Household Food Strategies and the Reframing of Ways of Understanding Dietary Practices

Abstract

While the use of households as a study focus is not a new concept in nutrition research, recent sociological literature has highlighted methodological advances in household strategy research that deserve attention. This article introduces and examines the conceptual relevance and analytical scope of household food strategies (HFS) research. People's household food strategies and dietary practices go together as do legs and walking, and yet to listen to public commentary on, for example, the current public health cause célèbre- the childhood obesity epidemic- we hear little, if any, balanced discussion of domestic food provisioning work, but much ideological posturing re parental responsibility, resisting the temptation of the abundance of fast food in our environment, and the importance of cooking from scratch. Using HFS as a unit of analysis highlights the process of integrating two critical sets of factors: household resources and preferences on the one hand, and the broader social and cultural shaping of dietary practices on the other. Such an approach has the advantage of avoiding an overemphasis on agency. Specifically, this article outlines a search for a coherent and integrated theoretical and methodological framework suited to studying households and dietary practices under circumstances of resource constraint and rapid social or political change. Developments in cultural sociology and anthropology, particularly, have much to offer a research agenda to support contemporary food and nutrition policy making in a post-modern world.

KEYWORDS:

• household food strategies
• social change
• public health nutrition

Notes

¹The depth of understanding that can be gleaned from the latter approach is demonstrated in the Australasian work of Dixon (2002) and Le Heron and Hayward (2002).

²Interestingly, the study by Theophano and Curtis in this volume addressed issues of continuity and change in shared sociocultural rules for food use, food exchange and reciprocity in an Italian-American community, thus producing a rare example of the application of the methods of cultural anthropology and social network analysis utilising the lens of food habits.

³In their recent article, Ochs and Shohet (2006) have presented ethnographic data from multiple cultural settings to demonstrate the universal but divergent practices of commensality.

⁴See Berman et al.,(1994), and Verma et al. (1989) for two examples of the household production of health (HHPH) literature. Given that women play a central role in domestic food work, the literature by critical anthropologists using a feminist perspective to research women and households is also pertinent to this discussion- Koning et al. (2000) and Krishnaraj and Chanana (1989) give a flavour of this field.

⁵This is arguably the result of an underdeveloped sense of individual agency in navigating through the quagmire of the contemporary food system. Food system modelling, however, remains popular and has supported the burgeoning field of environmental interventions, which seeks to modify so-called obesogenic or toxic environments.

⁶The complex set of processes referred to here is just as relevant to a political economy of agriculture approach as it is to a micro-level qualitative sociocultural analysis of individual agents, whether they be food provisioners, producers, or consumers.

⁷For examples see Hoisington, Shultz, and Butkus (2002); Kempson et al., (2003); Maxwell (1996).