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One of the most fundamental, but also controversial, food trends of the past years is convenience food. This article investigates the underexplored relationship between the heterogeneity in (convenience) food consumption (a feature of a food culture's cuisine) and meal patterns (characteristics of a food culture's structure). This study hopes to illustrate that convenience food can be interpreted both as a means to maintain a food culture's structure and as a means to overturn it. Latent Class Cluster Analysis is performed using data from the HBS 2005 survey on families' food expenditures to conceptualize convenience-orientation and to examine the relationships with families' meal behaviors. Whereas outsourcing cooking is most prevalent among single-person households; two-or more-person households are most likely to buy unprocessed and natural foods and to spend most time cooking and eating in. A higher consumption of convenience food is also more likely to affect individuals' kitchen than table habits., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Cooking is one of the basic activities in our lives. However, people frequently feel they fall short of time to cook when facing problems with the temporal organization of daily life. How people think about home cooking is considered to be important for the time they spend on preparing meals. It is assumed that the meaning of cooking differs for different people, depending on the temporal and social context. This contribution allows us to clarify how the meaning of cooking varies according to individual and household characteristics and the cooking occasion. By using the pooled time-diary data from the Flemish time-use surveys from 1999 and 2004 we can examine people's views on cooking in order to understand how people use time for food preparation. Although the results suggest that people consider cooking primarily as a household chore, preparing food can also be a way to please others, as well as themselves. It seems that feelings of time pressure and the family situation are clearly related to men's and women's cooking experiences. Furthermore, the meaning of cooking also tends to be clearly influenced by the meal situation and (the moment of) the day., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)