Experiences of the food environment and the role of the ‘routine’ in producing food practices: an ethnography of Sandwell residents
Abstract
Despite a sustained academic interest in food environments and their impact
upon dietary practices, relatively little is known about the ways in which
individuals interact with the food environment. The multiple and complex
factors that influence food choices are difficult to investigate, especially in the
family setting where individual and collective practices intersect. This thesis
investigates how people perform food practices and unpacks how specific
contexts shape, promote and constrain food behaviours. The case study through
which this is examined is that of the food practices of 26 residents of Sandwell, a
uniformly deprived metropolitan borough in the West Midlands. Through
ethnographically collecting accounts and observations of how residents
performed food practices, both in the home and while shopping for food, highly
routinized behaviours were revealed. The notion of routinized decision making,
as it appears in social science research, is developed and adapted to incorporate
descriptions of general approaches to routine food behaviours. The novel
concept of routines-of-practice is employed to characterise these routines in
terms of agency, attitudes towards individualism, and reliance on environmental
and contextual cues.
Food shopping practices are positioned, to an extent, as acts of
consumerism performed in the pervasive consumption environment of the
supermarket. The home, by contrast, was depicted as a site of both privacy and
responsibility. The ways in which responsibility was interpreted and enacted
dictated how family meals and routine home food behaviours were structured.
By looking at food practices in terms of repetitive, context specific and often
uncritical behaviours, this thesis highlights the importance of place in moulding
food practices. Understanding how people interact and interpret their
environment has been underestimated in diet-related health policy and
promotion. This thesis specifically examines the way food practices are
influenced by environment and context at the micro level.
Authors
Thompson, Claire PilarCollections
- Theses [3704]