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The aim of this paper is to conceptualize and discuss how plant-based food consumption is accomplished in an environment pre-configured by meat-based food practices. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with thirteen consumers, and using a socio-material practice approach, the paper demonstrates how plant-based shopping, cooking and eating practices are enabled and shaped by material reconfigurations. The paper shows how developments such as an expanding range of plant-based food products, the increased use of social media, and the re-appropriation of shops and kitchens all entail the continuous reconfiguration of the materials involved in shopping, cooking and eating practices. Together, these material reconfigurations form a socio-material landscape that is mutable and changing, thus enabling plant-based food consumption. In addition, the paper also suggests that these material reconfigurations are not something that can be managed due to having evolved as a collective process in which multiple actors take part, all guided by their own interests. In doing so, the paper illustrates that, in order to understand plant-based consumption, as well as its emergence, performance, and complexities, we must take into account the practical and material aspects involved, not just the cultural or cognitive mechanisms.

In this paper we present a methodological toolbox as a useful research approach for investigating domestic food practices. Consumption research often relies strongly on interviews or surveys. While helpful, such methods inevitably create a distance between the verbalization of the studied practice and the practice itself, inviting post hoc rationalization. The toolbox helps the researcher to get closer to the studied practice by combining interviews with methods based on observation, visualization and verbalization, in or close to practice. The toolbox holds a variety of methods and we describe fridge stories, food mapping, shop-alongs and food diaries. Through a practical discussion of the advantages and difficulties of these methods, and their combined use, we hope our paper can be useful to other researchers and students interested in everyday food practices.

This paper argues for, and reflects on, the introduction of social and mobile media into food studies pedagogies. Specifically, the paper describes the complications resulting from a pedagogical ex...

This special issue introduction examines why and how food matters in Asian cities and foodscapes, thus providing a different lens from Western interpretations of urban space. As cities transform, the ways that people eat and procure food also change, along with the sociocultural meanings of food itself. The special issue brings together seven research papers that together draw attention to the everyday culinary habits, rituals, creativity, and sensory experiences that are collectively used to nurture shared senses of cultural identity and economic livelihoods. In so doing, the papers as a whole consider important issues to do with urban infrastructure, urban governance, diversity, conviviality, and cosmopolitanism.

This editorial introduces a Special Issue on food practices and social inequality by outlining a dichotomous tendency in policy-related, academic and populist accounts of the relationship between food and class. The Special Issue aims to move our understanding beyond this dichotomous divide, which privileges either middle-class discerning taste or working-class necessity in understandings of the determinants of food practices. The papers call attention to the diverse, complex forms of critical creativity and cultural capital employed by individuals, families and communities across the spectrum of social stratification, in their attempts to acquire and prepare food that is both healthy and desirable. The papers report on research carried out in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Denmark, and cover diverse contexts, from the intense insecurity of food deserts to the relative security of social democratic states. Through quantitative and qualitative cross-class comparisons, and ethnographic accoun...

What influences how people taste the food they eat? This paper investigates how sensual engagements with food, particularly tasting it, become contextualized in everyday life practices and social science theories. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Swiss hospital, the Kantonsspital Graubunden, the paper analyzes what doctors, patients and nurses bring up as shaping sensual engagements with food. It also investigates how sensual engagements with food become contextualized in three social scientific studies on “taste,” “eating” and “tasting.” The paper argues that the three different contexts developed in these studies, namely “society,” “food culture” and “in practice,” do not help to make sense of what was observed and was brought up by the people working and living in the hospital as shaping sensual engagements with food: what happens before, after and around eating. The paper therefore adds “mundane goings-on” as a fourth context and concludes that contexualizing tasting allows the addressing ...

In Mexico, the corn tortilla has long been imbued with deep meaning; at particular historical moments, it has reflected indigenous backwardness, national culture and women’s contribution to social reproduction. In one rural community in Yucatan, tortillas, their place in everyday life and their relationships with human bodies have grown yet more complicated. Over the last century, shifting conditions in the region—a decline in agricultural sustainability, the development of a massive tourist industry, the expansion of mass media and new religious diversity—have altered many of the ways in which people engage with food. This paper examines the tensions between the qualities of foods—and the process of tasting by which they are experienced—and the resistance of some Yucatec Maya women to preparing tortillas at home. Consensus about what good tortillas taste like no longer precludes women’s refusal to pat out this staple food by hand. The paper draws distinctions between practices of tortilla prepara...

This paper examines how Jamie Oliver, an increasingly global celebrity chef, works as a cultural intermediary. It explores focus group data to demonstrate how he is received and used by different people. The paper explores instances of positive identification that are supported through a sense of personal familiarity with Oliver. It also tracks negative identifications where audiences refuse to accept the cultural and practical value of his culinary lifestyle suggestions. These identifications, whether positive or negative, are theorized as cultural intermediation. Intermediation should be understood as situated and coproduced as audiences bring moralized notions of self, other, class and gender to bear upon their view of Oliver and his influence in their life. Oliver's perceived normality is a key factor in allegiance and successful intermediation. Reports of familiarity and personal affinity are often seen as central to willingness to “try something new.” Consumer resistance to some of Oliver's ...

Unlike its Nordic peers, Norway has never created a national school meals program. This paper explores the non-emergence of this policy using insights from historical institutionalism and the literature on gender ideology to consider how ideas and institutions interact in the creation of policy. The paper argues that both the ideational factor of gender ideology that saw women as caregivers and not earners, and the institutional factor of an agricultural policy that did not produce surpluses, interacted in such a way as to remove school lunches from the policy agenda in the 1930s and 1940s.

This paper explores the social and symbolic meanings of recipes in the creation of community imagined online. Linking scholarship on the social relevance of recipes with research on food memories, ...

As part of the wider discourse of “real food,” consumers today are exhorted to “know where their food comes from” and “know their farmers.” This paper presents a critical analysis of real food disc...

Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jackson, Mississippi, this paper uses the food voice of Zenani, a working poor Black mother, as a case study to explore how structural inequalities...

In this paper, I develop a concept that I call black culinary epistemologies. I argue that the cookbooks of Bryant Terry, African American chef and food justice activist, are an archive for black c...

This paper offers a “more-than-representational” understanding of how heritage value is reproduced by cottage food businesses in Singapore. It advances the notion of haptic heritage to highlight th...

Neoliberal narratives dominate constructions of poverty. The dearth of alternative legitimizing narratives effectively silences the lived experiences of issues such as food insecurity. In conjunction with hegemonic silencing, feelings of shame and personal inadequacy further drive these experiences from public view. People living with poverty learn to hide their everyday realities from public scrutiny and engage in social practices in an effort to reduce experiences of stigma, oppression, and social rejection. As part of a larger study into food and poverty, this paper draws on interviews with five householders who source and provide food for their respective families. In doing so, it documents how lived experiences of food scarcity bring the often hidden aspects of marginalized lives into view. Householders utilize practices of passing and food rationing in order to navigate the shame and moral accusations associated with poverty.

This paper explores the complex relationship of sweets to changing gender identities in Japan. Drawing on ethnography and popular culture sources, it examines ways men negotiate their beliefs and a...

While beer has maintained a position as the most popular alcoholic beverage among men age 21–34, a recent Gallup poll indicates that craft beer has surpassed wine as the most popular beverage for women in the same age group in USA. In light of this trend, there has been little research done to explore gender dynamics in craft beer consumption and the craft beer industry. This paper seeks to understand the increasing popularity of craft beer among women by: (1) exploring beer as a gendered object, (2) illuminating the experiences of women in the craft beer culture and industry, and (3) examining how gender is done, redone, and undone in craft beer spaces. Drawing from a discursive content analysis of an online beer community, it seeks to consider the gendered nature of beer and how gender is both reconfigured and upheld, allowing for the possibility for new consumption patterns.

Food safety has material, symbolic, experiential, and sensory elements that create ways of thinking and acting, resulting in knowledge that is embedded in institutional practices and discourses. This knowledge—contextual, contested, and changing—shapes the discourse and practice around the perception and regulation of food safety. Taking the city-state of Singapore as an example, this paper draws together elements of food safety discursive practice, culturally and temporally specific symbols of safety, with its sensory experience to show how governmental, cultural, and private actors have worked across the Singaporean food system to create “senses of safety.”

A sub-culture of “locavore” chefs is playing a critical but under-examined role in addressing concerns about the conventional, industrialized food system by re-localizing the sourcing, processing, and preparation of food. The values that underlie why certain chefs decide to work in this niche market, their strategies to overcome the situational challenges of sourcing locally produced food, and the ways they develop the knowledge and skills needed to prepare and incorporate these ingredients into appealing menus all point to the unique position that these chefs occupy in the local food movement. This paper presents insights from a study that utilized in-depth interviews to investigate the culinary practices of twenty-three local food-promoting chefs in Alberta, Canada. Using a social practice theory framework, these chefs’ culinary practices were examined based on what material conditions they encountered, how they employed particular skills and competencies and why they decided to become “locavores.” This...

This paper explores the representation of food in Manuel Gutierrez Aragon’s film Half of Heaven (Spain, 1986) and Silvio Caiozzi’s The Moon in the Mirror (Chile, 1990) as it depicts the political transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain and Chile. While the Spanish transition was initiated with Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, and the Chilean transition with Augusto Pinochet supposedly stepping down in 1989, in both cases the dictatorial power structures ensured that such a shift in political ideology did not come into effect overnight. As a result, well after Franco’s death and Pinochet’s defeat, the regimes’ institutions remained in place. With this political context in mind, food features prominently as a metaphorical representation of the complex power struggles and political shifts that were occurring in these two countries at this time. In this way, the relationship of food—presented as either good or bad, edible or contaminated—is conflated with character development in such a wa...

This paper uses a Bourdieusian theoretical framework to explore how thirty-nine Canadian families shop for food. Based on two qualitative interviews with at least two members of each family, in seven sites across Canada, we explore how high- and low-income families describe their food shopping practices and priorities. For low-income households, economic constraints were paramount, and shoppers displayed extensive cultural capital in the knowledge and skills required to purchase food at the lowest possible cost. They also displayed considerable agreement with the dominant discourses of healthy eating and ethical eating, though they typically lacked the economic capital to pursue these. High-income households were less constrained by finances in their food shopping, thus freeing them to focus on quality and authenticity. These priorities coexisted with or superseded emphases on healthy and ethical eating, suggesting the latter two may have diminished in their symbolic power to mark class distinctions.

The preparation and the consumption of food constitute integral parts of the idealized representations of domesticity and home. What we eat and how we eat it defines our sense of individuality, as well as our collective sense of cultural belonging. However, in this era of transcultural migration, the notion of “authentic” food is fraught with ambiguity. This paper examines the ways in which October, Zoe Wicomb’s most recent novel, dismantles the concept of home and renders it dangerous through inscribing food as a site of cultural inauthenticity and violence. Returning to South Africa from Scotland at the behest of her ailing and alcoholic brother, Mercia Murray, the novel’s protagonist, is forced to confront her family’s history of violence, as well as her own complicity in it. Mercia, a colored university lecturer, has been living in Glasgow in Scotland since before South Africa’s transition to democracy, and has been left for a younger woman by her long-time partner, Craig. The present-time of ...

This editorial introduces a special issue of Food, Culture & Society and works to add a parallel, substantive take on the phenomenon of the food celebrity and the mediated, everyday cultural politics they create. We start by exploring the concept of the foodscape. Specifically, we argue that food celebrities represent a fundamental component of contemporary foodscapes, how they “perform” and function, and the socio-material means by which they are produced. We then explore the key roles and privileges of food celebrity, arguing that the celebrity chef is not the only high-profile, mediating figure at work on the foodscape. Key food celebrity paradoxes are identified and discussed: food celebrities must work to be authentic and aspirational, accessible yet exclusive, responsibilizing but also empowering. We conclude with a short contextualization of the papers in this special issue, and argue for the rich potential of food celebrity scholarship as a way to better understand food inequalities.

This paper insists that the writing of Michael Pollan be analyzed with respect to its popularity among members of the liberal professional middle class. I understand Pollan's writing as lifestyle instruction, a technology of the self in Foucault's sense, offering readers tips for cultivating a more ethical relationship with food. While Pollan's advice often aligns with imperatives of neoliberal citizenship, his widespread uptake within this class formation is more reflective of ambivalence about neoliberalism than simply another instantiation of it. Pollan's work is productive of classed technologies of the self and an ethical, albeit highly ambivalent, form of neoliberal citizenship.

This paper explores the narrative behind Becel®'s pro.activ® calorie-reduced margarine advertising campaign. Becel® pro.activ® is a new functional food product developed with plant sterols that claims to lower cholesterol and is the first food product available for purchase in Canada with plant sterols. The campaign consists of six advertisements specifically targeted to women in two Canadian magazines (Canadian Living and More) over the course of six months from September 2010 to February 2011. Using a sociology of diagnosis framework, I argue that these advertisements create a false sense of urgency and empowerment surrounding high cholesterol for women, and reinforce a “healthy lifestyle discourse” that individualizes the responsibility for health, potentially disenfranchising the individual, patient and consumer. Using frame analysis, I argue that Becel®'s pro.activ® campaign constructs high cholesterol as a disease; simultaneously frightens and empowers women; and lastly, privileges and promo...