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

Introduction

There has been growing scientific interest in understanding and effecting change in the food habits of consumers, for reasons related both to sustainability and public health. However, food habits have proven hard to change (Warde 2016), which, among other things, is illustrated by the continued high levels of meat consumption per capita in rich countries, despite efforts to promote more plant-rich diets (Ritchie, Rosado, and Roser 2019). Within the practice-theoretical literature on food habits and dietary change, some have argued that one reason for the seeming inertia of food practices is their connections and relations to other everyday practices (Laakso, Aro, et al. 2021; Castelo, Schäfer, and Silva 2021). However, while connections between practices have been discussed extensively on a theoretical level, few studies have investigated the subject empirically. As result, in recent years there have increasingly been calls for empirical analyses of the relations between practices (Castelo, Schäfer, and Silva 2021; Hui, Schatzki, and Shove 2017; Torkkeli, Mäkelä, and Seitamaa-Hakkarainen 2022). In line with these calls, this article starts from the basic observation that since performances of food practices are inextricably linked to the performances of other practices, we cannot fully understand how food practices are reproduced and changed without analyzing their relations to other practices (Laakso, Aro, et al. 2021).

This article empirically investigates how food practices are shaped by configurations of other practices in everyday life by analyzing data from 27 interviews with young Danish consumers. The article suggests the term entrenchment to denote how the performances of practice are shaped by the configuration of the performances of other practices they link to in the lives of practitioners. Simply put, entrenchment attempts to capture how the timing, location and manner of a practice performance is contingent on configurations of related practices and people. By viewing practice-relations through the lens of entrenchment, the article highlights dynamic relations between performances, rather than more static relations between practice entities.

I begin by reviewing the existing literature investigating different aspects of what changes and reproduces everyday food habits and position the current study in relation to it. I then briefly outline some main principles of practice theory, with special attention to existing approaches to understanding connections between practices and how the term entrenchment differs from existing concepts. In the analysis, I employ the categories of spatiotemporal and social entrenchment to show how the timing, location and manner of a practitioner’s food performances can be more or less contingent on other practices and practitioners. I go on to discuss how the term entrenchment may contribute to practice-theoretical understandings of how practices connect in configurations and influence each other. Finally, I discuss the relevance of entrenchment for policy aiming to effect behavior change. I argue that the entrenchment of food practices may help explain why the policy focus on the behaviors of individual consumers has so far had limited success in creating behavioral change, e.g., toward less meat-heavy food practices. In addition, I discuss how change initiatives and policy aimed at creating behavioral change may benefit from taking into account how the food habits of most people are deeply spatiotemporally entrenched to the performances of other practices and socially entrenched to the practices of other practitioners.

Existing research on what changes food habits

Because this article investigates how food practices are shaped by configurations of other everyday practices, it is related to the field of studies investigating different aspects of what changes and reproduces everyday food habits.¹ This subject has been studied widely in social science, often with a focus on sustainability (O’Neill et al. 2019) and/or public health aspects (Halkier and Holm 2021) of food habits. In this section, I outline two broad overall tendencies in the field to position the current study and detail its contribution.

The first tendency is to focus the investigation of change and reproduction in food habits on individual consumers and their characteristics. This entails studies that investigate consumer identities (Mycek 2018; Hirth 2021; Kemper and White 2021), tastes (Cliceri et al. 2018), motivations (Boyle 2011; Dijkstra et al. 2014; Vrinten et al. 2022; Malek and Umberger 2021; de Boer and Aiking 2017), choices (Rosenfeld and Burrow 2017; Saccone and Obeng 2015), preferences (Slade 2018), and values, perceptions, attitudes and beliefs (Allen et al. 2000; Lupton and Turner 2018 Amiot et al. 2018,; Bschaden, Mandarano, and Stroebele-Benschop 2020). These studies have contributed important insights about how individuals understand their own consumption. However, they tend to underemphasize the role of non-conscious and non-cognitive aspects of everyday life and social change, including how sequences of everyday activities interrelate and influence each other (Welch, Halkier, and Keller 2020). A possible explanation for this is that such studies often adopt a view of social change in which the aforementioned tastes, rationales, values and so on more or less straightforwardly drive individuals to choose to adopt specific actions. This view of social change has been criticized for limiting the innovativeness and effectiveness of interventions and policy, by focusing on guiding and persuading individuals to make “better” (e.g., more sustainable) consumption choices (Capstick et al. 2014; Shove 2010).

The second tendency is to study what shapes food habits based on theories of practice (Delormier, Frohlich, and Potvin 2009; Halkier and Jensen 2011; Warde 2016). This group of studies, while diverse, all place everyday food practices, such as shopping, cooking and eating, as their unit of analysis. Consequently, much less emphasis is put on individuals’ conscious choices, and more emphasis is put on chains of activity and the social dynamics of everyday life (Warde 2014). These studies have contributed important insights on how food practices are reproduced and changed, for example, in more or less sustainable or healthy directions. These include looking at how life course transitions influence food performances and meat consumption (Burningham and Venn 2020; O’Neill et al. 2019; Paddock 2017; Plessz et al. 2016) and how food practitioners navigate and solve challenges to plant-based food performances in their immediate material and social environment (Fuentes and Fuentes 2021; Twine 2018). They also include investigating how food practitioners coordinate their performances with each other and produce understandings of appropriate ways of performing food practices through social interactions (Wendler 2023; Wendler and Halkier 2023; Laakso, Niva et al. 2021). Finally, practice-theoretical studies have started to investigate the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on food practices (Forno, Laamanen, and Wahlen 2022; Greene et al. 2022; Hirth et al. 2022). However, while there has been much theorizing on inter-practice relations and interactions (e.g., Schatzki 2019; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012; Southerton 2020; Warde 2016), there are few empirical inquiries into the subject.

The current study positions itself to add to the existing literature and to address some of its limitations. First, this study adopts a view of social change inspired by theories of practice, which emphasizes how the material, temporal and social structures of everyday life limit the scope of possible and probable ways of doing with food (Keller, Halkier, and Wilska 2016). Second, by empirically investigating how food shopping, cooking and eating relate to and are influenced by other everyday practices, the article seeks to illuminate a somewhat understudied area within the practice-theoretical body of literature.

Theories of practices and their interrelations

Practice theory consists of many different and overlapping theories that share some important assumptions and traits (Schatzki 1996; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012; Warde 2005).

One common trait for contemporary theories of practice is to place practices as the center of analysis, while individuals are viewed as carriers or practitioners of said practices (Schatzki 2019). Although there are different conceptualizations of how to define practices, they are commonly understood as collections of doings and sayings that are linked and organized by certain elements, such as understandings, engagements and procedures (Warde 2005). In other words, theories of practice focus on activities more than on actors, and on what characterizes and holds together these activities into intelligible collections of doings and sayings that are meaningful to the practitioner (Castelo, Schäfer, and Silva 2021).

Practices exist both as entities and as performances (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). Practices as entities are the aforementioned organized collections of doings and sayings, which exist beyond their temporal and material manifestations, i.e., their performances (Schatzki 1996; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). Take, for instance, the practice-as-entity of cooking. The doings and sayings related to cooking are organized by myriad different understandings (e.g., of how to use different ingredients to cook meals), procedures of acceptable conduct (e.g., of the appropriate time to spend on cooking an evening meal) as well as engagements in the form of affective and normative end-goals (e.g., of being a good host or spouse). A cooking performance then, is an instance of someone cooking at a specific point in time and space, say, a grandfather cooking for his grandkids. Such a performance draws on and brings together only some of cooking-related understandings (e.g., how to cook a kid-friendly curry), procedures of acceptable conduct (e.g., concerning hygiene) and engagements (e.g., the goal of providing the grand-kids with a suitably tasty meal), depending on which elements are relevant to the situation and available to the practitioner. In the below analysis, I refer to the two concepts of practice-as-entity and practice-as-performance simply as “practices” and “performances.”

Another common trait in theories of practice is to acknowledge that in everyday life, multiple practices overlap, interact and relate in various ways (Castelo, Schäfer, and Silva 2021; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012; Southerton 2020). While there are different conceptualizations of how to analyze relations between practices, most authors acknowledge that these relations have temporal, spatial-material and social qualities (Blue and Spurling 2017; Plessz and Wahlen 2022 Castelo, Schäfer, and Silva 2021). Practices can relate to each other by entailing common elements (Castelo, Schäfer, and Silva 2021; Schatzki 2019) and/or, to some degree, be functionally dependent on each other (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). They can also relate in the sense that they share temporal and/or material performance locations (Plessz and Étilé 2019; Castelo, Schäfer, and Silva 2021) or they can compete over practitioners (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012; Veen, Wahlen, and Angelino 2023). Finally, they can affect the timing and manner of each other’s performances (Blue 2019; Schatzki 2019; Southerton 2020). To name a few examples: The practice of cooking arguably shares some organizing elements with the practice of parenting (e.g., understandings of what foods are healthy for kids to eat). Cooking is also to a certain degree functionally dependent on grocery-shopping (people often need to shop for groceries to be able to cook) and even sometimes share performance-locations with trekking (e.g., cooking can take place in a forest via the use of a gas burner). Finally, cooking may compete for practitioners with the practice of ordering takeaway (in the sense that performing the latter usually stops people from performing the former).

In continuance of the above, the amount of overlap and dependence between practices on the above parameters have often been used to assess how tightknit specific practices are with each other, that is, whether they connect in relatively loose “bundles” (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012) or in more tightknit “complexes” (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). In a discussion of eating, Warde (2016) even suggests the term of a compound practice to denote a collection of closely related and overlapping, but relatively autonomous practices. In this article, I conceptualize food practices as a compound of the three practices of shopping, cooking and eating (Halkier 2020).

The concepts of bundles, complexes and compounds have commonly been used to describe overall and relatively static relations between two or more practices-as-entities (e.g., if two practices are in competition). I aim to contribute to practice-theoretical discussions on relations between practices, by approaching the subject of practice inter-relations from a different angle. Namely, by focusing on the relations between practice performances in the everyday lives of food practitioners. In doing so, I employ a dynamic view of practice relations, highlighting how the relations between practices vary, depending on configurations of everyday practice performances in the actual lives of practitioners (Blue and Spurling 2017).

In the analysis, I investigate how the configuration of practice-performance sequences in the practitioners’ everyday lives shape the timing and manner of their food practices and how their food performances are contingent on the everyday practices the people around them carry and perform. I suggest the categories of spatiotemporal and social entrenchment as new ways of understanding how food practices are interlinked with configurations of other practices.

Research design and methods

The analysis draws on data from 27 interviews with young Danes, ages 18–30, who have reduced their meat consumption. The focus on meat reducers was chosen because the main aim of the overall research project (Wendler 2023; Wendler and Halkier 2023; Halkier and Lund 2023) was to investigate processes of meat reduction in consumers’ everyday lives, but the interviews also touched on how food habits relate to other everyday activities. While there were several reasons for focusing on young adults, one is especially relevant here. Namely, early adulthood is likely to involve many changes to the organization of everyday life, which makes young adults a fitting group for investigating the relationship between food habits and configurations of other everyday activities. As a part of every interview, the participants were asked to describe their daily and weekly schedule, both in general and specifically related to food activities.² In other words, the interviews produced data about sequences of everyday activity as well as how food and other activities relate to each other in the lives of the participants (Hitchings 2012). This provides a strong basis for analyzing how food and other practices relate and interact.

The interview participants were recruited through a large telephone survey (n = 3000) on the food habits and meat consumption of Danes. At the end of the survey, all participants were asked if they were interested in participating in a qualitative interview. From the pool of people who responded positively, approximately 100 people were in the target group.

Due to having access to the survey answers, it was possible to recruit participants strategically to maximize the variation of the group on a number of parameters. The participants were sampled to reflect different genders, ages (within the target group range), levels of education, household types, self-reported degrees of urbanization and self-reported levels of meat consumption. Therefore the resulting participant group was very diverse, which allowed for many different perspectives on the subject. To name a few examples, the group entailed everything from omnivores to vegans, and from singles to families with kids (for a more complete overview, see Wendler and Halkier 2023). This diversity arguably strengthens the basis of the study for making analytical generalizations (Flyvbjerg 2006).

In all stages of the data production, from recruitment to interpretation, the project has followed acknowledged ethical standards of informed consent, data protection and anonymity (ASA 2018). The interviews lasted between 45 min and 2 h and were audio-recorded and fully transcribed. The interviews were coded using NVIVO in two phases: first an open coding, which resulted in a list of conversational themes, followed by a more targeted coding that compared the contents from the open coding with a shorter list of conceptual themes relevant to this article’s research question. This second, “theoretical” coding resulted in a shorter list of codes, and this interaction between the data and existing theoretical concepts ultimately led to my development of the two terms spatiotemporal and social entrenchment (Tavory and Timmermans 2014).

All excerpts in the following analysis have been cleared of half-sentences and filled pauses (e.g., “umm”) and translated from Danish to English with special attention to language-specific phrasings and metaphors. This was done to convey the meanings of the original statements as accurately as possible. To ensure analytical and interpretative transparency, each excerpt included is presented with brief descriptions of the interview context in which they were produced (Cho and Trent 2006).

Results

Over the course of the following sections, I utilize excerpts from the interview data to show two central ways in which the configurations of practice performances in the participants’ lives shape their food performances. I show how food performances are (1) spatiotemporally entrenched and (2) socially entrenched in varying degrees. The discussion focuses on the implications of entrenchment for theoretical understandings of the relations between everyday practices, and on implications for intervention efforts and policy aimed at creating behavior change, e.g., toward a reduced meat consumption.

The spatiotemporal entrenchment of food performances

In this section, I show how the participants’ food performances can be more or less spatiotemporally entrenched. By employing the term entrenchment, I attempt to capture how the performance of any everyday practice is shaped by its links to configurations of other practice performances. While the term entrenchment is in principle relevant for an analysis of any practice or practice compound, in this analysis, the focus is on the performance of food practices. This entrenchment shapes the timing, spatial location and manner of food performances, which is what makes the entrenchment spatiotemporal.

I argue that food performances can be more or less spatiotemporally entrenched. This means that the levels of regularity of performance sequences in a practitioner’s everyday life shape how profoundly food performances are conditioned by the performances of other everyday practices.

To illustrate how food performances can be spatiotemporally entrenched, I utilize and compare excerpts from the interview data. Consider the following excerpt from the interview with Asger, a 26-year-old male omnivore, who lives with his girlfriend, owns a car, and works full time as a trainee in a large medical company.

INT: So how would you describe your overall schedule for the week? […]

Asger: Well, I get up at 4.45, because I need an hour to wake up properly before I get on the expressway. Then I drive to work, where I arrive at 7 am. It takes some time to get there with the morning traffic, unfortunately. I then work until 3pm. Then I go home. If my girlfriend hasn’t done it already, I’ll shop for groceries. Then we cook. We usually eat quite early. She works in a hospital, so it is limited how much time she has to eat during the day. So we are both pretty hungry when we get home. After dinner, I go to the gym and return home at around 7 pm. Then we relax for two or three hours, and then I go to sleep. That’s more or less how every weekday looks for me. […]

INT: My next question was going to be about a typical day, but you sort of covered that already. I don’t think you mentioned lunch though.

Asger: I usually buy lunch at the work lunch service and eat it at 11. […]

INT: Ok, and you eat breakfast at what, 5-5.30?

Asger: I get up at a quarter to five and make breakfast, but then I eat it in the car actually. I mean, I make a smoothie with oatmeal and berries every day, and then drink it on the way to work.

Asger describes, in broad strokes, what appears to be a relatively regular set of daily activities, both in a linear and circular sense (Southerton 2020): Linear in the sense that the activities happen in more or less the same sequence: Asger wakes early, goes to work, returns home, goes to the gym, relaxes and goes to bed. Circular in the sense that the sequence of activity is repeated regularly throughout the workweek (Southerton 2020). What is important to note here, is how both the timing and location of food performances are influenced by the configuration of other activities in Asgers’ daily life. The fact that Asger, as he describes in a different part of the interview, is a dedicated amateur bodybuilder and goes to the gym “6–7 times a week”, together with an early workday and the around 45-minute drive to and from Asger’s workplace all take part in reproducing the early timing of Asger’s daily meals. The same goes for the regularity of the spatial locations of his food performances: breakfast in the car, lunch at work, dinner at home.

To clarify, I am not claiming that the excerpt accurately describes Asger’s “actual” weekly schedule. The excerpt consists of a general answer to a general question, and as such does not go into detail with everything (such as the rate of recurrence of shopping performances), account for possible variations to the schedule or for potential instances of “wishful thinking” (e.g., whether Asger really makes it to the gym almost every day). Instead, I am suggesting that the excerpt illustrates that Asger’s food performances are spatiotemporally entrenched to a high degree: The timing and location of his shopping, cooking and eating activities are closely linked to the way his other everyday performances are configured, because these other performances have regular rates of reoccurrence and relatively fixed spatial locations.

Consider, in comparison, the following excerpt from the interview with the 22-year-old omnivore Liv.

INT: Can you maybe start by telling me a bit about yourself?

Liv: Well, I live in a small village with my mom. I’m in my second gap year, and since I’m not sure what I am going to do later on, I’m taking some [online] classes at HPE³, just to have something to do. And since it is only a couple of classes, I spend some time on hiking as well. Besides that, well, I have a dog, and I hang out with my friends.

INT: It sounds to me like you have a relatively flexible schedule? But how does a typical week look for you?

Liv: During my week, I usually try to get the studying done in the mornings. Then, in the afternoons, I have a tendency to take relatively long breaks once in a while. Which is no problem. But I usually walk the dog before my mom comes home. And then there are all the other fun things I can do (laughs). I don’t know… sometimes it varies from day to day, other times I have the whole week planned out. Such as this week, where I’m here [visiting friends in Copenhagen], and last week where I went hiking several times. So I just make plans depending on how much I have to study. […] The only thing I need to adhere to is some weekly assignments that I need to hand in.

While Liv mentions some regularly recurring activities (e.g., walking the dog, studying some mornings), her description is of a much less regular sequence of performances than Asger’s. Aside from studying constituting relatively few hours of Liv’s week, the temporal and spatial location of Liv’s studying activities are also much more flexible than Asger’s full-time job. This enables Liv to spend some days hiking or to spend several days visiting friends in Copenhagen. As the following example illustrates, this relatively irregular weekly schedule also takes part in shaping Liv’s food performances.

INT: Do you and your mom have any agreement about who cooks when?

Liv: No, we sort of make it up as we go along. I think it depends how much time each of us has. I mean, when I return home [from Copenhagen] tonight, I won’t have time to cook. But tomorrow or the day after that, I might go “I’ll cook dinner today”. (…) Last week, I cooked dinner every day from Monday to Thursday, and then she did it the rest of the week. But that was because I had the time. I didn’t really have anything else to do, so I just did the cooking.

Liv’s irregular schedule takes part in shaping her coordination of cooking activities with her mom, which depends on “how much time” Liv has available, and whether she has “anything else to do.” In other words, the irregularity of Liv’s schedule is part of the reason why she and her mom make the division of cooking responsibilities “up as [they] go along”, because Liv is not necessarily home for (or has the time to cook) dinner on a given day.

The comparison of Asger’s and Liv’s schedules illustrates how the spatiotemporal entrenchment of the participants’ food performances vary. First, the degree of regularity of everyday activities (such as work, study, and leisure activities) in the participants’ everyday lives influences how regular and/or flexible their food performances become. Second, and in continuation of the first tendency, the configuration of everyday activities in the participants’ lives does not only shape the regularity of performance, but also how, when and where the participants perform food practices. There are many examples of these two tendencies among the participants. To name a few: First, the 23-year-old student Siri says she doesn’t make a weekly dinner plan, because she doesn’t have an “especially structured life”, and mostly makes “spontaneous social plans”, which makes it hard to know in advance which nights she’s eating dinner at home. Secondly, in another interesting case, the 29-year-old August, who has a full-time job, mentions how he regularly makes use of his workplace’s cantina, and brings home leftovers for his family’s dinner. Finally, the nurse Sofie describes how her biweekly work schedule affects her cooking: In anticipation of weeks with late shifts, she cooks large portions of a dish to have enough for dinner for several days.

To sum up, this section has shown how the participant’s food performances are more or less spatiotemporally entrenched, depending on the configurations and regularity of other everyday practice performances. This spatiotemporal entrenchment arguably has important implications for how food practices are organized and may even inform efforts to create behavior change.

The social entrenchment of food performances

In this section, I show how the sequences of everyday practice performances of the participants are not only spatiotemporally entrenched, but also conditioned by the configurations of everyday practice performances of other people. This, in turn means that the participants’ food performances can be viewed as more or less socially entrenched, depending on how intertwined their performances are with the everyday practice sequences of other practitioners. Social entrenchment differs from the concept of coordination (e.g., Southerton 2020), because social entrenchment does not necessitate co-performances, but attempts to capture the ways the food performances of one practitioner can be contingent on the everyday performances of others.

The degree to which the participants’ everyday practice sequences are socially entrenched varies and is most pronounced in the cases where the participant lives with a partner and/or has children living at home. Part of the reason for this is arguably the necessity for high degrees of daily coordination. Moreover, in the cases of participants with young children, the parents also have to manage the kids’ everyday activities in ways that have profound impacts on their own everyday activity sequences. Consider the following example of the 29-year-old Lisbeth, who lives with her husband and two kids.

INT: What does your typical week look like?

Lisbeth: Well, I get up early to get ready to wake up the kids. Then we drive off, first to the kindergarten and then to work. Then we go back home. I’m working part time, so we can come back home relatively early. Otherwise, it is my husband who picks them up first. So, we have the afternoons to be together with the kids, and then the evening. One of my kids goes to soccer, and my daughter has gymnastics classes. […] We try to squeeze in our own activities when the kids are sleeping, or we try to make them part of it, like to take them for a run or a walk or whatever makes sense. In the kids’ waking hours everything is on their terms.

Lisbeth’s description of a typical week revolves around the children’s needs and activities, and Lisbeth even describes how “everything is on their terms” during their waking hours. The configuration of the children’s daily activities (e.g., going to kindergarten, leisure activities, putting the kids to bed) adds activities to and takes part in organizing Lisbeth’s everyday schedule. The kids’ activities have relatively fixed temporal locations in the week and in the day (Southerton 2020): The kindergartens have limited opening times, and leisure activities such as soccer or gymnastics classes usually happen on a set day (or several days) during the week, at the same point in time (say, at 4 PM), and for the same duration (e.g., two hours). The spatial locations of these activities are also fixed: the kindergarten and the leisure activities both happen outside of the home, which creates the regular task of transporting the kids around. This spatial-temporal fixedness of the children’s’ activities is likely why Lisbeth and her husband have to “squeeze in” their own activities around the children’s, and it even plays a part in shaping Lisbeth’s other practice performances (e.g., the fact that Lisbeth works part time to be able to pick up the kids from kindergarten and spend time with them). In other words, Lisbeth’s configuration of everyday practice performances is deeply socially entrenched, because they are inextricably linked to her kids’ performance configurations.

These results supplement those of a recent study, which shows that the interlocking practices involved in mothering creates temporal inflexibility to the mother’s schedule (Spotswood, Nobles, and Armstrong 2021). Here it has been shown how this inflexibility also derives from the entrenchment of the parent’s practices to the kids’ everyday practices. While Lisbeth’s food performances are not mentioned explicitly in this excerpt, it is clear from the rest of the interview that her food performances are also socially entrenched. For example, since Lisbeth’s husband leaves early to commute to work every morning, Lisbeth is usually responsible for the kids’ breakfast.

To elaborate on how social entrenchment can shape food performances specifically, I have included the following excerpt from the 28-year-old vegan Stefan, who works full time as a consultant and shares custody of his 3-year-old son with his ex-wife. This means that Stefan’s son lives with him every other week:

INT: So if we take a slightly more schematic approach, how would you describe an average week?

Stefan: Well, if I have my son, I get up at exactly 6.45 AM. Otherwise, I get up a little later than that. Then I drive him to kindergarten, and work until 3 PM. After my son’s bedtime, at 7 PM, I work for another two or three hours. […] When I don’t have my son, I usually work from 9 AM to 6 or 7 PM. […] I don’t really have time to cook, so I cook enough of a dish so it lasts for 3 days or so […]. I try to vary my son’s food more. I still cook in big portions, but then throw some of it in the freezer so I can vary what I serve him. Whereas I normally eat the same dish 3 or 4 days in a row myself. […] It’s just easier. It was hard for me to make it work, just having the time to cook when I had my son. […]

INT: You mentioned earlier that you cook something different for your son and yourself. Is it then two versions of the same dish or is it something completely different?

Stefan: It’s a completely different dish. He usually eats, like, pasta carbonara with some veggies on the side, meatballs in curry, that sort of thing. And I mostly eat curry dishes of some sort, it’s sort of a tendency at the moment. And that is too spicy for my son, and in general those sorts of dishes don’t really work for him, because he can’t really figure out what’s in it.

What stands out here is how Stefan describes two different versions of his everyday sequences of activity: One for the weeks where Stefan is by himself, and one for the weeks where he has responsibility for the son. Stefan organizes both his cooking and work performances differently in each version, not just when it comes to the timing and sequence of the activities (in a similar sense to the case of Lisbeth), but also when it comes to the manner in which they are performed. Not only does Stefan try to vary his son’s meals more than his own, but he also cooks dishes where the son is able to “figure out what’s in” the dish. Interestingly, Stefan cooks parallel dishes for himself and the son. While cooking parallel dishes is not an unusual thing to do for parents according to earlier research (e.g., Anving and Sellerberg 2010), there is an important twist to Stefan’s version: Although Stefan’s own diet is almost completely plant-based, he cooks dishes with meat for his son. In a different part of the interview, Stefan explains this by saying he hasn’t been able to find any vegan dishes that his son will eat. In other words, Stefan’s understandings of what constitutes proper “kid’s food” (in this case “food that kids will eat”) takes part in organizing his cooking performances when the son is present. To sum up, the social entrenchment of Stefan’s food performances varies with his son’s presence and absence.

There are many examples of different degrees of social entrenchment in everyday food performances among the participants, and far from all these examples are related to parenting. The earlier example of the omnivore Asger is one of them; whether he needs to go shopping on a given day is contingent on whether his girlfriend “has already done it,” and Asger describes the girlfriend’s busy workday with limited time to eat lunch as taking part in shaping the timing of the couple’s (early) dinners. Emilie, who lives with her boyfriend, provides another interesting example: Her boyfriend plays basketball every Tuesday and Thursday, which shapes which nights the couple eats together. There are also many examples of participants whose everyday food performances are not very socially entrenched. There are both those who live by themselves and are solely responsible for their daily shopping and cooking, and those who live in shared apartments, but who only coordinate food activities very loosely with their roommates, such as by buying common spices and cooking oil and by sharing kitchen equipment.

In summary, in this section, I have shown how the configuration of the participants’ everyday practice performances are more or less socially entrenched, depending on how intertwined their everyday lives are with the lives of other practitioners. The configurations of other practitioners, especially those of cohabitant partners and kids, take part in shaping the performances of the participants. In the following and final section, I discuss the implications of entrenchment for understanding relations between everyday practices, and briefly discuss the potential implications of entrenchment for policy initiatives aimed at creating behavior change.

Contributions and conclusions

In this article, I have investigated how configurations of practice performances in the everyday lives of practitioners shape their food performances. By analyzing interview data on the everyday life activity sequences of the participants, I have shown how food performances can be more or less spatiotemporally and socially entrenched, and that this entrenchment shape both the regularity, timing, location and manner of food performances.

The category of spatiotemporal entrenchment denominates how food performances are shaped by their linkages to configurations of other everyday practices: High levels of temporal regularity and spatial fixity in the everyday performance sequences of a practitioner entrench food performances in the sense that they are shaped to fit in around the performances of other practices. This means that the food performances are likely to become more regular and spatially fixed. Conversely, food performances can also be less spatiotemporally entrenched in other practices, especially in cases where the everyday performance-sequences of a practitioner are temporally irregular and spatially flexible.

The category of social entrenchment denominates how the food performances of one practitioner are shaped by their intertwinement to the everyday performance sequences of other practitioners, for example, a partner or a child. When the everyday life of a practitioner is closely intertwined with the lives of one or more other practitioners, this affects the timing, location, and manner of that practitioner’s food performances. Conversely, if a practitioner’s everyday life is only loosely intertwined with the lives of other practitioners, e.g., if the practitioner lives by themselves and has no kids, that practitioner’s food performances are less entrenched.

Entrenchment and connections between practices

While this paper has focused on food practices and how configurations of other practices shape them, entrenchment is not inherently tied to food practices, and the term could in principle be employed to zoom in on any practice.

With the category of spatiotemporal entrenchment, I tentatively suggest a way of zooming in on how the performance of single or compound practices, such as food practices, is shaped by its linkages to configurations of other everyday practice performances. The term thus attempts to go beyond thinking of connections between practices in terms of relatively static relations between two or more practice entities. The degree to which, e.g., food performances are spatiotemporally entrenched is not so much a consequence of the character of any single practice, but instead the result of the overall configuration of sequences of everyday practice performances in the lives of practitioners.

The category of social entrenchment is an attempt to highlight an important social aspect of food conduct, namely how the everyday food performances of a practitioner are intertwined with the performances of other practitioners. In other words, the performances of a single practitioner cannot be understood without understanding how these performances are conditioned by those of other, proximate practitioners. Instead, the configuration of performance sequences in the practitioners’ everyday lives depend on processes of social coordination and interaction (Halkier 2020; Wendler and Halkier 2023).

Together the two categories entail an approach to understanding how configurations of everyday performances shape how single or compound practices are performed. The aim of this approach is not to replace existing concepts that focus on the overall character of the relations between practices entities. Instead, thinking in terms of entrenchment enables investigating how the performance of a single or compound practice is shaped by its links to configurations of other practice performances. In other words, through the term entrenchment, the current article contributes to theories of practice with a new approach to understand relations between everyday practices. In addition, the article contributes to food studies by highlighting the ways in which the food conduct of individual consumers is both contingent on other everyday activities and intertwined with the conduct of social relations.

Implications of entrenchment for behavior-change initiatives and policy

While this article hasn’t empirically analyzed processes of behavior-change, the results can nonetheless potentially contribute to further understandings of behavior change and reproduction. The category of spatiotemporal entrenchment may help explain why it is ineffectual to appeal to individual consumers, if the goal is to change practices in specific ways (Hargreaves 2011), for example, by making food practices less meat-heavy (Capstick et al. 2014). Even if individuals become inclined to change their food habits, the ways in which their food performances are contingent on the configuration of other everyday practice-performances may in some cases hamper individual attempts at changing their own habits.

The analysis showed how food performances were most strongly spatiotemporally entrenched in the cases where the practitioner had a regular occupation, and in Denmark (and most other countries), this would account for a large majority of the adult population (Statistics Denmark 2022). The irregular and spatiotemporally relatively loosely entrenched food performances of the HPE-student Liv is in other words the statistical exception rather than the norm.

However, spatiotemporally entrenched food performances are also potentially more susceptible to being shaped by changes in surrounding practices because of their entrenchment to these practices. This means an important implication of spatiotemporal entrenchment is that policies and behavioral initiatives could benefit from understanding how their target behaviors are contingent on their links to other everyday activities. The analysis thus lends empirical evidence for the recommendation Keller, Halkier, and Wilska (2016) put forward to policymakers, that is, “to include work-life and professional practices in change initiatives, and not limit initiatives to private everyday lives” (p. 84). For example, if the goal is to normalize more sustainable (e.g., plant-based) dietary behaviors in countries such as Denmark, intervention efforts would benefit from broadening their scope and aiming to create infrastructures that support more plant-rich diets, not only in a private setting, but also in, for example, workplaces and public institutions.

The analysis has also shown how food performances were socially entrenched to the highest degree in the cases where the participant lived with a partner and/or had cohabitant children. This means that it becomes important for change-initiatives to consider the social contingencies of behavioral change. The social entrenchment of everyday practice performances may be another reason why attempts to reduce the carbon emissions from consumption through individual behavior-change initiatives have proven ineffective (Capstick et al. 2014). In the case of dietary change toward less meat, because the food performances and everyday lives of many people are highly intertwined with those of their significant others, acquiring new engagements and knowledge may have a very limited impact on their diets. Consequently, change initiatives could benefit from tailoring their efforts to match the social contingencies of specific target groups (e.g., single households vs. families). In sum, the terms spatiotemporal and social entrenchment can provide a lens through which change-initiatives can better understand and potentially overcome some of the obstacles consumers face in their everyday lives when they attempt to live (and eat) more sustainably.

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.

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).

Additional information

Funding

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

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.