Some thoughts from the Sociology of Consumption

1. Some thoughts from the Sociology of Consumption • Dale Southerton

2. Introduction • Sociological enquiries interested in questions like: • How we come to eat particular foods, in specific formats, and in particular orders? • Why do social groups eat different variants of meals? • What are the rules, norms and rituals that accompany different eating events? • Why is the practice of eating patterned as it is, and what are the trajectories of those patterns?

3. Food and Culture • Anthropology (e.g. Mary Douglas): • Food content and events are hierarchically ranked. • The content of meals and eating events present a cultural symbolic hierarchy that governs what, when and how we eat. • Sociological (e.g. Bourdieu): • What and how we eat derived from our ‘habitus’ and played out through processed of identification and differentiation. • For example, taste for necessity. • What constitutes good, appropriate, ‘tasty’ or satisfying foods is both culturally derived and socially varied in relatively ordered ways.

4. Food anxieties (& micro-politics) • Food anxieties located in four over-lapping categories (Warde, 2011): physical; economic; symbolic; social and moral. • Many anxieties presented in the context of the demise of the ‘proper meal’ (which is a normative ideal), often presented as being undermined by: • The proliferation of formerly unavailable foodstuffs, and new food technologies; • The spread of specialised diets such as vegetarianism; • Shifts in family and household structure; • Changes in the distribution of paid and unpaid labour across the sexes; • Significant increases in eating out.

5. Meal Occasions • What constitutes normal ways of eating? What are the trajectories of normality? • Looking at changes across space provides one way of revealing the ‘normal’ ways of life that underpin the patterning of meal occasions…

6. Timing of Eating Events in Spain

8. And changes over time, e.g. during the post war period in the UK: • Decline of lunch as the main meal of the day and rise of the sarnie • Cooked breakfast declines • Dinner becomes the main meal of the day • Significant rise of eating out – and types of eating out • The processes that underpin normal eating patterns are difficult to explain as the outcome of ‘behavioural change’). • Variations across space and changes over time carry their own particular resource-intensities that underpin ‘normal’ patterns of eating. • Yet, in the context of sustainable food, rarely is it considered which patterns of normal eating are more or less sustainable.

9. Provisioning and Eating Systems • How do we provision eating practices? • Can shifts away from self-serviced food cultures be directed in more sustainable ways? Could include: • Re-institutionalisation of lunchtime meals (at work?) • Death of the kitchen (or, less dramatically, reduction of home cooked meals)

10. Conclusion • A highly stylized summary of the sociology of food consumption would suggest that the critical foci of analysis should be the meal occasion and: • the rules and norms that govern their satisfactory performance; • how those rules and norms vary across social groups; • the ways in which meal occasions are socially (and temporally) ordered; • and, how those meals are provisioned.