Convenient Food for Baby: A Study of Weaning as a Social Practice

Abstract

This article reports findings from a study of weaning from a perspective informed by practice theory. The overall aim is to examine how parents integrate convenience baby food into their everyday feeding practices. The focus is the embedding of convenience baby foods in the routines and rhythms of everyday life and the “do-ability” of different practices. The study is based on fieldwork with nineteen mothers in Falköping in western Sweden. Results show that local do-abilities emerge out of situated combinations of materials, competences, and meanings. Convenience proves to be an emergent category rather than a property of particular kinds of food.

Keywords:

• baby food
• convenience
• weaning
• social practice

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Professor Peter Jackson and the colleges in the FOCAS project for their support and excellent advice during the process of writing this article, and also the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier draft versions.