The extent to which practices such as sharing food or cooking are coordinated or prioritised is associated with cultural and social orientations towards eating in particular ways.
Furthermore, the requirement to organise practices into particular slots of time as well as the ability to synchronise time with other household members, to share food for example, depends on household members’ relationships to the constraints of time. Time constraints
3 See Jackson and Viehoff (2016) for an extensive critical review of research on consumption of convenience
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organise experiences of practices, but the ability to negotiate the temporal constraints of practices also relates to an individual’s position within social relations. Different groups experience feeling ‘harried’ (Southerton 2003) in relation to different practices and their associated norms. This point requires me to factor gender as well as class into the analysis. There is a wealth of literature which establishes that, despite their increased participation in the workforce, women remain responsible for feeding the household (Bava et al 2008; Beagan et al 2008; Brannen et al 2013; DeVault 1991; Parsons 2016; Sullivan 1997; Yates and Warde 2017). This is important because families are continually reinforced by patterns of practices (for instance feeding) (Curtis et al 2009; Delormier et al 2009; Finch 2007). The prevailing responsibility of women to coordinate domestic practices, in particular everyday food provisioning, highlights their centrality in the production of family. These are the processes through which family identities are actively established and organised. These practices reflect hegemonic discourses about family, which combined, impact on how people organize family lives (James and Curtis 2010). For example, by paying attention to the
invisible nature of feeding work (such as planning), DeVault’s (1991) research reminds us that domestic feeding is socially organised and naturalised as feminine. DeVault also shows that through their responsibility for feeding the family, the women in her study were maintaining and producing the family according to classed and gendered frameworks. Yates and Warde (2017) found that men are more likely to have their household meals prepared for them than their female counterparts. It seems reasonable to argue therefore that being responsible for feeding work, woman are disproportionately affected by time constraints. At the same time there has been a renewed emphasis on homemade food in recent years (Moisio et al 2004; Hsu 2015), which is often positioned against the increased availability of convenience foods. Returning to Warde’s (1997) antonym of convenience and care for a moment, public narratives circulate which demonise convenience because it undermines spending time on preparing ‘good’, healthy meals from scratch (Parsons 2016: 385). Accounting for the temporality of practices highlights how classed femininity operates via feeding since the subversion of care for convenience in the face of temporal constraints is understood to contravene acceptable standards of (classed) femininity. For instance, the working women in Thompson’s (1996) study talked of striking a compromise within this antonym by using pressure cookers, slow cookers, and microwaves. These ‘time-shifting’ devices enabled the scheduling of feeding within fragmented slots of time. Moreover, like
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the women in Moisio et al’s (2004) study, they also relied on convenience foods to feed their family in order to gain time and efficiency. However, given that women are socially
positioned as care-givers through food, it is hardly surprising that using convenience foods was a source of guilt for many of these women. As well as being positioned as individual and distant from homogenised, externally-market-made food, the symbolic value of homemade food is intimately tied to gendered care-giving and domesticity (Moisio et al 2004). The provision of homemade food requires an active commitment to a particular mode of feeding as having value. In light of this, the concept of domestication provides a frame to understand why the use of convenience food is ‘tinged with moral disapprobation’ (Warde 1999: 518) because it requires few active practices of conversion.
The scant body of literature which focuses on men’s experience of cooking (Klasson and Ulver 2015; Neuman et al 2017; Szabo 2012, 2014) establishes the nuanced ways that masculine identities are configured through cooking, and how these depart from the feminised forms I discuss above. Men are increasingly participating in domestic cooking (Warde et al 2017). But significantly, Klasson and Ulver (2015) establish how their male participants dramatize mundane domestic food practices so as to conduct a performance of hegemonic masculinity. Generally, women’s cooking is seen as ‘other-oriented responsibility’ and men’s as ‘self-orientated leisure’ (Szabo 2014: 18). Yet Szabo’s male participants who have significant domestic feeding responsibilities present a more nuanced picture. Szabo argues that many of the men in his study drew on traditional ‘feminine’ care-orientated approaches to food, suggesting that the self/other dichotomy can be contested. This is a useful insight; however, it remains within a framework which conceptualises care-oriented foodwork as feminine and does not dismantle that.
A number of studies have shown that the provision of food acts as to produce a socially and culturally-acceptable feminine identity (Bugge and Almås 2006; Harman and Cappellini 2015; Haukanes 2012; Parsons 2014). This is not to suggest that norms around feeding are
passively reproduced, rather to highlight that they are ever-present. For instance, women in Beagan et al’s (2008) study discussed their feeding work, not in terms of gendered
responsibility, but in terms of individual decisions, employing rationales such as wanting to feed the family healthy, high-quality foods. Bugge and Almås (2006) show how cooking dinner is not just an act of caring for the family as noted by Charles and Kerr (1988), but it also operates as a kind of identity work to position the female self via socially and culturally-
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valid food practices. Whilst Bugge and Almås’ (2006) research falls short in explaining how valued food practices relate to class, it accounts for the ways that participants negotiate socio-temporal limitations to prioritise valued ways of eating through the synchronisation of family schedules. Parsons (2014) research specifically accounts for class. She notes that for the middle-class mothers in her study a commitment to homemade was a means of
differentiating themselves to the cultural symbol of a working-class mother who feeds her family convenience foods.
In this final section I have highlighted how domestic food practices are subject to a multitude of temporal constraints and pressures which act to prevent and enable preferred practices. The temporal and spatial ways practices connect must be understood in relation to the material and symbolic processes surrounding the domestic provisioning of food. In so doing, I offer a wider framework to consider the intimate ways that class and gender are made and reproduced through food practices.