The Practice of Eating E-Book

Alan Warde

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 399

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

This book reconstructs and extends sociological approaches to the understanding of food consumption. It identifies new ways to approach the explanation of food choice and it develops new concepts which will help reshape and reorient common understandings. Leading sociologist of food, Alan Warde, deals both with abstract issues about theories of practice and substantive analyses of aspects of eating, demonstrating how theories of practice can be elaborated and systematically applied to the activity of eating.

The book falls into two parts. The first part establishes a basis for a practice-theoretic account of eating. Warde reviews research on eating, introduces theories of practice and constructs eating as a scientific object. The second part develops key concepts for the analysis of eating as a practice, showing how concepts like habit, routine, embodiment, repetition and convention can be applied to explain how eating is organised and coordinated through the generation, reproduction and transformation of a multitude of individual performances.

The Practice of Eating thus addresses both substantive problems concerning the explanation of food habits and currently controversial issues in social theory, illustrated by detailed empirical analysis of some aspects of contemporary culinary life. It will become required reading for students and scholars of food and consumption in a wide range of disciplines, from sociology, anthropology and cultural studies to food studies, culinary studies and nutrition science.

Leseprobe

Copyright page

Copyright © Alan Warde 2016

The right of Alan Warde to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2016 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9170-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9171-8(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Warde, Alan.

The practice of eating / Alan Warde.

    pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7456-9170-1 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-7456-9171-8 (pbk.)    1.  Food habits–Social aspects.    2.  Food consumption–Sicial aspects.     I.  Title.

GN407.W36    2015

394.1′2–dc23

2015019447

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, London

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:

politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

The material for this book was compiled over more than a decade and I have incurred many personal and intellectual debts along the way. The research upon which it is based has been supported materially by the University of Manchester through periods of sabbatical leave, and by the Economic and Social Research Council. A substantial part of the work was conducted at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, where I had the privilege to spend two years from 2010 as the Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professor in Studies on Contemporary Society as a guest of the Erkko Foundation. To these sponsors of my work I record my gratitude. At the University of Manchester I have worked with very many stimulating and helpful colleagues: through the Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition, the Sustainable Consumption Institute and in the Department of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, I have been able to discuss many of my ideas in a congenial atmosphere with teachers, research staff and research students. They are too many to name. Friends and colleagues who made a particular contribution to this book as a result of having worked alongside me as co-researchers on projects about food and eating include Lydia Martens, Dale Southerton, Isabelle Darmon, Luke Yates, Cecilia Díaz-Méndez, Mark Harvey, Andrew McMeekin, Modesto Gayo-Cal, Corinne Wales, Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, David Wright, Unni Kjaernes, Lotte Holm, Mark Tomlinson, Svetlana Kirichenko, Mette Ranta, Wendy Olsen and Shu-Li Cheng. Sincere thanks to all of them. I owe an even greater debt to four people who read the whole of the draft typescript of the book, Jukka Gronow, Anne Murcott, Sue Scott and Dale Southerton. I am profoundly grateful to them. While I have not been able to incorporate all their insightful comments and suggestions, the book would be immeasurably poorer were it not for their generous and kind efforts. I also benefited from the advice of three readers for Polity Press and from the efficient and patient management of the process of publication by Elliott Karstadt.

Alan Warde

Manchester, April 2015

Some of the chapters in this book have been revised in small or large part for publication here. The author and publishers would like to thank the following publishers for permission to reprint:

Oxford University Press for extracts (4 paragraphs) from Ch. 12, ‘Sociology, Consumption, and Habit’ from Alistair Ulph and Dale Southerton (eds) (2014), Sustainable Consumption: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives in Honour of Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, pp. 277−98; and extract (three paragraphs) from Ch. 19, ‘Eating’ in Frank Trentmann (ed.) (2012), Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, pp. 376−95. Reprinted with permission.

Sage Publications for ‘Consumption and the Theory of Practice’ (2005), Journal of Consumer Culture 5(2): 131−54, and ‘After Taste: Culture, Consumption and Theories of Practice’ (2014), Journal of Consumer Culture 14(3): 279−303.

Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group) for ‘What Sort of a Practice is Eating?’, in Elizabeth Shove and Nicola Spurling (eds) (2013), Sustainable Practices: Social Theory and Climate Change, pp. 17−30.

1Introduction

Eating as a Topic of Interest

Public interest in food has increased markedly since the 1980s and scholarly regard has expanded commensurately. Food is a political issue, a matter of leisure and recreation, a topic of health, a resource for media industries, as well as a primary necessity of daily life. Crises in the food system have spurred political parties and social movements to action. A proliferation of food programmes and journalism − on television, in the press and latterly on the internet − has made food and eating a growth area of popular attention and conversation (Rousseau 2012). This reflects new priorities regarding the body and body management, as states, particularly those responsible for funding health care, become more concerned with what people eat. Consequently, food has come under more intense scrutiny from social research. Some aspects of the food system have always attracted scholarly research, and the most prolific contributors remain agriculture, pharmacology, medicine, nutrition, home economics, macro-economics and psychology. However, public preoccupations have made more space for socio-cultural disciplines like anthropology, cultural studies, social geography and sociology to fill major gaps in understanding, not least with respect to failures of policy intervention.

The changing social and economic circumstances occasioned by the post-war boom in the West had the effect of making food relatively cheaper, and older problems of poverty-induced hunger and malnutrition receded. Agribusiness, sustained economic growth, multinational corporations and ever greater international trade transformed the economic foundations of western diets. Abundant, accessible and relatively cheap foodstuffs, sourced globally, presented most people with the possibility of eating in much more varied ways than had been possible for preceding generations. By the end of the twentieth century, food systems had experienced some of the most profound effects of globalization (Inglis and Gimlin 2010). Of course, this did not result in immediate or radical changes in diet or culinary practices for individuals, but there were significant shifts over a few decades at aggregate level, sufficient for serious scholars to diagnose ‘a culinary revolution’ (Panayi 2008).

Increasing variety, and intensified commentary upon and exploitation of that variety, provided a powerful thrust for examining eating as a type of cultural consumption. Social research moved from an almost exclusive focus on processes of production, especially the circulation of commodities in the market sphere, to activities associated with consumption – recreation, aesthetics and the conduct of everyday life. Acknowledging consumption permitted eating to be treated partly autonomously of questions of the availability of foodstuffs; the presumption of a symbiotic relationship between supply and demand was severed by abandoning the assumption that eating be treated primarily as instrumental to physiological reproduction. However, that research emerged in a period increasingly obsessed by concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘the consumer’. The so-called ‘cultural turn’ provided a backdrop and impetus to emergent sociological approaches to food consumption. The legitimation of the study of consumption meant that eating could become a bona fide topic of social research.

The Objectives of the Book

A prodigious amount of empirical research on food and eating is now available, to which socio-cultural disciplines have made a significant contribution. The proliferation of handbooks and encyclopediae present the current state of knowledge on a wide range of discrete topics but their integration and synthesis is proving elusive. The task of pulling the accumulated evidence together is becoming ever more demanding. This is, no doubt, partly the result of the multidisciplinary nature of the study of food. Disciplines have their own particular scientific agendas and tend to be committed to incommensurable theories, which have been formulated over time in relation to particular substantive interests. Their key concepts serve to bracket out those forces, processes and facts considered of no theoretical interest, thus militating against theoretical synthesis. Since theoretical synthesis is more likely to be feasible within a disciplinary tradition, I try to reconstruct and extend sociological approaches, and do so by drawing specifically upon practice-theoretical approaches to consumption.

Eating is a form of consumption. Research on consumption is now vast, having expanded rapidly during the last two decades. Radical new departures in multidisciplinary studies of consumption coincided with ‘the cultural turn’ in the humanities and social sciences in the 1970s. Rather than viewing consumption as an instrumental and practical activity, it came to be seen as a means of communication with others, signalling self-identity through cultivation of distinct ‘lifestyles’. Consumption was recognized as an enjoyable and often constructive process, a process of creative appropriation of goods and services which served commendable personal and sociable ends. Reversing also the prevailing condescension towards popular culture and popular practices expressed by critics of mass culture, the cultural turn demonstrated the meaningfulness of consumption. Consumption was shown to play a role in identity formation and aesthetic expression in everyday life.

It is frustrating that progress in the sociology of consumption was slow to filter into research on food. For consumption research offers many promising avenues for food scholars. One is an opportunity to interrogate the activity of eating more rigorously. How exactly should eating be conceptualized? Of course, most people, for most purposes, leave puzzling about its definition to sociologists and proceed happily several times a day to engage in an activity that comes as second nature. However, what is entailed in consumption of food is not simply a given. It might be thought of as a purely physiological process. Arguably, the interpretive social sciences have paid too little attention to the embodied dimension of physical reproduction entailed in eating. However, it would make little sociological sense to restrict attention solely to processes of bodily incorporation of foodstuffs. All peoples surround the physiological process with conventions about what counts as food, and when, where and with whom eating should occur. Even the comportment of the body is subject to social discipline through manners and etiquette. For sociological purposes, a broader framework of concepts is required to position eating and render it explicable. One task of the book is to make clearer what is at stake in defining eating as an activity and to propose a set of concepts to frame it as a moment of consumption.

By emphasizing communication, agency and engagement, exponents of the cultural turn, while charting the meaningfulness of these activities and items for self-identity, demonstrated how and why people made consumption into personal and social priorities. However, as I have argued elsewhere, cultural analysis had several weaknesses, both in terms of its focus of attention and its theory of action (Warde 2014). Its proclivities included, first, a focus on the display for others of symbols of identity, obscuring the fact that most consumption is ordinary or inconspicuous (Gronow and Warde 2001). Second, to emphasize culture was to downplay social structure (Abbott 2001), eclipsing distinctive features of the social realm, of social interdependence and social interaction, and of status and class. Third, the cultural turn found little place for objects and technologies as material forces. In addition, however, cultural analysis of consumption contained a deeper set of theoretical weaknesses embedded in its general theory of action. Despite its internal diversity, primary recourse was to a voluntaristic theory of action, upholding models of an active, expressive, choosing consumer, motivated by concerns for personal identity and a fashioned lifestyle. The model of an active and reflexive actor predominated, implying that conscious and intentional decisions steer consumption behaviour and explain its sense and direction. In key respects, its model is similar to the sovereign consumer of neo-classical economics, for it effectively shares in the dominant and basic template of consumption which presents the process as one where the individual engages in very many discrete events, characterized by personal deliberation preceding personal, independent decisions made with a view to the satisfaction of preferences. One feature of this book is to explore how far we can advance without the use of such a concept of choice.

Another of my objectives is to demonstrate the benefit to the sociology of food and eating of greater engagement with theories of practice. Theories of practice offer remedies for both the substantive and explanatory deficiencies of cultural analysis. They are not themselves specifically sociological theories. Many different disciplines are currently attempting to apply them to their conceptual and empirical concerns. Yet, even if they belong to no discipline, practice theories have considerable affinity with sociological understandings of everyday life. They are, however, very diverse; Schatzki (2001: 2−3) noted that three diverse currents of thought, post-functionalist, post-structuralist and post-humanist, all found the practice approach attractive. Nicolini (2012) effectively captures their very considerable range. Consequently, even enumerating their common features is controversial. However, against the model of the sovereign consumer, they tend to emphasize routine over actions, flow and sequence over discrete acts, dispositions over decisions and practical consciousness over deliberation. And, in reaction to cultural analysis, emphasis is placed upon doing over thinking, the material over the symbolic, and embodied practical competence over expressive virtuosity in the fashioned presentation of self. The degree to which these features are pronounced bequeaths weaker and stronger variants (Warde 2014: 285−6).

This book avoids purely theoretical arguments and concentrates instead on demonstrating the relevance of the theory to a substantive domain where it matters. Nevertheless, I retain an ambition to indicate how analysis of a particular, complex practice − eating − might enhance the theory of practice, solve some of its puzzles and develop it in ways relevant to the analysis of other practices. One moot point is whether extant theories of practice have the conceptual machinery adequate for distinguishing between different types of practice. It remains debatable whether all practices have the same basic structure and set of characteristics. Given that, on any definition, the social world hosts a great many practices, reflection on the sources of variation is limited. In the absence of an agreed comprehensive typology, I seek to show that there is something special and specific about eating which demands adaptation and development of the theory. I coin the concept of a compound practice, observe different degrees of coordination and regulation of practices, argue that Practices may be conceptualized as entities, and extend the theory to account for the sharing of practices and also how their rudiments, essentials and nuances are imparted to other, and potential future, agents.1

The book oscillates back and forth between the abstractions of theories of practice and substantive analysis of aspects of eating. The aspiration is not only to show that the concepts of practice theory can be applied to eating but also to shed substantive new light on eating. The primary objective is to address explanatory problems and puzzles, and to account for the actuality of how contemporary eating is carried out. Success would entail the identification of some novel and improved accounts of contemporary structure, trends and meaning. I attempt this in relation to the learning of new tastes, the role of handbooks and manuals, the compatibility of diverse performances with integrated Practices, the competing role of cultural intermediaries and their effects on the coordination and regulation of eating, the role of controversy in popular judgements and justifications of behaviour. The evidence I use is, however, little more than a demonstration of the relevance of categories or concepts to the description of unsystematically selected episodes and some illustration of theoretical points. Evidence about contemporary experiences of eating is presented briefly, cursorily and with minimal background, using examples drawn selectively and sparsely from previous research.

The case for theories of practice includes contesting standard modes of social scientific explanation. In line with a long running argument in the sociology of consumption against the concept of choice, practice theories offer a strong alternative by seeking a platform at the meso-level. Rejecting methodological individualisms, emphasis is placed on repetition and on aspects of everyday life which make it impossible to give a satisfactory account of an activity like eating without recognizing its collective and unreflective elements. Standard explanatory models fail to capture the practical, collective, sequential, repetitive and automatic aspects of consumption (Warde and Southerton 2012). First and foremost, standard models presume the defining characteristic of consumption to be purchase, with the manner of appropriation of goods and services within the practices of everyday life at best a subsidiary feature. However, if one considers use as well as purchase, matters are complicated considerably. If consumption is appropriation for the sake of a practice (Warde 2005), it becomes an integral part of everyday life because tools and materials are constitutive of the power to act. Then, consumption is the use of things for the purpose of mundane conduct. Second, the extensive evidence of the social patterning of purchase suggests that ‘decisions’ are not purely personal. In part, they are practical responses to the affordances and constraints of a shared social environment. People conform to the norms of groups to which they are attached. Social groups differ in their views of what is valuable and desirable; tastes are distinguishing. Equally important, to the extent that different groups participate unequally in different activities, their requirements for goods and services will vary. Third, choices are not independent of one another; decisions are sequential and cumulative, with past performances precluding some options and leaving gaps for new ones. Fourth, many items are acquired repetitiously, with some items routinely depleted and replaced. Repeat transactions are sometimes explained in terms of economy of physical and mental effort and of reassurance afforded in situations of uncertainty. Fifth and finally, the role of deliberation is easily exaggerated. While very expensive purchases or strategic consideration of ethical commitments may entail protracted reflection and consideration of a range of options, a great many items of ordinary consumption are acquired and consumed mindlessly, as for example groceries, fuel, electricity and water. Moreover, given the prevalence of collective and state services, not to mention the unequal social division of labour of shopping, much of what is appropriated is vicarious; the final consumer has no need of deliberation if someone else does the provisioning.

Hence, in this account I pursue a strong programme for the application of theories of practice. I am aware that I do not, for lack of space if no other reason, demonstrate how a theory of practice can be readily applied to many empirical issues or show explicitly how it might be superior to all other approaches. Nevertheless, I hope to indicate its potential, using brief examples, by showing that it constitutes a basis for a theoretical synthesis which encompasses neglected aspects of the activity of eating. I proceed to explore the conjecture that the concept of practice captures eating particularly well. It might then be of use in several ways. First, it brings issues of food into the sociological mainstream with the possibility of contributing to sociological theory. Second, it develops theories of practice in a sociological context. Third, it informs policy making in relation to behaviour change. Fourth, it gives some new and distinctive answers to puzzles about why people eat what they do. Behind these concerns lies also a fundamental theoretical issue about the boundaries of practices and their interrelationships. In an earlier attempt to demonstrate the value of practice theories for studying consumption (Warde 2005), it had been my intention to illustrate the argument using evidence about eating, but it proved too difficult, apparently because of its complexity. Instead, I used the example of motoring – the activity of driving cars – which I subsequently came to view as a more regularized and regulated activity. One purpose here is to demonstrate how theories of practice can be applied to highly complex but weakly regulated activities.

The Structure of the Book

The book falls roughly into two parts. The early part (chapters 2−4) clears the ground for a practice-theoretic account of eating. It reviews research on eating, introduces theories of practice and constructs eating as a scientific object. The second part (chapters 5−7) develops key concepts for the analysis of eating as a practice. It identifies some of the means by which eating is organized and coordinated in order to explain how myriad individual performances are generated. The recursive relationship between performance and practice, which is common to all versions of the theory, is applied to account for repetition and innovation, reproduction and change. A key challenge is to demonstrate that the repetitious and the routine, and also the dynamic, aspects of alimentary life can be fairly represented within the confines of a practice-theoretical analysis.

Chapter 2 reviews the development of socio-cultural studies of food. It considers the role of research in different disciplines in framing understandings of food consumption, noting that much more is known about production and provisioning. It argues that rather little attention has been paid to developing theories about eating. After discussing the role of theories in the interpretive social sciences, it finds obstacles in the multidisciplinary formation of studies of food and in excessive attention paid to trying to solve food crises. It also observes that the powerful cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences directed research towards particular fields, with the consequence that other important aspects were neglected. With a view to theoretical innovation, some older traditions of research are explored for their continuing relevance. In the final section, some new themes emerging since 2000 are briefly identified, leading to the suggestion that theories of practice are worthy of careful examination as they may have the potential to provide a distinctive and broad basis for a better understanding of eating.

The third chapter introduces the reader to theories of practice and elaborates on the key concepts relevant to the later arguments about eating. Theories of practice were rediscovered in the 1970s and were developed to deal with particular puzzles in social theory. Attention is paid to the sociological theories of Bourdieu and Giddens in this, the first phase of the modern evolution of the concept of practice. The doyen of the second phase is Schatzki who developed an ontological version of practice theory which has had considerable influence on studies of consumption. Exegesis focuses on his analytic distinctions between practice and performance, dispersed and integrated practices, and the nexus of understanding, procedure and engagement which constitutes practices. Emphasis is put upon the collective nature of practices and the organization that lies behind them. The result is a general impression of the emphases of explanations based in theories of practice and hints at their relevance for analysing eating.

The fourth chapter begins by discussing the value of constructing eating as a scientific object. Eating is positioned as a form of final consumption, therefore inviting a focus on the activities occurring after the many steps involved in production, procurement and preparation of food. But defining eating is not straightforward. A simple dictionary definition of the verb to eat is ‘to take into the body by mouth as food’ (Chambers 1972). Sociology has never found such a definition adequate; if not entirely deficient, it is surely very narrow because it lacks reference to the social aspects of eating. Episodes of eating typically involve other people, require suitable social settings, as well as often have special connections to whomsoever prepared the food. I review some of the ways that prominent and powerful sociological accounts have attempted to conceptualize the social element. I argue that none is sufficiently comprehensive and all could benefit from further systematization.

The chapter therefore reviews concepts designed to capture the social, culinary and bodily dimensions of eating – the elementary forms, or principal components, of food consumption. I conclude that an inclusive and yet analytically parsimonious definition of the scope of the study of eating would approach consumption as episodic events, menu selection and physiological and sensory processes of bodily incorporation. Each is dealt with in turn, discussing some of the analytic benefits and puzzles associated with their application. Basic features of the concepts and their mutual connections are developed with passing reference to other literature. The aim is to make clear what exactly it is about eating that requires explanation. It is maintained that all performances of eating involve the permutation of the three interrelated elements, and that the associated concepts constitute a sparse and effective analytic framework for describing patterns of behaviour. The final section summarizes the position and presents material from a research interview which illustrates how the concepts capture an everyday account of the organization of eating.

The second part of the book aims to develop a series of concepts, with relevance beyond eating, for the theoretical understanding of practice. Three sets of processes – the organization of practices, the nature of habituation and the capacity for competent performances in changing situations – are dealt with in successive chapters. These processes are illustrated mostly from secondary studies in the field of food consumption – the growth of media coverage of cooking and eating, reactions to the obesity crisis, acquiring a taste for exotic foods and the enthusiasm of ‘foodies’.

Beginning from the debate about ‘gastro-anomie’, the supposed contemporary condition where people are uncertain about the rules governing taste in food, chapter 5 discusses current advice about what to eat. Contradictory recommendations indicate the inherent complexity of the practice of eating. The delivery of competent performances requires orchestration of the elementary forms, a not inconsiderable difficulty. The problem is one of adjusting conduct appropriately to different social settings and meal occasions. At least four integrative practices claim authority in the governance of how to eat, witnessed by texts giving advice about nutrition, cookery, manners and taste. Analysis of instructional and promotional texts shows how cultural intermediaries and professional associations construct, legitimize and contest standards and procedures. It is argued that eating is not a simple integrative practice but a compound of component practices. The consequence is that eating tends to be weakly coordinated and weakly regulated, leaving much discretion to individuals.

While intermediation plays a part in the institutionalization of the practice of eating, it does not account in itself for how performances are enacted. Chapter 6 seeks to assimilate the critique of voluntaristic and decision-making models of human action into a practice-theoretic analysis of eating. In the light of evidence from neuro-science, experimental psychology, behavioural economics and cultural sociology, the orthodox ‘portfolio’ model of action is shown to have significant weaknesses. Wansick's Mindless Eating (2006) is used as an entertaining example of how little attention people pay to the activity most of the time. The implication is that much eating behaviour is habitual rather than a matter of deliberation and choice. Various approaches to the analysis of habit and habituation are examined. Concepts of habit require that environment and context play a substantial role in explaining performances. Some accounts of the interdependence of habit and environment are examined and relevant attributes of environments isolated. The theoretical points are illustrated by a case study of obesity, its possible causes and potential remedies. The general long-term failure of weight-loss diets is highlighted, a failure attributed to several features of the reproduction of practices – embodied habits, temporal routines and the norms circulating within social networks – which are germane to explaining practical competence in everyday life.

Chapter 7 wrestles with the concept of repetition and its many modalities which are fundamental to a sociological analysis of practices. The aim is to explain how performances are fluently staged in a manner consistent with their being shared socially. It examines the basic anatomy of performances and asks how people come to approximate their conduct to the injunctions of practices such that their behaviour exhibits recognizable similarities. This involves a discussion of the concepts of dispositions and practical sense, rescued from Bourdieu. Concepts of custom, convention and especially routine are employed to underpin an account of the conditions for the reproduction of practices. The question of how the procedures necessary for competent performances are learned and how then they are triggered by social environments is examined. This deploys a conception of culture as external to the individual. The chapter continues by asking how people learn new tastes in the light of one standard criticism of practice theories – that they cannot explain change. Explanation of the spread of tastes for ‘foreign’ cuisine in Britain is taken as a case study, revealing the importance of cultural intermediation. Finally, the issue of ‘agency’ is addressed, assessing how far the theoretical argument for habituation, routine and convention can be pushed.

The book concludes with a summary of the argument and a discussion of some of its implications. It offers a synoptic account of the key themes and theorems of practice theories to indicate the distinctive emphases brought by their approach to sociological analysis. It reconsiders issues of shared understandings, practical competence, personal and collective routines, conventions, cultural intermediation and institutions. The consequences specifically for an analysis of eating are then summarized, using an extended illustrative example of eating out.

Note

  1

    I use the term ‘Practices’, with a capital ‘P’, to refer to the notion of a practice as an entity, rather than simply behaviour. The distinction is explained more fully in

chapter 3

.

2Towards a Sociological Theory of Eating

Disciplines, Food and Eating

Opportunities for new departures in research always depend upon the current state of established disciplines. Any historical account of the development of the social scientific understanding of eating must first acknowledge that the vast majority of work on the topic derives from the perspective of nutrition, of the qualities and quantities of foodstuffs that are beneficial to human health. For practical and policy purposes, the problem has been viewed primarily as one of getting individuals to behave in their own best interests in accordance with scientifically determined dietary guidelines. On topics of consumption, economics and psychology, often represented via the disciplines of marketing and consumer behaviour, have proved hegemonic. They are the disciplines most often credited with having knowledge suitable to ensuring the application of the physiological and biological knowledge of nutrition to well-being. Mostly, they have been united in addressing consumption and the consumer in terms of the individual. Also, other perspectives on eating probably shape the popular understanding more than do socio-cultural sciences. Eating is a topic upon which professional food writers have probably had more impact than academic scholars, and for them theory building and the application of theory is not a priority. Medical sciences and marketing are also influential but do not aspire to a theory of food consumption.

In the development of the social science of food, an overwhelming degree of attention was paid to its production. Earlier sociological approaches to food were primarily concerned with agricultural production and the types of communities formed in rural areas. Subsequently, many other primarily economic aspects of food production were explored (Murcott 2013). The story of huge food corporations, science, industrial farming techniques, global exploitation of land and people and massive distribution capacities on a global scale is gradually being told. The consequences for health, environment, animals and labour forces are increasingly well appreciated (Pritchard 2013). Theoretically, a generation of research was consolidated around ‘agri-food studies’, beginning in the 1980s, as the tools of political economy were deployed to analyse food systems. Theoretical sophistication has produced a set of useful concepts to trace food from farm to fork. Carolan (2012) distinguishes two broad approaches within agri-food theory. ‘Regime’ theories emphasize the political conditions in which food production takes place and explore epochal shifts in the global system. Commodity systems approaches, of which there are several versions, make particularly good use of the metaphor of a chain of processes, which connect different actors through economic exchanges. As Carolan (2012: 61) comments, ‘it is now commonsense when studying food never just to look at food itself but also at the actors, institutions, and rules and regulations that connect farm-gate and kitchen table’.

The contribution of the political economy of food is impressive and valuable. It has some fine and nuanced accounts of how and why the food that feeds the world comes to be available in markets and supermarkets. Yet it tells mostly of what is grown, made and sold, and on what economic terms, without saying much about how, or in what circumstances, those products are eaten. While, as Carolan (2012: 60) notes, agri-food approaches attribute little power to the sovereign consumer, they nevertheless pay scant attention to the site of consumption or relations of consumption. So, while no sensible theory of consumption would deny that the foodstuffs available and ease of access to them matters enormously to what people eat, what is provided is only part of the story. This book starts at the point where the political economists typically leave off. It is specifically concerned with puzzles associated with processes of consumption. It brackets production, distribution and exchange, making no pretence of giving a comprehensive account of the food system. It says nothing about farming or fork making, nor anything about supermarkets or allotments, except in so far as these might illuminate relations of consumption. It is not that I think these unimportant: if I wanted to give a comprehensive explanation of what people eat, I would certainly not neglect to study seed manufacturers, chemical companies and logistics firms.

Scholars working from political economy and commodity chain perspectives began to call for better understanding of processes of consumption and more effective theoretical analysis of the connections between production and consumption from the 1990s onwards (e.g. Fine and Leopold 1993; Fine, Heasman and Wright 1996; Goodman 2002; Goodman and DuPuis 2002; Guthman 2002). How best to specify the connection between the two domains of production and consumption remains contested theoretically and ideologically. One of the more promising avenues is through analysis of provisioning. The manner in which goods and services are delivered manifestly affects how they are received or consumed. In relation to eating, the domestic mode of provision is particularly important, but market, communal and state modes all play a part (Warde 1992). They affect the way in which people access food. Family obligations, economic contracts, reciprocity and citizenship rights generate different relations of consumption with systematically different consequences for the experience of eating. Provisioning approaches complement the literature in the sociology of consumption about the acquisition of items to be consumed.1 However, most empirical studies of acquisition have focused on the practices of shopping, budgeting and cooking, which are treated primarily as instrumentally oriented processes of production. The issue of the fairness of the terms upon which labour is allocated in delivering services is often the focus. Yet from the point of view of consumption, the more important question is how the fruits of that labour are received. When children are taught to say ‘thank you’, they are being educated in the social relations of consumption. When guests invited to dinner bring gifts, follow the lead of the host in the orchestration of the meal, and confer compliments on the cook, they are engaging specifically in relations of consumption. In order to put the moment of consumption at the heart of my analysis of eating, I will address provisioning and acquisition only tangentially.

Guthman and DuPuis (2006) noted the growth of investigations of consumption under the label of ‘food studies’. Food studies have been cultivated explicitly in the United States under the auspices of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS). A scion of the cultural turn, it comprises work from disciplines at the intersection of the humanities and the social sciences. It is multi- rather than interdisciplinary, and shows no signs of reaching, or indeed even of seeking, theoretical or conceptual synthesis. Proponents of food studies now express a good deal of confidence and optimism, not to say self-congratulation, which contrasts with a rather humble and despondent attitude no more than a decade ago. Then, Belasco (2002: 6), seeking to explain the lowly academic status of studies of food, observed that social scientists usually study food not for its own sake but in response to other research agendas. It occurs at the interstices of other intellectual programmes. Behaviour around food consumption is typically explored because it gives insight into phenomena like mental categories, family formation, social distinction, personal identity, material culture or body management. Arguably, none of these streams of investigation have taken eating as the focus or object of attention in its own right, but rather, as Belasco claimed, they deploy food consumption as illustration of other processes which are perhaps typically seen by sociologists as more legitimate or scientifically central. The successive treatment of these topics has bequeathed reliable knowledge and insight about several relevant aspects of the activity of eating. However, if ‘food studies’ have become the focus of scholarship on food consumption, then one would have to point to their very considerable heterogeneity – of discipline, approach and topic – and hence a lack of unified theory or even aspiration towards theory. Published material draws unevenly on a range of theoretical resources to which there seems to be limited commitment, with food studies having shown less theoretical ambition than in the better developed sociology of consumption.

Nevertheless, recent research gathered together under the label of food studies has made notable contribution to knowledge about aspects of food consumption. Although identifying trends in the absence of a systematic review is difficult, food studies (as exemplified by the journal Food Culture and Society) exhibits a strong focus on some central topics. One is the cultural aspects of the obesity ‘epidemic’, including issues of body management and image, consumption of fast food, with children − and school meals − a point of concentration. Another is migration and migrant labour, and in association, ethnicity and identity. Considerable attention has been paid to aesthetic aspects of cuisines, with reference to eating out, ethical issues of food consumption and mobilization through social movements. In this, there are parallels with cultural studies of consumption more generally, with attention heavily focused on the effects of globalization and the formation of personal identities.

The amount of research on eating within the socio-cultural sciences, when compared with other disciplines, is slight, although the overall volume is now very considerable. Anthropology, sociology, geography, history and cultural studies have all made attempts to explain changing patterns of food consumption. They often remain as interested in production as consumption, and perhaps indeed they should. Important shifts have occurred in the better established area of agri-food studies where the new political economy of agriculture has supported a variety of approaches.2 Eating, however, has rarely been targeted as an object of research. The relevant chapter in Murcott, Belasco and Jackson's Handbook of Food Research (2013) is entitled, tellingly, the sociology of ‘food consumption’. Even after years of attention paid to consumption more generally within the social sciences, research on food remains centred on products, production and provision. However, articles on food consumption and eating are becoming more common in generalist and mainstream journals of the social science disciplines. A shift is signalled by special issues of Sociological Research Online (2011), Sociological Review (2012), the Journal of Sociology (2010) and Environment and Planning A (2010), although, not coincidentally, they focus on crises, risks and the politics of food.3

The social science of food, then, is a multidisciplinary venture which operates in the interstices of the big battalions of research in agriculture and nutrition. The social or human, as opposed to the biological and physiological, aspects of these topics in the past were typically addressed through political economy and (social) psychology respectively. The sociological contribution is minimal by comparison but is nevertheless expanding apace.

The Pursuit of Theory

Social scientists do not agree about what theories should be expected to do. Abend (2008) identified seven distinct regular usages of the term in the social sciences, ranging from statistical associations between variables to Weltanchauungen. In his view, there can be no final solution to the question ‘what “theory” really means [because that] is not the kind of thing one can find out or establish’; hence he advocates a principle of ontological and epistemological pluralism. Theories derive their importance partly from being central to the creation of professional scientific communities. They embody, for a school of thought or a discipline, the aspiration to articulate general principles of explanation. They act, as Bourdieu would say, as the illusio of scientific practice, an often unspoken belief in the value of a joint activity which generates and reinforces personal investment and collective commitment to progress within scientific fields. Thus theory is often presented as a means to sum general, valid and reliable knowledge obtained from prior investigations and explanations, thereby identifying the conditions necessary to give a coherent account of existing observations about a phenomenon.

I propose a naive and all-purpose definition of theory. A theory is a set of propositions (discursive or algebraic) which, if one wants to explain why or how situations (occurrences – processes or events – or states of affairs) (must have) come to be the way they are, will alert you to what to look out for (relevant and important entities – whose properties and propensities will probably be described) and how those entities stand in relation to one another. Such a view permits many different types of theory and different types of explanation. Components of theory include taxonomy (classification and definition of properties of entities), propositions about connections between the phenomena under surveillance and between those phenomena and others beyond, and propositions about the genesis or development of those phenomena. Resultant theories may take the form of description, specification of configurations, or formalized models (of entities and forces). Explanations may come as narrative, analytic and causal.

The prevalence of different and competing views and explanations is to some degree a function of disciplinary preferences and traditions, which in turn are partly related to the nature of the phenomena that they seek to understand. One role of theory is to provide a counterbalance to what would otherwise be an endless series of unconnected descriptive case studies; for example, sociology without theory is dull and hard to use. Another is to make explicit and render consistent assumptions about the connections (causes, co-emergence, mechanisms, elective affinities, contingent or necessary co-presence) between the phenomena observed, which can then serve as the foundations of the analysis and interpretation by means of narrative exposition or analytic explanation. A third role is to subtend causal models which predict behaviour or outcomes.

Sociological or socio-cultural theories are most often conjectures with analytic aspiration. They offer a framework of concepts, mechanisms and associations to capture social interdependence and the logic of multiple situations. They are conjectural (logically consistent, integrated core propositions, connecting concepts, referring to a real world), a lens to aid practical understanding of complex empirical reality. At present, formalization is barely on the agenda for sociology. Whereas models based upon atomistic individual action lend themselves to a-contextual generalization, which may be subjected to formalization in accordance with axioms of rational action,