Estelle Masson

Toward new forms of meal sharing? Collective habits and personal diets

This article sheds light on the fact that the commensality remains a fundamental aspect of eating in French culture. However, at the same time, the expansion of the individualisation and medicalisation of the act of eating during the latest decades impacted the social representations of food. We will first place dietary practices into a general context in which the relationship to food tends to be individualised and in which health-related issues remain an important aspect of the discourse about food on internet. Secondly, we will examine how these practices are (in)compatible with the defining dimensions of the French food model, in particular those relating to commensality (the practice of eating together) and food sharing. It seems that although a personalised diet restricts the objective possibilities of food sharing, it is still central in representations of food and, in some cases, leads to the emergence of associated practices to introduce new forms of social eating behaviours, such as those made possible by the spread of the Internet.