Michelle Szabo

Good food, good people: Understanding the cultural repertoire of ethical eating:

Ethical consumption is understood by scholars as a key way that individuals can address social and ecological problems. While a hopeful trend, it raises the question of whether ethical consumption is primarily an elite social practice, especially since niche markets for ethical food products (for example, organics, fair trade) are thought to attract wealthy, educated consumers. Scholars do not fully understand the extent to which privileged populations think about food ethics in everyday shopping, or how groups with limited resources conceptualize ethical consumption. To address these knowledge gaps, the first goal of this paper is to better understand how consumers from different class backgrounds understand ethical eating and work these ideas into everyday food practices. We draw from 40 in-depth interviews with 20 families in two Toronto neighborhoods. Our second goal is to investigate which participants have privileged access to ethical eating, and which participants appear relatively marginalized. Drawing conceptually from cultural sociology, we explore how ethical eating constitutes a cultural repertoire shaped by factors such as class and ethno-cultural background, and how symbolic boundaries are drawn through eating practices. We find that privilege does appear to facilitate access to dominant ethical eating repertoires, and that environmental considerations figure strongly in these repertoires. While low income and racialized communities draw less on dominant ethical eating repertoires, their eating practices are by no means amoral; we document creative adaptations of dominant ethical eating repertoires to fit low income circumstances, as well as the use of different cultural frameworks to address moral issues around eating.

Foodwork or Foodplay? Men’s Domestic Cooking, Privilege and Leisure

Market research documents a rising passion for cooking among men. Yet, some feminists argue that men see cooking as ‘leisure’ in part because they have distance from day-to-day care obligations. However, empirical research on men’s home cooking is still limited. This article investigates the relationship between cooking and leisure among 30 Canadian men with significant household cooking responsibilities. Drawing on interview, observational and diary data, and poststructural conceptualizations of leisure, I ask, to what extent do these men understand cooking as leisure and why? Opposing the notion that women’s cooking is ‘work’ and men’s, ‘leisure’, I find that these men experience cooking as ‘work-leisure’ complicated by worries about others’ preferences, health and approval. However, I also argue that participants create leisurely cooking by manipulating cooking spaces and time(s), and it is in the ease with which they do so that gender (as well as class and race) hierarchies become more visible.

Place, Ethics, and Everyday Eating: A Tale of Two Neighbourhoods

In this article we investigate how ‘ethical eating’ varies across neighbourhoods and explore the classed nature of these patterns. While our focus is on ‘ethical eating’ (e.g. eating organics, local), we also discuss its relation to healthy eating. The analysis draws from interviews with families in two Toronto neighbourhoods – one upper and the other lower income. We argue that understandings and practices of ‘ethical eating’ are significantly shaped by social class as well as place-specific neighbourhood cultures which we conceptualize as part of a ‘prototypical’ neighbourhood eating style. People compare themselves to a neighbourhood prototype (positively and negatively), and this sets a standard for acceptable eating practices. This analysis helps shed light on how place is implicated in the maintenance and reproduction of class-stratified food practices.

The Challenges of “Re-engaging with Food“

Abstract As the negative health, environmental and social consequences of the industrial food system are brought to light, convenience food options are being criticized and “re-engagement” with food celebrated. Indeed, there are many benefits when households are more involved in their own food provision, doing things such as growing food and cooking from scratch. However, calls for a return to more labor and time-intensive food practices often overlook the difficulties that food providers face in trying to manage both paid and unpaid work in the context of contemporary employment and household patterns. This paper brings light to these under-examined issues by putting the feminist concept of social reproduction into dialogue with the food literature. It is argued that significant and widespread changes in food provision at the household level cannot take place unless employment conditions and the gendered division of labor are addressed.

Men nurturing through food: Challenging gender dichotomies around domestic cooking

Sociological and cultural studies research suggests that men and women cook differently. However, this research rarely takes into account mens and womens different levels of responsibility for the practice and how this might affect cooking approaches. This study investigates this culinary gender dichotomy through the experiences of men with significant domestic cooking responsibilities. Using interviews, cooking observations, and meal diaries from 30 such men from Toronto, Canada, I examine the extent to which they drew on traditionally ‘masculine’ and traditionally ‘feminine’ approaches to food. While most men did draw on traditional masculinities, many of the same men also drew on traditional femininities. Further, I observed the most ‘feminine’ approaches among men with the heaviest responsibilities for feeding others, including men who, previous to taking on these roles, saw cooking in more masculine ways. The data illuminate how social roles and responsibilities, as they intersect with interactional positionings and identities, shape gendered cooking approaches.

Understanding the food preferences of people of low socioeconomic status

Scholars have long studied consumer taste dynamics within class-stratified contexts, but relatively little attention has been paid to the taste preferences of low-socioeconomic-status groups. We analyze interview data from 254 individuals from 105 families across Canada to explore the cultural repertoires that guide low-socioeconomic-status consumer tastes in food. Empirically, we ask which foods respondents prefer, and for what reasons, across socioeconomic status groups. Analytically, we argue that low-socioeconomic-status respondents demonstrate aesthetic preferences that operate according to four cultural repertoires that are distinctly different from that of high-socioeconomic-status omnivorous cultural consumption. Our respondents display tastes for foods from corporate brands, familiar “ethnic” foods, and foods perceived as healthy. While low-socioeconomic-status taste preferences in food are shaped by quotidian economic constraints – what Bourdieu called “tastes of necessity” – we show how cultural repertoires guiding low-socioeconomic-status tastes relate to both material circumstances and broader socio-temporal contexts. Our findings advance debates about the nature of low-socioeconomic-status food ideals by illuminating their underlying meanings and justifications and contribute to scholarly understanding of low-socioeconomic-status consumption.