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Recent years have seen the emergence of calls for the transformation of food systems to make these more responsive to environmental, access and health challenges. Addressing how the UK food system may best meet these challenges, this article develops understanding of the multiple food concerns that guide practices of food provisioning at the intersection between markets and domestic life. Combining insights from a survey questionnaire and qualitative fieldwork from research that was part of the EU Horizon2020 SafeConsume project, we depict how practices of food provisioning are guided by concerns driven by economic and environmental logics. The findings suggest economy is prevalent while environmental food ethics are marginalised. The conclusion discusses how the adopted practice theoretical approach, which combines an analysis of the socio-material arrangements of provisioning and the relationship between food concerns and higher order considerations, advances understanding of the nature of food concerns and the challenges of sustainable food transitioning.

Nearly 40% foodborne outbreaks in the European Union are attributable to food practices in domestic homes that include handling and preparation of raw chicken. Hand washing is an important way to prevent cross-contamination with pathogens during chicken preparation. This study, which is part of the EU Horizon 2020 funded consortium SafeConsume, aimed at quantifying and understanding hand washing practices in three categories of households and five European countries. A quantitative survey (n = 1889) was combined with qualitative research, during which 75 participants from France, Norway, Portugal, Romania, and the United Kingdom were observed and interviewed. An original method for analysing video with “The Observer XT” software was developed to identify when and how risk arises. The quantitative survey and qualitative research data revealed that touching raw chicken was more frequent in Romania and Portugal. Practices to avoid touching raw chicken were declared and observed, although observations revealed that these practices were not always consistently followed. Only a third of the participants washed their hands with soap after handling raw chicken with important variations among countries (a majority in Norway and in the UK, a few in France and Portugal, none in Romania), in contrast to the results of the survey. Observations and interviews suggested that rinsing hands with water only and washing hands with soap are considered equivalent by many people. Barriers to washing hands due to improper equipment were mainly observed in Romania. Washing hands after touching raw chicken was motivated by food safety concerns for some participants in Norway and the UK, but not in France and Portugal, where it was motivated by unpleasant feelings on hands, or presented as a habit. Participants not washing their hands after touching the chicken did it after other actions they presumably perceived as unsafe (e. g. touching the bin, handling pets, and blowing the nose), indicating that they did not specifically consider touching raw chicken as risky. Knowledge, habits, and equipment with regard to chicken and hand washing differed among European countries, resulting in safe and risky practices. This work was supported by the Horizon 2020 project SafeConsume (Grant Agreement No. 727580).

International audience; How is food handled in safe and unsafe ways from retail to fork in European households? This is the overall research question raised in this report. The aim of this report is to contribute to an in-depth, detailed, empirical and nuanced analysis of how food is handled in everyday life in five European countries: France, Norway, Portugal, Romania and the UK. The first chapters (Part 1) describe the food cultural difference and food safety variation between the five countries, theories of practices that underpin the study and the transdisciplinary methods employed for studying shopping, transportation, storage and cooking a meal with chicken and raw vegetables in 75 European households. The first empirical chapters (Part 2) introduce the households in this study (chapter 2.1), discuss the everyday food life the households (chapter 2.2) and describe food anxieties and experiences with foodborne illnesses (chapter 2.3). Part 3 concentrates on food procuring and organising practices in the households and includes three empirical discussions of shopping (chapter 3.1), transportation (chapter 3.2) and storage (chapter 3.3). Part 4 discusses food preparation and comprises five chapters discussing the order of cooking (chapter 4.1), chicken preparation (chapter 4.2), vegetable preparation (chapter 4.3), determining doneness (chapter 4.4) and washing hands (chapter 4.5). Finally, Part 5 discusses the main findings in the report and suggests further research steps.

A transdisciplinary observational study, coupled with a web-based survey, was conducted to investigate refrigerated storage of food, in five European countries. The investigated consumer groups in this study were: young families with small children and/or pregnant women, elderly people, persons with an immunodeficient system, and young single men. The refrigerator temperature was monitored for approximately two weeks using a temperature data logger. Variables such as country, income, age of refrigerators, education, living area, refrigerator loading practices had no significant effect (p > 0.05) on the overall average fridge temperature, whereas consumers' practices showed a significant influence (p < 0.05) on registered temperature values. Compared to temperatures inside the fridges belonging to young families and young single men group, the temperatures inside refrigerators belonging to elderly was in the temperature danger zone (5–63 °C). The lowest temperatures were recorded in UK consumers’ refrigerators, whereas the highest were in French households. Presence of Listeria monocytogenes was confirmed in three refrigerators out of 53 sampled (two in Romania and one in Portugal). The most vulnerable category to food safety risks is represented by elderly persons with low education, unaware of safe refrigeration practices and the actual temperature their fridges are running. This research was supported by the Horizon 2020 project SafeConsume (Grant Agreement No. 727580).

Global climate change poses challenging questions for how human beings should be living their lives in a more-than-human world. These questions are complex and multifaceted, and thus demand actions across a broad range of social and political fronts. This article engages with a sub-question of this broader concern, namely, how more-than-human ethics of care are learned in family life, and the insights this provides for the performance of the generational familial categories of child and parent. It draws on ethnographic research, funded by the British Academy, in which I researched the embodied and moral engagements of children and their families in activities on the seaside in North Scotland. Drawing on Barad’s agential realism (2003, 2007), I focus on the activity of rockpooling and analyse a particular rockpooling event with the Crab Fisher family, in order to comprehend this family’s intra-actions with the tide, with crabs and with animal death. I draw out the saliences of the analysis for what it means to care in a more-than-human world, for the question of ethical-generational becoming, and for the multifaceted quality of learning.

This chapter presents an analysis of the aesthetic organisation of commercial environments and objects of early childhood. The aim is to demonstrate the role aesthetic organisation plays in the shaping of the particular understanding of ‘the young child’ as loveable. I purposefully start the analysis of the teleoaffective structuration of child caring with the quality of the young child as loveable, because knowing ‘the child’ in this way operates as such a resounding cultural obviousness, that it renders examination almost redundant, and because the loving quality of the young child serves as an ‘anchor’ for other elements in the teleoaffective structure, including those of protecting and purifying, around which pecuniary value is created. Elements of the aesthetic of early childhood outlined in this chapter, and found in the commercial world of young children and child caring, include the use of colours and colour schemes, the definition of ‘cute’ objects, designed as play mates for children and used as affective devices targeting adults, and conventions in the visual representation of young children. I close with a discussion on the use of certain kinds of objects in practices of personal life lovemaking. In and through these various practices, ‘the young child’ is known as lovable, not only in the privacy of family life, but as a signifier in a broader generational and symbolic culture of childhood.

This chapter focuses on the enactment of protecting as one of the main teleoaffective qualities of child caring. I examine how this teleoaffective priority is produced and maintained in the commercial world through the theme of infant safety, and the constitution of ‘the young child’ as vulnerable in embodied ways. Infant commodity culture is crowded with products that are designed to ‘safeguard’, ‘guide’, ‘monitor’ and ‘promote the health of’ the young child, and my analysis therefore starts with a consideration of three ways in which safety connects with products. I then move on to consider renditions of the young child as vulnerable, enigmatic and unpredictable. Performances of the youngest of children as vulnerable and enigmatic open up opportunities for pecuniary value creation through product innovation and problem multiplication in which techno-medical-science ways of knowing the infant child abound, and in which ‘the child’ is not in any way held responsible (and thus rendered innocent). Performances of the young child as unpredictable, as opposed to enigmatic, point to shifting understandings of vulnerability in relation to age, development and agency. In the final part of the chapter, I draw on my interviews with prospective and new parents to discuss how protecting children gains affective salience through the co-occurrence of vulnerability with lovable and purity. I here also compare commercial and parental enactments of the young child.

This chapter presents an introduction to the business of child caring. Using the consumer exhibition as example, I offer an analysis of seller-buyer interactions and on how this business is organised. The reader joins me on a day out at The Baby Show to become familiar with some of the main components that make up the consumer exhibition. Along the way, we listen to visitors’ reflections on their day out, their reasons for attending The Show, and their shopping practices. Drawing on product leaflets and website content, I provide an analysis of the ‘product content’ of childcare. I identify six pathways of child caring and argue that each of these pathways is supported by the teleoaffective structure of this practice, bringing together four main qualities of the young child: those of loveable, vulnerable, pure and the ‘need’ for nurturing. In the final part of this chapter, I provide an analysis of the spatial and material organisation of exhibitions, and consider how these organise the interactions between exhibitors and visitors. It is argued that the larger companies organise their exhibitions in ways where face-to-face interaction is minimal. In the conclusion, I argue that the main organisational components of the consumer exhibition are shared across different market environments.

This chapter examines purifying as a third major component in the teleoaffective structure of child caring. Purification is a set of ritualised practices performed on babies and products, and in material-embodied and symbolic ways, creating a range of material and symbolic orders that keep the pure child pure. The chapter is organised in two parts. I start by following the recently growing interest in re-usable nappies in an analysis that gives some insight into the hybrid reality of early parenting where practical, embodied, environmental and symbolic concerns are brought together. I mostly draw on my interviews with prospective and new parents to discuss plans and values towards childcare and products, focusing on baby excrement, which, as argued by Murcott (1993), points to the concomitant realisation of infants as pure and polluting. In the second part of the chapter, the focus shifts to an example of the purifying work performed in sales practices to render products natural and normal, thus enhancing their suitability as components in child caring practices. I here return to infant feeding tools and present an analysis of recently converging sales narratives in which the tools are ‘naturalised’ through design changes that are argued to make these closer to the embodied qualities of infants and the process of breastfeeding.

This chapter explains the approach to practices that was formulated to guide the analysis presented in this book. One of the arguments I develop is that it is in and through specific performances of the practice of child caring, in interactions in market space, that the value of the young child and pecuniary value are co-realized. I therefore turn to theories of practice and draw specifically on Theodor Schatzki’s argument that practices are social entities that are organised through a teleoaffective structure, principles and instructions, and understandings. The central practice I am concerned with is that of child caring. I start by identifying the peculiarities of carrying this practice. Challenging everyday understandings of child caring as an entity, I argue that a range of entities can carry this practice, and perform it in ways that are different from the kinds of performances to which common understandings of child caring point. Next, I attend to the teleoaffective qualities of child caring, and advance the argument that these qualities are structured through knowledge practices that understand the young child in ways that give the practice of child caring its reason d’etre. As child caring can be carried by different entities, teleoaffective structuration needs to be acknowledged as a political process. The teleoaffective structuration of child caring happens in and through the repeated performances of different actants, and I have therefore also drawn on science and technology studies and feminist theory to argue that the analysis should be guided by a horizontal methodology. The chapter closes with a discussion of the ethnographic and textual research that was conducted.

In the introduction, I argued that there is consensus in recent debate on children, childhood and consumer culture for the need to move ‘beyond the moralistic and sentimental views about children’s consumption that tend to dominate the public debate’ (Buckingham 2011). Some suggestions have been made for how this may be done, including the presentation of varied empirical case studies that unearth the often complex and contradictory realities of children’s lives (Buckingham and Tingstad 2010; Chin 2001; Martens et al. 2004; Martens 2005). In this chapter, I argue that there is a need for awareness of the challenges that confront those wishing to follow this call for innovation. Several challenges connect with common conceptual knots and discursive practices, which reveal and hide cultural complexities in specific ways. In this chapter, I concentrate on the performativity of scholarly practices around the binary opposition of the sacred and the profane in debates on children, childhood and consumer culture. I identify three ways in which incompatibility work around this binary opposition is evident in debates. The first form of scholarly performativity I call simple incompatibility work, and it is represented by what may be called moral entrepreneurship. The second version is bad capitalism, which includes contemporary neo-Marxist critiques of consumer culture. The third type is arguably the most challenging, as it is tied up in the temporal trajectories of programmes of scholarly work, in what may be termed territorialisation around entities. What I mean by this is the development of scholarly terrains of practice where research programmes have diverged by becoming focused on the entities of ‘the child’, ‘motherhood’ and ‘parenting culture’, ‘consumption’ and ‘the market’, and where attempts to tie these terrains together is uneven. I discuss each of these, embedding bad capitalism in the discussion on territorialisation, and conclude by signposting the approach adopted in the book. This will be discussed in Chapter 3.

Purpose– This paper aims to examine, through a focus on the practice of child caring, how three qualities of childhood preciousness, vulnerability and unpredictability, are nurtured by being brought together as rationales for product re-design, innovation and diversification. The new parent of today is confronted with a myriad of products that are designed to “safeguard”, “guide” and “monitor” the young child and ensure its well-being.Design/methodology/approach– The paper draws on research into the organisation of encounter platforms that serve as communication forums for commercial practitioners and child carers, and includes insights derived from fieldwork and a cultural content analysis of the British retailer Mothercare, consumer exhibitions and brand–product websites.Findings– After providing a brief outline of the research on which this paper draws, the author present three ways in which child safety is present in the market that caters for young children and their care. This is followed by a discussion of two case studies, which respectively expand on how vulnerability and unpredictability are nurtured in commercial narratives.Originality/value– The author concludes by drawing out the implications of the risk-averse culture, which this creates.

The articles in this special issue have one thing in common: all engage with the epistemological and methodological concerns of researching habits, routines and practices. However, in developing th...

The aim of this article is to contribute to methodological debate on how to research everyday life with a reflexive exploration of the ways of looking we developed to analyse video recordings of a 24/7 on-going performance of kitchen life. We bring insights from debate on the affordances of video for the examination of mundane everyday life, utilising theories of practice and phenomenological perspectives on ways of looking. Three strategies for looking and thinking using the video data in our research are discussed: looking at performance, looking into performance; and looking for practices. We elaborate how each way of looking maps onto different epistemological concerns and results in different ways of knowing practices and performance. We conclude by considering the consequences and ask whether it is possible and useful to work across these approaches of looking and comprehending.

Contents: Introduction, Emma Casey and Lydia Martens. Part 1 The Commercialisation of Domestic Life in Historical Perspective: Class, gender and domestic consumption in Britain 1920a "50, Judy Giles The feminist and the cook: Julia Child, Betty Friedan and domestic femininity, Joanne Hollows Gender and the destalinization of consumer taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, Susan Reid. Part 2 Private/Public Dynamics in Gender and Consumption: Making sameness: mothering, commerce and the culture of children's birthday parties, Alison J. Clarke Perceptions of commercialised social introduction services amongst women, Jacqueline Davidson Consuming pleasure on the wedding day: the lived experience of being a bride, Sharon Boden Gambling and everyday life: working class mothers and domestic spaces of consumption, Emma Casey Gender, class, emotional capital and consumption in family life, Elizabeth B. Silva. Part 3 Gender and the Material Culture of the Domestic Sphere: The sensory home as a site of consumption: everyday laundry practices and the production of gender, Sarah Pink Consumption and sexual intimacy: towards an understanding of intimate cultures in everyday life, Dana Wilson-Kovacs Gender at play: dA(c)cor differences between boys' and girls' bedrooms, Irene Cieraad. Afterword: gender, consumer culture and promises of betterment in late modernity, Lydia Martens and Emma Casey Index.

The aim of this paper is to open up debate about the methodological implications of adopting practice theory in social research. Practice theory has become a much used analytical framework for researchers working on the question ‘what we do’ in relation to a diverse set of contemporary concerns, but discussion on the epistemological implications has thus far been limited. By looking at interview talk on dish washing through a practice-theoretical lens grounded in Schatzki's (1996 , 2002 ) ontology of practices, I set out to examine how language and talk form a resource and an obstruction when we want to think about mundane practices in scholarly ways. My concern is located within the broader questioning of qualitative interviews in debate in the social sciences. Acknowledging that interviews are ‘distinctive forms of social action’ ( Atkinson & Coffey 2003 ), I move on to consider how talk about washing up in interviews conveys the interaction between two practices; those of talking as the salient embodied practice wielded by human beings in interaction with each other, and dish washing as an integrated cleaning practice common in domestic kitchens. The analysis suggests that our qualitative interviews stimulated talk on the teleo-affective qualities of dish-washing. Rules and principles also appeared in the talk in specific ways. However, the talk was not so good for gaining understanding of the activity of dish washing. In conclusion, I argue that the standard qualitative interview brings out the human-to-human interactional concerns of practices, but that different research contexts need to be developed and employed for gaining greater understanding of the performance (or activity) of the practice of dish washing.

This paper examines how the product world around domestic cleanliness plays with the dual construction of the home as safe and dangerous. By participating in this construction, cleaning products engage with a salient concern in domestic life—how to achieve and maintain a safe domestic environment. We have investigated the discursive commentary on domestic cleanliness and safety in one domestic advice manual: Good Housekeeping magazine, over the period 1951–2001. This investigation has also provided insights into the discursive character of cleaning products. We have been interested in how product discourse moves the home discursively from exhibiting dangerous tendencies towards the attainment of safety through the utilization of products. However, reading product narratives over the late modern period makes it apparent that competition and the need for product innovation in an otherwise difficult market has created complexities that confront the domestic sphere with more dangers. We draw out the consequen...

In this paper we begin to open the black box that constitutes the organisation of domestic cleaning and consumption in the latter half of the twentieth century. We focus specifically on change and continuity in the manner in which cleaning practices and cleaning products are represented in the UK woman's magazine Good Housekeeping, in the late modern period. After a discussion of the modern history of cleanliness, we proceed with a rationale for why this magazine was chosen for our analysis, followed by a summary of our methodology. We then argue that three phases of representation may be delineated in the time period we investigated. The first phase, which is apparent in the 1951 and 1961 issues, we have named “pride in domestic practice” and it covers a period when, what we call “the women's lobby”, speaks in a uniform voice about the tasks of the housewife and the purpose of domestic cleaning. The second phase, manifest in the 1971 and 1981 issues, is termed “domestic dreaming”, and it heralds a period...

The market as educator has become firmly lodged at the centre of popular and scholarly debate commenting on the nexus between children, consumption and education/learning. In this paper, I appreciate this scholarly debate from the point of view of the sociology of consumption. The latter has been relatively silent on children's consumption and education, focusing instead on adult learning. Nevertheless, I here draw on that sociology to forward an argument that favours consideration of a broader range of social relationships and cultural and contextual influences. I outline two models on the network of relationships that inform children's consumption, and illustrate, through a discussion of Chin's Purchasing Power, how children's consumption-related learning may originate from outside the market. The paper finishes with a plea for more research that focuses on children and the domestic contexts of consumption.

The sociology of consumption pays relatively little detailed and systematic theoretical attention to children, while the sociology of childhood tends to view children’s consumption through what can be called the ‘production of consumption’ approach. This is surprising given the range of empirical and theoretical debate in the sociology of consumption, where ‘mode of consumption’,‘consumption as aesthetics’ and ‘material culture’ represent a further three approaches. By bringing together the sociologies of childhood and consumption, a framework for empirical research is advanced. Four inter-related themes are suggested: learning to consume; lifestyle and identity formation; children’s engagements with material culture; and the parent-child relationship. It is argued that such a framework offers scope to further understandings of how cultures of consumption impact on children, children and parents, and construct notions of childhood. A focus on children’s consumption also represents an opportunity to clarify key processes of influential theories of social change.

Data collected under the ESRC Research Programme `The Nation's Diet: The Social Science of Food Choice’ offer an opportunity for detailed analysis of British eating-out habits. 1001 respondents in Bristol, London and Preston reported on their use of various types of eating-out venue. We find evidence of considerable market segmentation. The eating-out product is significantly differentiated, with `ethnic’ venues appealing to certain social groups for particular reasons. The paper uses logistic regression to distinguish the factors affecting the probability of exposure to each type of restaurant. Age, earnings and household income are important but vary in their specific effects. We find additional, independent effects of locality, occupational class, education, and ethnicity. We describe and recommend logistic regression as an analytic technique for explaining differential participation in the selection between different types of places to eat out.

Reports research findings on the gendered character of the eating out experience, from a study of eating out in England. Investigates two main areas: food tastes and authority relations within consumer groups. Describes how gender differences in food tastes when eating out are subtle. Shows that food tastes alter according to where the eating is done; food preferences and choices differ when people eat out as opposed to when they eat in. These trends are similar for men and women. Further investigates aspects of eating out decision taking and shows that gendered conduct does exist, but the extent of it varies depending on the composition of the company.

This chapter considers how “elusive childhood” (Honeyman, 2005) and early parenthood are imagined at the site of The Baby Show, a UK consumer show targeted at new parents and other interested adults. The forms of consumer culture that surround the very young child have not received much scholarly interest to date. Yet this phase in the life course, in which new families are formed and in which adults develop a parental identity, is of interest in part because it illustrates how adult imaginings become interspersed with the complex voices and narratives coming from the marketplace. The Baby Show is an excellent site for an examination of how adults, diverse in terms of their objectives for taking part, construct the young child and the new parent. My arguments draw on ethnographic immersion at this site over several years.

The concept of gender was brought into academic usage to stand for the cultural manifestations of biological sexual differences. Human beings are born with a set of sexual organs and a body which is both shaped and regulated by hormones. However, what it means to be ‘a woman ’ or ‘a man ’, and ‘a boy ’ or ‘a girl ’ is a cultural accomplishment that has its roots both in the way gender is structurally present in our society (for instance, through the gendering of positions in the labour market), and in the way gender is ‘ done’ on an everyday level through the way we talk, walk and interact with others ( West and Zimmerman, 1987 ). The domain of consumer culture is not immune to this for, as pointed out by Bristor and Fischer, ‘gender is a pervasive fi lter through which individuals experience their social world, and consumption activities are fundamentally gendered ’ (1993, p. 519).