The Practice Of The Meal

Reflecting a growing interest in consumption practices, and particularly relating to food, this cross disciplinary volume brings together diverse perspectives on our (often taken for granted) domestic mealtimes. By unpacking the meal as a set of practices - acquisition, appropriation, appreciation and disposal - it shows the role of the market in such processes by looking at how consumers make sense of marketplace discourses, whether this is how brand discourses influence shopping habits, or how consumers interact with the various spaces of the market. Revealing food consumption through both material and symbolic aspects, and the role that marketplace institutions, discourses and places play in shaping, perpetuating or transforming them, this holistic approach reveals how consumer practices of ‘the meal’, and the attendant meaning-making processes which surround them, are shaped. This wide-ranging collection will be of great interest to a wide range of scholars interested in marketing, consumer behaviour and food studies, as well as the sociology of both families and food.

Preface -- Introduction: the practice of the meal / David Marshall, Benedetta Cappellini and Elizabeth Parsons -- Acquisition -- Authentic food and the double nature of branding / Søren Askegaard, Dorthe Brogård Kristensen and Sofia Ulver-Sneistrup -- The supermarket revisited : families shopping food / Malene Gram -- Working your way down : re-balancing Bourdieu's capitals in times of need / Benedetta Cappellini, Alessandra Marilli and Elizabeth Parsons -- The multi-cultural food market : grocery stores approaching foreign-born consumers in Sweden / Karin M. Ekström -- Appropriation -- Appropriation / Alice Julier -- Appropriating bimby on the internet : perspectives on technology mediated meals by a virtual brand community / Monica Truninger -- The digital virtual dimension of the meal / Janice Denegri-Knott and Rebecca Jenkins -- Fraught contexts and mediated culinary practices : ontological practices and politics / Paul Hewer Part III: Appreciation -- Consuming the family and the meal : representations of the family meal in women's magazines over 60 years / David Marshall, Teresa Davis, Margaret Hogg, Tanja Schneider and Alan Petersen -- From harmony to disruption and inability : on the embodiment of mothering and its consumption / Susanna Molander -- The intersection of family dinners and high school schedules in urban China / Ann Veeck, Hongyan Yu, and Fang (Grace) Yu -- Meal deviations : children's food socialisation and the practice of snacking / David Marshall -- Disposal -- The milk in the sink : waste, date labeling and food disposal / Carl Yngfalk -- The quest for the empty fridge : examining consumers' mindful food disposition / Elina Närvänen, Nina Mesiranta, and Annilotta Hukkanen -- "Don't waste the waste" : dumpster dinners among garbage gourmands / Marie Mourad and Alex Barnard -- Shit happens : excrement as fear of waste, and waste of fear / Robin Canniford and Alan Bradshaw -- Concluding remarks / Benedetta Cappellini, David Marshall and Elizabeth Parsons

With over half the world's population now deemed to be urbanised, cities are assuming a larger role in political debates about the security and sustainability of the global food system. Hence, planning for sustainable food production and consumption is becoming an increasingly important issue for planners, policymakers, designers, farmers, suppliers, activists, business and scientists alike. The rapid growth of the food planning movement owes much to the fact that food, because of its unique, multi-functional character, helps to bring people together from all walks of life. In the wider contexts of global climate change, resource depletion, a burgeoning world population, competing food production systems and diet-related public health concerns, new paradigms for urban and regional planning capable of supporting sustainable and equitable food systems are urgently needed. This book addresses this urgent need. By working at a range of scales and with a variety of practical and theoretical models, this book reviews and elaborates definitions of sustainable food systems, and begins to define ways of achieving them. To this end 4 different themes have been defined as entry-points into the discussion of 'sustainable food planning'. These are (1) urban agriculture, (2) integrating health, environment and society, (3) food in urban design and planning and (4) urban food governance.

This collection breaks new ground by investigating applications of degrowth in a range of geographic, practical and theoretical contexts along the food chain. Degrowth challenges growth and advocates for everyday practices that limit socio-metabolic energy and material flows within planetary constraints. As such, the editors intend to map possibilities for food for degrowth to become established as a field of study. International contributors offer a range of examples and possibilities to develop more sustainable, localised, resilient and healthy food systems using degrowth principles of sufficiency, frugal abundance, security, autonomy and conviviality. Chapters are clustered in parts that critically examine food for degrowth in spheres of the household, collectives, networks, and narratives of broader activism and discourses. Themes include broadening and deepening concepts of care in food provisioning and social contexts; critically applying appropriate technologies; appreciating and integrating indigenous perspectives; challenging notions of 'waste', 'circular economies' and commodification; and addressing the ever-present impacts of market logic framed by growth. This book will be of greatest interest to students and scholars of critical food studies, sustainability studies, urban political ecology, geography, environmental studies such as environmental sociology, anthropology, ethnography, ecological economics and urban design and planning.

A rallying cry to link the food justice movement to broader social justice debates The United States is a nation of foodies and food activists, many of them progressives, and yet their overwhelming concern for what they consume often hinders their engagement with social justice more broadly. Food Justice Now! charts a path from food activism to social justice activism that integrates the two. It calls on the food-focused to broaden and deepen their commitment to the struggle against structural inequalities both within and beyond the food system. In an engrossing, historically grounded, and ethnographically rich narrative, Joshua Sbicca argues that food justice is more than just a myopic focus on food, allowing scholars and activists alike to investigate the causes behind inequities and evaluate and implement political strategies to overcome them. Focusing on carceral, labor, and immigration crises, Sbicca tells the stories of three California-based food movement organizations, showing that when activists use food to confront neoliberal capitalism and institutional racism, they can creatively expand how to practice and achieve food justice. Sbicca sets his central argument in opposition to apolitical and individual solutions, discussing national food movement campaigns and the need for economically and racially just food policies—a matter of vital public concern with deep implications for building collective power across a diversity of interests.