Changing Families,
Changing Food
Programme Summary
Peter Jackson, University of Sheffield
Changing Families, Changing Food
• Conclusion of a three-year, inter-disciplinary
research programme funded by The Leverhulme
Trust (F/00 118/AQ)
• Focus on contemporary Britain with some
historical and international comparisons
• 15 inter-related projects, organised into three
research strands, across the life-course.
Why families and food?
• Food is a powerful lens through which to view recent
changes in family life
• A means of addressing the diversity of family life:
– variations between families (class, ethnicity, place…)
– dynamics within families (gender, generation…)
– different family types (singles, nuclear, extended…)
– changing family contexts (historical, cultural…)
• The project offers a new perspective on family life,
transcending disciplinary boundaries and challenging
received ideas about ‘the family’.
‘The family’ in contemporary Britain
• No such thing as ‘the family’ (single, timeless,
homogeneous entity)
• It is a ‘falsely monolithic’ concept (Marjorie De Vault,
Feeding the family, 1991)
• And yet the (nuclear) family remains a powerful normative
social ideal, underpinned by strong institutional structures
and capable of exerting considerable moral force
• Strength of relationship between family and food also
revealed in our work with homeless people where quasifamilial relations were created in institutional settings
through ‘home cooking’ and networks of ‘fictive kin’.
Family diversity
Families have always taken diverse forms
including (since 1945) increases in:
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single-person households
cohabiting couples
divorced and separated couples
step families
gay and lesbian couples
the archetypal nuclear family (where husband, wife and
children live together under the same roof) currently
comprises less than a third (27.5%) of UK families.
‘Doing family’
• De Vault: ‘a ‘family’ is not a naturally
occurring collection of individuals; its
reality is constructed from day to day
through activities like eating together’
(1991: 39)
• A practice-based definition of family,
approached via the everyday work of ‘doing
family’.
Changing food
• Series of ‘food scares’ and farming crises (BSE,
salmonella, FMD etc) have led to a politicisation
of food, raising questions of trust and consumer
confidence
• Increased retail concentration has placed more
power in hands of the ‘big 4’ supermarket chains
• Rising food and energy prices have put pressure
on household budgets (‘The end of cheap food’,
The Economist December 2007).
Changing food
Food and family: why now?
• Increasing political and popular
interest in families and food
(childhood obesity, school
meals, 5-a-day etc)
• Cabinet Office (Food: an
analysis of the issues and Food
Matters reports, 2008)
• IPPR seminar Food for Thought,
2007 and Best Before report,
2008
• But little sustained social science
research since The Nation’s Diet
(ESRC, 1992-98).
Obesity as a social problem
• The Foresight report on
Tackling Obesities (Oct
2007) concluded that
‘policies aimed solely at
individuals will be
inadequate’
• Need for greater
understanding of ‘wider
cultural changes’
• Action required by
‘government … industry,
communities, families and
society as a whole.
Research findings
• Government policy recognises diverse family
circumstances but still implicitly addresses consumers as
individuals (primarily through advice to mothers):
“The opportunities are now opening up rapidly for everyone to make their own
individual informed healthy choices” (Choosing Health, DoH, 2004).
• Policy interventions acknowledge impact of poverty and
inequality but still tend to focus on deficits within families
(e.g. cooking and parenting skills)
• Improvements in ‘healthy eating’ require more than an
information or family deficit model.
Food is socially embedded
• FSA statistics: 71% of consumers are aware
of the government’s 5-a-day target but only
55% meet the target (Consumer Attitudes
Survey, Feb 2007)
• Children and parents are well aware of
dominant narratives about ‘healthy eating’
but not always reflected in practice.
Pregnancy and motherhood
• Pregnancy and motherhood as ‘projects’ to be managed,
balancing (often conflicting) professional advice (e.g.
feeding on demand) with the idea of motherhood as an
intuitive identity based on embodied knowledge
• Pregnancy increasingly medicalised over last 40 years,
technologies of surveillance (e.g. scans) and promotion
of healthy lifestyle (e.g. Healthy Start)
• Expectations have changed, pregnant women are more
confident in public but also under more pressure
regarding ideal body shape and size (‘celebrity mums’).
Feeding the family
• Feeding the family remains highly gendered practice with
women doing the majority of routine food work
• Men are cooking more, but mostly on special occasions,
where they have professional skills or where female
partners indisposed
• Children do little cooking, except snacks and cakes
• Mothers’ commitment to cooking ‘proper’ family meals
from scratch is often offset by the need to balance other
(family and work-related) commitments, including feeding
hungry kids after school
• The content of the ‘family meal’ creatively manipulated by
mothers to accommodate individual food preferences.
Family meals
Family meals
• Change in the timing of meals, away from clear
pattern of three meals a day at set times towards
more frequent, informal eating events (snacking
and grazing)
• But no overall decline in the amount of time
families spend eating, inside and outside the home
• Proper ‘family meals’, cooked from scratch,
remain an important symbol of family life, a
widely-shared aspiration
• Media emphasis on the decline of the family meal
seems exaggerated and not supported by historical
or sociological evidence.
School meals
• School meals have been intense focus of recent media and
policy interest
• School lunch as space of contested discourses: civility,
nutrition, choice, efficiency
• School lunch boxes as a transitional space between
home/school, family/peer group, imagination/reality
(dream and nightmare lunch boxes…)
• Children were critical of the standard and cost of school
meals, but not seen by them as key eating events, suggests
that policies promoting healthy eating for children which
position the school as a critical site for their delivery may
be misguided.
Lay and professional knowledge
• Our research reveals significant gaps between lay
and professional ideas about ‘healthy eating’
(among health managers and practitioners)
• Tensions between idealised notions of the nuclear
family and day-to-day experience of diversity of
family forms
• Notions of the ‘ideal’ nuclear family are deeply
rooted and continue to influence policy and
practice.
British culinary culture
Specificity of contemporary British food culture(s)
revealed by international and historical
comparisons:
– hosting and toasting in Hungary vs the middle-class model of
entertainment in the UK (the dinner party)
– the normative and nationalistic connotations of official food
discourse in Japan
– inter-generational change among Ukrainians in Bradford (food as a
vehicle for advancing political project of independence, food as a
means of facilitating active citizenship within multicultural
Britain).
Food as problem and pleasure
• Food ads in Britain in 1940s and 50s
repeated government health advice
but also emphasised role of diet in
looking good, soothing the nerves,
improving digestion and achieving
weight loss
• Food ads today repeat this tension
between food as problem/food as
pleasure (e.g. children’s food
advertised as healthy and fun).
Programme outputs
• Books:
– Changing Families, Changing Food (ed. Peter Jackson, PalgraveMacmillan)
– Children, Food and Identity (eds. Allison James et al., PalgraveMacmillan)
– Who Cares? Doing family, doing food, doing care (eds. Graham Smith
and Paula Nicolson).
• Journal papers:
– British Journal of Nutrition; Midwives Journal; Social Science and
Medicine; Gender, Place and Culture; Journal of Public Health; Public
Health Nutrition; Children’s Geographies; Population, Space and Place;
Social Semiotics; British Journal of Social Psychology; Food, Culture and
Society; Oral History etc.
• Conference presentations: over 50 papers at national and international
meetings including our own mid-term and final conferences.
Outputs/cont…
• Annotated bibliography with >1000 entries
• Working paper and seminar series
• Media coverage: including Woman’s Hour (R4)
and a double-page spread in Times Higher
Education Supplement
• Exhibition on family and food planned for Weston
Park Museum (Sheffield) and Museum of
Childhood (Bethnal Green)
• Website: more than 2000 hits per month on
www.sheffield.ac.uk/familiesandfood.
Future research
• European Research Council Advanced Grant on
‘Consumer anxieties about food’ (£1.3m 2009-13)
–awarded September 2008
• Marie Curie ITN bid on ‘Food agendas’ (with
colleagues in Denmark, Norway and Sweden) –
under review
• Bid to ESRC-Swedish Research Council bilateral
scheme on Fair Trade initiatives – under review
• Food Standards Agency’s new Social Science
Research Committee.
Thanks…
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The Leverhulme Trust
Our research participants
Project teams (led by Paula, Graham and Allison)
Colleagues at The British Library
Graham Allsopp (Drawing Office in Sheffield)
Jackie Pickering (programme administrator)
You, the audience
Our ‘critical friends’ (David Morgan, Anne
Murcott and Libby Bishop) – the last word.
Family Meal at Home: ‘Sixty dollars a month isn’t a lot of money, but
Mrs Siebold is a good manager and she feeds her family well with the
small budget she has for food’ (WPA, November 1937).