1
Introduction

Eating as a Topic of Interest

Public interest in food has increased markedly since the 1980s and scholarly regard has expanded commensurately. Food is a political issue, a matter of leisure and recreation, a topic of health, a resource for media industries, as well as a primary necessity of daily life. Crises in the food system have spurred political parties and social movements to action. A proliferation of food programmes and journalism - on television, in the press and latterly on the internet - has made food and eating a growth area of popular attention and conversation (Rousseau 2012). This reflects new priorities regarding the body and body management, as states, particularly those responsible for funding health care, become more concerned with what people eat. Consequently, food has come under more intense scrutiny from social research. Some aspects of the food system have always attracted scholarly research, and the most prolific contributors remain agriculture, pharmacology, medicine, nutrition, home economics, macro-economics and psychology. However, public preoccupations have made more space for socio-cultural disciplines like anthropology, cultural studies, social geography and sociology to fill major gaps in understanding, not least with respect to failures of policy intervention.

The changing social and economic circumstances occasioned by the post-war boom in the West had the effect of making food relatively cheaper, and older problems of poverty-induced hunger and malnutrition receded. Agribusiness, sustained economic growth, multinational corporations and ever greater international trade transformed the economic foundations of western diets. Abundant, accessible and relatively cheap foodstuffs, sourced globally, presented most people with the possibility of eating in much more varied ways than had been possible for preceding generations. By the end of the twentieth century, food systems had experienced some of the most profound effects of globalization (Inglis and Gimlin 2010). Of course, this did not result in immediate or radical changes in diet or culinary practices for individuals, but there were significant shifts over a few decades at aggregate level, sufficient for serious scholars to diagnose 'a culinary revolution' (Panayi 2008).

Increasing variety, and intensified commentary upon and exploitation of that variety, provided a powerful thrust for examining eating as a type of cultural consumption. Social research moved from an almost exclusive focus on processes of production, especially the circulation of commodities in the market sphere, to activities associated with consumption - recreation, aesthetics and the conduct of everyday life. Acknowledging consumption permitted eating to be treated partly autonomously of questions of the availability of foodstuffs; the presumption of a symbiotic relationship between supply and demand was severed by abandoning the assumption that eating be treated primarily as instrumental to physiological reproduction. However, that research emerged in a period increasingly obsessed by concepts of 'culture' and 'the consumer'. The so-called 'cultural turn' provided a backdrop and impetus to emergent sociological approaches to food consumption. The legitimation of the study of consumption meant that eating could become a bona fide topic of social research.

The Objectives of the Book

A prodigious amount of empirical research on food and eating is now available, to which socio-cultural disciplines have made a significant contribution. The proliferation of handbooks and encyclopediae present the current state of knowledge on a wide range of discrete topics but their integration and synthesis is proving elusive. The task of pulling the accumulated evidence together is becoming ever more demanding. This is, no doubt, partly the result of the multidisciplinary nature of the study of food. Disciplines have their own particular scientific agendas and tend to be committed to incommensurable theories, which have been formulated over time in relation to particular substantive interests. Their key concepts serve to bracket out those forces, processes and facts considered of no theoretical interest, thus militating against theoretical synthesis. Since theoretical synthesis is more likely to be feasible within a disciplinary tradition, I try to reconstruct and extend sociological approaches, and do so by drawing specifically upon practice-theoretical approaches to consumption.

Eating is a form of consumption. Research on consumption is now vast, having expanded rapidly during the last two decades. Radical new departures in multidisciplinary studies of consumption coincided with 'the cultural turn' in the humanities and social sciences in the 1970s. Rather than viewing consumption as an instrumental and practical activity, it came to be seen as a means of communication with others, signalling self-identity through cultivation of distinct 'lifestyles'. Consumption was recognized as an enjoyable and often constructive process, a process of creative appropriation of goods and services which served commendable personal and sociable ends. Reversing also the prevailing condescension towards popular culture and popular practices expressed by critics of mass culture, the cultural turn demonstrated the meaningfulness of consumption. Consumption was shown to play a role in identity formation and aesthetic expression in everyday life.

It is frustrating that progress in the sociology of consumption was slow to filter into research on food. For consumption research offers many promising avenues for food scholars. One is an opportunity to interrogate the activity of eating more rigorously. How exactly should eating be conceptualized? Of course, most people, for most purposes, leave puzzling about its definition to sociologists and proceed happily several times a day to engage in an activity that comes as second nature. However, what is entailed in consumption of food is not simply a given. It might be thought of as a purely physiological process. Arguably, the interpretive social sciences have paid too little attention to the embodied dimension of physical reproduction entailed in eating. However, it would make little sociological sense to restrict attention solely to processes of bodily incorporation of foodstuffs. All peoples surround the physiological process with conventions about what counts as food, and when, where and with whom eating should occur. Even the comportment of the body is subject to social discipline through manners and etiquette. For sociological purposes, a broader framework of concepts is required to position eating and render it explicable. One task of the book is to make clearer what is at stake in defining eating as an activity and to propose a set of concepts to frame it as a moment of consumption.

By emphasizing communication, agency and engagement, exponents of the cultural turn, while charting the meaningfulness of these activities and items for self-identity, demonstrated how and why people made consumption into personal and social priorities. However, as I have argued elsewhere, cultural analysis had several weaknesses, both in terms of its focus of attention and its theory of action (Warde 2014). Its proclivities included, first, a focus on the display for others of symbols of identity, obscuring the fact that most consumption is ordinary or inconspicuous (Gronow and Warde 2001). Second, to emphasize culture was to downplay social structure (Abbott 2001), eclipsing distinctive features of the social realm, of social interdependence and social interaction, and of status and class. Third, the cultural turn found little place for objects and technologies as material forces. In addition, however, cultural analysis of consumption contained a deeper set of theoretical weaknesses embedded in its general theory of action. Despite its internal diversity, primary recourse was to a voluntaristic theory of action, upholding models of an active, expressive, choosing consumer, motivated by concerns for personal identity and a fashioned lifestyle. The model of an active and reflexive actor predominated, implying that conscious and intentional decisions steer consumption behaviour and explain its sense and direction. In key respects, its model is similar to the sovereign consumer of neo-classical economics, for it effectively shares in the dominant and basic template of consumption which presents the process as one where the individual engages in very many discrete events, characterized by personal deliberation preceding personal, independent decisions made with a view to the satisfaction of preferences. One feature of this book is to explore how far we can advance without the use of such a concept of choice.

Another of my objectives is to demonstrate the benefit to the sociology of food and eating of greater engagement with theories of practice. Theories of practice offer remedies for both the substantive and explanatory deficiencies of cultural analysis. They are not themselves specifically sociological theories. Many different disciplines are currently attempting to apply them to their conceptual and empirical concerns. Yet, even if they belong to no discipline, practice theories have considerable affinity with sociological understandings of everyday life. They are, however, very diverse; Schatzki (2001: 2-3) noted that three diverse currents of thought, post-functionalist, post-structuralist and post-humanist, all found the practice approach attractive. Nicolini (2012) effectively captures their very considerable range. Consequently,...