Helene Brembeck

Home to McDonald's

Fast food is regularly referred to as a symbol of the decline of cooking skills, families and the community at the dinner table. With inspiration from theories on domestication and Actor Networks, and using examples from studies from McDonalds in Sweden, this paper argues that a McDonalds restaurant can in fact be regarded as a home and the meals eaten there as “proper” family meals. A meal at the restaurant is for many parents the easiest way of upholding family life, but also of creating “family” and “home” in new ways.

Exploring children's foodscapes

In this article, we discuss childrens becoming as food consumers in the intersection of various foodscapes. We draw from a project, Children as co-researchers of foodscapes, where we have been working with children as co-researchers, using basically ethnographic methods, and as co-designers in a collaborative design effort. This article focuses on the findings from a theoretically inspired perspective, using the concept of foodscapes. These are food-related structures of different kinds, which evolve as the child explores them and where children as food consumers are generated. In this article, we highlight the scapes of taste, routines, people, things, commerce, child (as opposed to adult) and health and give brief accounts of the way the children related to them. Finally, we turn to the benefits of working with foodscapes for a better understanding of childrens becoming as food consumers in the intersection of various foodscapes. This article is based on data gathered by the children, but also on our fieldwork notes and observations following the children in their foodscapes.

Fraught cuisine: food scares and the modulation of anxieties

This paper explores the circulation of contemporary anxieties related to food through an engagement with sociological and geographical work on affect. The paper draws on four case studies of ‘food scares’ in the UK and Sweden to consider the emergence, circulation and expression of food anxieties. It suggests that existing analyses of food anxiety neglect its affective dimensions, and that the circulation of concerns about food is an affective and embodied process as well as a cognitive one, taking place through encounters between heterogeneous bodies at a range of temporal and spatial scales. However, it argues that the movement of affect should not be considered as a linear ‘manipulation’ of mute subjects, but rather as a circulation of affective intensity that moves through heterogeneous milieux and is open to ‘modulation’. In contrast to manipulation, the modulation of affect is constituted through interactions and encounters, making its outcome unpredictable and uncertain.

Best for baby? Framing weaning practice and motherhood in web-mediated marketing

ABSTRACT The aim is to illustrate how web marketing frame commercial baby food as a value-adding part of weaning practice and discuss how various ways of framing relate to contemporary mothering ideals. Drawing on “practice” and “frame analysis,” we illustrate how four baby food producers’ web marketing frame commercial baby food and weaning as “medical,” “fun” or “convenient.” The analysis shows that the web material offers a range of images and ideals that could function as discursive resources in mothers’ everyday feeding practices, while at the same time providing a good fit with several, rather than one specific mothering ideal. Besides adding to our knowledge on mothering this work illustrates the role that marketing play in configuring consumer practices. As a form of representation of consumer practice marketing involves a range of images offering discursive resources and supports consumers in negotiating actual and ideal practices linked to cultural ideals on consumption.

Preventing anxiety: a qualitative study of fish consumption and pregnancy

Starting from theories of anxiety as social practice, this article explores the contested landscape of health, risks associated with fish consumption and pregnancy in Sweden, and the way risk communicators and pregnant women navigate this landscape. This article argues that the risk analysis by the Swedish National Food Administration is a good example of the practices of definition and annihilation of subjects and objects of anxiety. It shows that the creation of anxious subjects is counteracted by two means in the brochures and on the website of the National Food Administration (NFA): by placing information about pregnancy and fish within a risk discourse, and by liberal governance. This article concludes that, although pregnant women manage and control anxiety during pregnancy by several practices, this strategy by the NFA does not make them feel safe and secure, which is the basic duty of the NFA, but rather bolsters their feeling that you cannot ever feel safe, you always have to anticipate that something bad might happen.

Children and Taste: Guiding Foodservice

Taste has been neglected in science, and school foodservice suffers from huge amounts of food waste when children do not eat what is served. This article highlights the importance of taste in terms of childrens food preferences, and the awareness of this fact has been recognized while working with children as co-researchers. The children formulated research questions themselves, chose research methods, gathered information, and analyzed and presented results. In this way, taste developed as the most important aspect of food for them. It is suggested to not just let them be a panel, but also to let children participate from the very beginning in planning school foodservice.

CONSUMOVER CITIZENS AND SUSTAINABILITY DISCOURSE: PRACTICING CONSUMER AGENCY THROUGH MOVING WITH COMMODITIES

Purpose – In this chapter, we intend to discuss and analyse possibilities and policies for sustainable cities and mobility by linking these issues to ordinary consumption or shopping practices. We argue that sustainability discourses directed towards urban dwellers or citizens tend to express totalizing and exclusionary tendencies that obscure the situated dimensions of mobility practices generated through consumption. Design/methodology – Through an ethnographically informed exploration of everyday consumption practices we discuss discrepancies between examples of sustainability policies and campaigns on the one hand and mundane consumption practices on the other. Findings – The chapter concludes that there are some major discrepancies between official sustainability discourses and mundane consumption practices and introduces the concept of the ‘consumover citizen’ as a productive way of discussing sustainability. Originality/value – Introducing the concept of ‘consumover citizen’ is a novel way of conceptualizing sustainability in terms of who and what moves in the city regarding mobility generated by consumption practices.

Convenient Food for Baby: A Study of Weaning as a Social Practice

Abstract This article reports findings from a study of weaning from a perspective informed by practice theory. The overall aim is to examine how parents integrate convenience baby food into their everyday feeding practices. The focus is the embedding of convenience baby foods in the routines and rhythms of everyday life and the “do-ability” of different practices. The study is based on fieldwork with nineteen mothers in Falköping in western Sweden. Results show that local do-abilities emerge out of situated combinations of materials, competences, and meanings. Convenience proves to be an emergent category rather than a property of particular kinds of food.

Assembling nostalgia: devices for affective captation on the re:heritage market

Abstract This article builds on the current rethinking of nostalgia in heritage studies and an increasing amount of research that explores the formatting of customer – producer relationships in terms of ’market attachments’ to analyse how nostalgia is performative on the market for retro, vintage and second hand, what we call the re:heritage market. Based on a multi-sited study including offline and online ethnographic observations, photography and qualitative interviews with shop owners and staff at a selection of central streets in Gothenburg, Sweden, the article explores the way shop owners work with nostalgia in order to attract, or ‘captate’, the public, through engaging affective market devices. Our particular contribution is to show how the re:heritage market contribute to our understanding of an alternative of cultural heritage, through configuring exchange and value, and details how ‘affective captation’ adds conceptual strength for understanding the emotive and sensate pull of certain market-based heritage practices. Staging nostalgic encounters involves practices of selecting, collecting, displaying and preserving for the future: practices that are vital for all heritage-making. A variety of actors are involved in this unconventional of heritage at safe a distance from traditional heritage practices.

A Short History of Convenience Food

This chapter traces the historical growth of consumer demand for various types of convenience food, acknowledging the significance of earlier forms of bottled, pickled and canned food but focusing on the period beginning in the 1950s with the development of the frozen TV dinner in the United States and contemporary European examples (including frozen, chilled and ambient products, branded and own-label). It discusses the variable market penetration of convenience food across Europe and examines the role of technological change including innovations in industrial food processing (such as the ‘cold chain’) and domestic technologies (such as refrigeration, home freezing and microwave cooking). The chapter also considers the role of supermarkets in shaping the routines of car-borne food shopping and changing gender relations and household structures (including the effects of increased female participation in the labour force and the growth of single-person households). The chapter ends with a more detailed account of the development of convenience food in the UK, Denmark, Germany and Sweden.