The entrenchment of food habits in everyday life: a qualitative investigation of the links between food and other practices

Abstract

This paper investigates how food practices are shaped by their linkages to configurations of other everyday practices in the lives of consumers. It contributes to discussions of relations between everyday practices, by suggesting the term entrenchment as a way of zooming in on how the performance of single or compound practices, such as food practices, are shaped by their linkages to configurations of other practices in the lives of practitioners. This is done based on an analysis of data from 27 interviews with young Danish meat reducers (aged 18–30). The analysis shows how the food performances of the participants are spatiotemporally and socially entrenched to varying degrees. I discuss how the categories of spatiotemporal and social entrenchment may contribute to practice-theoretical discussions about how to understand the interrelations of everyday practices and argue that thinking in terms of entrenchment may help us understand the ways in which the performance of any practice is shaped by the organization of the performances of the other everyday practices they are linked to. Finally, I discuss the potential implications of food practice entrenchment for behavior change initiatives and argue that understanding the entrenchment of food performances can both help explain the ineffectiveness of individual behavior-change initiatives and help point toward alternative approaches.

Keywords:

• Everyday life
• food practices
• practice relations
• practice theory

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Bente Halkier and Amanda Krog Juvik for their valuable input and comments throughout different stages of the writing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical statement

The research project, from which the data used in this article originates, was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, approval number UCPH-SAMF-SOC-2023-01.

Notes

1 A number of studies have investigated the social differentiation of taste and food habits (e.g. Atkinson and Deeming 2015; Darmon and Drewnowski 2008), but while these studies have contributed with valuable insights, they have not investigated processes of change and reproduction in food habits per se, and are thus not included in this review.

2 In line with the main aim of the overall research project, the remainder of the interviews focused on different aspects of how the participants had reduced their meat consumption, as well as what challenges they faced in doing so. For more details on this, see Wendler and Halkier (2023).

3 HPE = Higher Preperatory Examination. HPE is a Danish upper secondary education program.

Additional information

Funding

The Velux Foundation supported this work under grant [27826, 2019].