‘I don’t think I ever had food poisoning’. A practice-based approach to understanding foodborne disease that originates in the home

Abstract

Food stored, prepared, cooked and eaten at home contributes to foodborne disease which, globally, presents a significant public health burden. The aim of the study reported here was to investigate, analyse and interpret domestic kitchen practices in order to provide fresh insight about how the domestic setting might influence food safety. Using current theories of practice meant the research, which drew on qualitative and ethnographic methods, could investigate people and material things in the domestic kitchen setting whilst taking account of people's actions, values, experiences and beliefs. Data from 20 UK households revealed the extent to which kitchens are used for a range of non-food related activities and the ways that foodwork extends beyond the boundaries of the kitchen. The youngest children, the oldest adults and the family pets all had agency in the kitchen, which has implications for preventing foodborne disease. What was observed, filmed and photographed was not a single practice but a series of entangled encounters and actions embedded and repeated, often inconsistently, by the individuals involved. Households derived logics and principles about foodwork that represented rules of thumb about 'how things are done' that included using the senses and experiential knowledge when judging whether food is safe to eat. Overall, food safety was subsumed within the practice of 'being' a household and living everyday life in the kitchen. Current theories of practice are an effective way of understanding foodborne disease and offer a novel approach to exploring food safety in the home.

Barriers and Facilitators to Safe Food Handling among Consumers: A Systematic Review and Thematic Synthesis of Qualitative Research Studies

“…Social theories of practice provide a framework to explain safe food handling behaviours from this perspective [46], and they have recently been applied to investigate and explain the safe food handling behaviours of consumers in the United Kingdom [33,34,47–49]. Understanding consumer food handling behaviour within this context could be used to guide the development of future interventions.…”

Exploring the impact of packaging interactions on quality of life among older consumers

“…Baker, 2006;Hunter-Jones, 2011;Jafari et al, 2013;Wang and Tian, 2013) and older consumers' interactions with FMCG products and kitchen practices (e.g. Wills et al, 2013;Dickinson et al, 2014;Wills et al, 2015). This approach allowed these researchers to "observe the many nuances and contingencies of human behaviour as they become manifest in a 'natural' setting" (Marvasti, 2014, p.355).…”

Re-imagining the kitchen as a site of memory

“…Likewise, much of what our participants themselves recorded took place in the kitchen (although not always relating to foodwork), pointing toward the centrality of the kitchen within their domestic lives. Indeed, all of these kitchens hummed with life and meaning that went beyond the preparation of food (see Bennett, 2006;Wills, Meah, Dickinson, & short, 2015). While narrative interviews emphasise the discursive dimensions of participants' experiences and perceptions, in both studies, the ethnographic work offered the advantage of capturing how domestic 'kitchen life' (Wills et al, 2015) is enacted and performed in each household, facilitating what Pink (2004, p. 10) has referred to as an 'anthropology of the senses' .…”

“…Indeed, all of these kitchens hummed with life and meaning that went beyond the preparation of food (see Bennett, 2006;Wills, Meah, Dickinson, & short, 2015). While narrative interviews emphasise the discursive dimensions of participants' experiences and perceptions, in both studies, the ethnographic work offered the advantage of capturing how domestic 'kitchen life' (Wills et al, 2015) is enacted and performed in each household, facilitating what Pink (2004, p. 10) has referred to as an 'anthropology of the senses' . While none of these methods is particularly 'novel' in itself, there are few examples in the literature on food/kitchens of life history interviews being combined with the range of ethnographic methods deployed across these studies, particularly not in relation to the multi-generational dimension of coNANX.…”