Maria Fuentes

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.

Making a market for alternatives: marketing devices and the qualification of a vegan milk substitute

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to describe, conceptualise and critically discuss how and with what consequences marketing is used to construct a mass market for vegan substitutes. Drawing on the concepts of the marketing device and qualification, it shows how Oatly – a Swedish company making oat-based products – enrols three sets of marketing devices, i.e. digital media, packaging and stores, to simultaneously ‘alternativise’ and ‘convenienise’ its range of vegan products. The result is the material and discursive construction of a range of vegan products that is qualified as different enough from conventional dairy products to be an attractive alternative, but similar enough to fit into existing practices of shopping for food, cooking and eating. By qualifying products along multiple registers, Oatly constructs ‘plastic’ products, which can be consumed, for various reasons, by various groups of consumers thus enacting a multi-niche market for its products.

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.

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.

Convenience, Sustainability and Health

This chapter reviews the implications of the FOCAS project in terms of the health and sustainability of convenience food. It challenges the assumption that all convenience foods are unhealthy and unsustainable, countering deficit approaches which assume that consumers lack knowledge or skill regarding the food they consume. The chapter also challenges the view that consumers are unable to make connections between food and health or between food and the environment, exploring the reasons why consumer behaviour often departs from the ‘best practice’ encouraged by official advice on healthy eating or sustainable diets. Our research finds ample evidence of consumer interest in environmental questions, often expressed through the (academically contested) concept of ‘food miles’, as well as a general repugnance for wasting food (in contrast to the common assumption of consumer profligacy). The chapter also addresses the ethical trade-offs and practical compromises that surround the use of different kinds of convenience food.

The Temporalities of Convenience Food

This chapter outlines the complex temporalities of convenience food including long-term historical changes in technology and society, generational and life-course changes, and shorter-term changes such as treats and rewards. Drawing particularly on the ready meals case study, the chapter shows how convenience food has been employed to help resolve issues of scheduling and routinization, through time-saving and time-shifting strategies. More abstract temporalities are considered including ideas of ‘being modern’ and the role of food in various kinds of memory-work. The chapter also considers the tactic of ‘stocking up’ in anticipation of future needs (where convenience food plays a key role). Having considered the temporal practices involved in shopping, cooking and eating, the chapter provides a more systematic comparison of the transformations, rhythms and timings associated with convenience food, concluding with a discussion of how convenience food is caught up in processes of escalation (doing more things) and acceleration (doing things within a shorter time).

Cooking and Convenience

This chapter discusses the notion that the use of convenience food is associated with an alleged decline in cooking skills and culinary competence. Despite the popular ‘discourse of decline’ in political rhetoric and media debate, evidence for these assertions is actually rather limited, incomplete and outdated. The chapter begins with some definitional issues, seeking to uncover what counts as ‘cooking’ in different contexts and how this has changed within living memory. Using a case study of two Danish meal-box schemes as the primary reference point, the chapter explores the skills associated with planned, improvised and audit way of cooking. It provides evidence of different forms of understanding including tacit knowledge, know-how and improvisation, concluding that meal-box schemes provide a convenient approach to meal planning while maintaining the positive values of home cooking.

Convenience Food as a Contested Category

This chapter discusses the nature of convenience food as a complex and contested category, subject to multiple interpretations and diverse uses. It explores the difficulties of translating ‘convenience food’ into other European languages besides English and how the category is used to refer, variously, to fast food, snack food and packaged/canned/frozen/pre-prepared food as well as to other foods that do not require direct involvement from the consumer in the work of growing, raising or harvesting them. The chapter shows that convenience food is a contested category in academic usage (as an analytical term) and in everyday life (as used by consumers). Drawing a distinction between ‘convenience’ food as a marketing category that applies to certain kinds of food and a wider range of foods that are rendered ‘convenient’ through specific consumer practices, the chapter advances our core concept of ‘conveniencization’ to refer to the process through which certain kinds of foods come to be recognized as more or less convenient than others. The chapter proposes an initial comparison of our four case studies in terms of provisioning, cooking, eating and wasting practices, examining what, where and when foods are rendered convenient. We also propose a typology of how foods become convenient in terms of their acquisition, appropriation and appreciation.

The Moralization of Convenience Food

This chapter discusses the moralization of convenience food, showing how its negative evaluation frequently involves implicit or explicit comparison with other sorts of food, using fresh ingredients, cooked ‘from scratch’. The chapter demonstrates how convenience food is moralized through its associations with diet-related ill health, through deeply gendered ideas about maternal responsibility and through arguments about the alleged decline of cooking skills (explored in more detail in Chap. 8). Convenience food is also caught up in contemporary debates about the responsibilization of consumers through notions of individualized ‘food choice’. The empirical evidence presented in the chapter shows how participants justified their use of convenience food in relation to ideas about sustainability and waste, eating on a budget and the need to accommodate family members’ dietary tastes and preferences. Their frequent use of irony and self-deprecating humour highlights the moral ambivalence attached to convenience food. The chapter also challenges the common distinction between convenience and care, suggesting that the use of convenience food can be justified as an expression of care rather than as evidence of a dereliction of domestic duty.

The Spatialities of Convenience Food

Drawing particularly on the case study of workplace canteens as a form of collective food provisioning, this chapter explores the spatial organization of convenience food. The chapter begins by considering the anxieties that are attached to the widening spaces of food production, distribution and retail, often described in terms of increasing ‘food miles’. More complex spatialities are then described including spatial relations, places and spatial changes, offering an alternative framing of convenience food. The specific spatialities of canteen food are then addressed in terms of networks and circulation, food preparation and eating spaces.