Exploring the dynamics of food routines: a practice-based study to understand households’ daily life

This paper aims to explore consumers’ experienced life and studies how practices interconnect and are organized on a daily basis. The objective is to contribute to a better understanding of how (or whether) it is possible to interfere with daily practices, as public policies pretend to do, to address several societal challenges (food waste, healthy eating, greenhouse gas reduction, social equity, etc.).

Using the concepts of routine, ritual and practice to understand the dynamics of daily life from a practice theories perspective, this study is based on a qualitative methodology combining a projective method of collage coupled with semi-structured interviews with 23 participants and, participant observation of shopping, cooking and mealtimes at home with 11 of the 23 participants.

Results show that the degree of systematization of practices defines different types of routine according to various systematization factors (time, commitment, social relations, material), suggesting a distinction between systematized, hybrid and partially systematized routines. Beyond the question of the degree of systematization of practices composing routines, results show that some practices are embedded in daily routines due to their ritualization.

This work takes part of the debates on how to study households’ daily life, and challenges the understanding of daily life activity more globally than just by the prism of isolated actions. For that, this study uses the concepts of routines and rituals. They are relevant to describe and to capture the tangle of practices composing food activities. The study shows that the material dimensions, the pressure of time, the commitments and the social relations condition the global arrangement of the food practices in a variable way.

Such results offer new perspectives for intervening on households’ daily consumption by understanding the global dynamics of food routines.

This work contributes to a better understanding of consumers’ food practices and routines and to a practice-change perspective considering constrained and routinely constructed lives.