English Households and Routine Food Practices: A Research Note

Abstract

This paper reports some findings frotn a study of households in the region of Greater Manchester. As part of a wider study of divisions of labour within households, information was collected about food preparation, the place of food in domestic routines and aspects of food preferences. The results are compared with Charles and Kerr's (1988) account of British domestic food practices. Introduction: the sociology of foodThe relevance of food for sociological analysis is much underestimated. Thus, a recent, authoritative literature survey (Mennell et al., 1992) was obliged to draw mostly on anthropological and historical sources in trying to establish the basis for a sociology of food. Much of what is known about contemporary British food habits derives from market research, which provides evidence about how often and what products people eat, from health specialists and official surveys, concerned almost exclusively with nutrition, or from food industry statistics. There are relatively few sociological studies of the role of food in British households. As a result, despite extensive discussion of change in social aspects of food practice -for instance, about men's participation in food preparation, 'grazing', the distribution of tastes for new foods, the impact of dining out -conclusions remain almost entirely speculative.Food provision constitutes a discriminating case for at least two sets of contemporary sociological debates. First, it provides an excellent locus for investigating consumption. It has a particu-

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