally-enabled food provisioning platforms reconfigure households' food consumption. Taking a market studies approach, and drawing on an ethnographic study of 15 households signing up to meal box schemes, the paper examines how meal box schemes, as market devices, work towards materiallysemiotically organising household food consumption. Analysis shows that the process of devising food consumption is demanding, dynamic and complex. While these market devices had to be worked into households, and thus demanded considerable work on the part of consumers, they also worked for consumers, performing an array of material-semiotic tasks for them, making their everyday food practices more convenient, adding food variation, and enabling them to pursue multiple food aspirations. During this process, market devices did not govern consumers nor did consumers domesticate market devices. Instead, market devices and consumers were locked in a complex and unstable process of mutual configuration.