Social Interaction as Key to Understanding the Intertwining of Routinized and Culturally Contested Consumption

Abstract

A number of concepts and concerns from cultural sociology were thrown out as babies with the bathwater when the sociological study of consumption became dominated by the use of practice theories. The concept of social interaction is one of them, perhaps due to assumptions about its association with symbolic and discursive interaction and reflexivity. In the field of sociological analysis of food conduct, however, there is a need for addressing both more culturally contested parts of food practices as well as more routinized parts. Food consumption and practices of provisioning, cooking and eating are both tacit, recursive, mundane activities, and at the same time discursively questioned through multiple, mediatized, cultural repertories of food. In the article, I will suggest how social interaction can be conceptualized as enabling the understanding of this intermingling of the culturally contested and routinized parts of consumption within a practice theoretical perspective. The conceptual suggestion consists in four analytical suggestions for how the culturally tacit and reflexive in food conduct become linked through social interaction. The four suggestions are about coordination, intersection, hybridity and normative accountability. The four suggestions are exemplified empirically on the basis of a number of qualitative studies of food conduct among Danish consumers.

Keywords

Consumption Denmark everyday life food practice theories social interaction

Linking the Culturally Tacit and Reflexive Through Social Interaction

One of the implications of the academic boundary work in recent debates about practice theories seems to have been that certain categories and concepts with an otherwise long history in the study of consumption and consumer culture were more or less thrown out like babies with the bathwater (see also Evans, 2019). In practice theoretically inspired discussions on consumption, concepts such as discourse, cultural representation, symbolic elements of consumption, identification, and reflexivity have been deemed to be too strongly linked with the so-called cultural turn in consumption research (Warde, 2014: 281–284), whereas practice theoretical approaches to consumption tend to focus on mundane practices as the analytical unit, and how consumption activities are generated through the organization and performative accomplishment of such practices (Shove et al., 2012; Warde, 2005). But during the cultural turn, the institutionalization of cultural studies in general and consumer culture studies in particular helped to reframe consumption as an academically worthy research pursuit. The empirical work tended to focus on issues of taste, style, identity, subculture, popular culture and more expressive and creative parts of consumption processes. This cultural approach to consumption continues to be a vibrant and important tradition in consumption research (Belk, 2017; Katz-Gerro, 2017), and it can be seen in articles published in this journal about consumption and consumer culture. Following the suggestion of reappraising the cultural in practice theories on consumption in this special issue, this article suggests that in order to understand the relations between reflexive and tacit parts of consumption, one of the key categories is social interaction in everyday life.

Social interaction is relatively under-analysed in practice theoretical discussions about consumption, probably due to assumptions about its terminological association with symbolic and discursive interaction and reflexivity. In the majority of mainstream practice theory texts (Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 2002) and widely referenced consumption studies publications based on practice theories (Shove et al., 2012; Warde, 2005, 2014), social interaction is either not mentioned, is underplayed, or is simply understood as coordination. This is despite the comprehensive empirical knowledge about consumption processes across theoretical perspectives, suggesting that social interaction is part and parcel of both acquisition, appropriation and appreciation in consumption (Warde, 2010). There are, of course, notable exceptions in consumption studies where an attempt has been made to highlight social interaction as an important category for practice theoretical approaches (e.g. Christensen and Røpke, 2010; Hards, 2011; Hargreaves, 2016; Keller and Halkier, 2014). In his latest book, Schatzki (2019: 91–96) explicitly acknowledges social interaction as an important kind of ‘action chain’ that links practices and practising to complex and larger bundles of practices (Schatzki, 2019: 44). However, there is room for more analytical work. In this article, I will argue that the tacit and the reflexive in mundane practices that lead to consumption are intertwined in various ways, and that both the reflexive and the tacit should be paid analytical attention. Social interaction is an important dynamic that shows this intertwinement between the tacit and the reflexive. The purpose of the article is to suggest a number of different ways in which social interaction is part of shaping the relations between the reflexive and the tacit in practices that lead to consumption.

Food consumption and practices of provisioning, cooking and eating are excellent examples of how consumption generated by everyday practices is not only highly routinized and tacit. Food consumption is also culturally contested because food is discursively questioned through multiple mediatized food cultural repertoires, which potentially affect the enactment of ‘proper’ food conduct, resulting from the high media-saturation as well as from social network interaction (Halkier, 2010).

The article falls in to three sections. First, a section that conceptually suggests how social interaction could be thematized in a practice theoretical understanding in order to take into account the intertwined relations between the reflexive and the tacit in consumption. Second, a section that exemplifies empirically the propositions for thematizing social interaction in practice-theories-based sociological research on consumption. This is done via examples from across four empirical studies of contested food conduct. Finally, a conclusion discusses the potential analytical implications of the conceptual suggestions.

Social Interaction Enabling Routines and Cultural Contestation

My strategy, here, is to try to clarify some analytical connections between social interaction and more or less reflexive and more or less tacit food consumption, which can be used in empirical research inspired by a practice theoretical approach. These analytical connections are thematized in four ways, building upon my empirical research in food conduct across a number of research projects informed by a practice theoretical approach. Thus, this section of the article begins by shortly discussing food conduct, before moving on to a short definition of social interaction, and then outlining and discussing the four ways of thematizing social interaction, and the related concepts of routine, conventionality and cultural contestation in a practice theoretical perspective.

Food conduct can be said to be any kind of activity involving food directly, such as shopping, other ways of providing for food, cooking, assembling meals and eating. Thus, food conduct is the application of a rather compound practice (Warde, 2016: 86), so compound that depending upon analytical purpose, cooking and eating are seen as different but overlapping practices (Plessz and Étilé, 2019). Specific instances and patterns of food consumption are generated through the performing of food conduct, and the intersecting of food conduct with other kinds of everyday practices, such as working, transporting, partnering, parenting, socializing etc.. Just like any other kind of mundane practice, food conduct consists in partly routinized activities, organized by understandings of food, guided by procedures for how to cook and eat, and by engagements in food (Warde, 2005).

I am deliberately using the term conduct to signal that food practising – like any other kind of mundane practising with a routinized, habitual or ritualistic character – implies some sort of conventions for how it is ‘properly’ performed, which practitioners are aware of in a reflexive manner (Ashley et al., 2004; Coveney, 2000; Oleschuk, 2017; Wheeler, 2018). No matter what is being cooked or eaten, it can be judged how socially expected it is and negotiated how normatively accepted it is (Halkier, 2017a). For example, before the 1980s, pizza outlets were rare in Danish towns, and nowadays they are common and considered normal, so eating take-away pizzas is now a regular and socially expected food conduct. This does not however mean that eating take-away pizzas is completely normatively accepted, as this depends much on the context and is negotiable. Thus, even without the current questionings of cooking and eating habits (see e.g. Bowen et al., 2018; Coveney et al., 2012; Evans, 2011; Halkier, 2010; Jalinoja et al., 2019), what people do with food would still consist of both reflexive and tacit dimensions. Hence, food conduct is a kind of umbrella term which covers the different ways of performing food practices, and favours processes of performing which contain both reflexive and tacit elements.

Social interaction is a widely used sociological category, but particularly defined and used in traditions such as social interactionism (Goffman, 1983), symbolic interactionism (Scott and Lyman, 1968), and work on interaction rituals (Collins, 2004). Rather than choosing a very particular definition and ascribe to that, or arguing for supplementing practice theories with, for example, symbolic interactionism, I use a rough working definition of social interaction as open-ended embodied and discursive co-enactments, enabled and conditioned by what is socially do-able. This type of understanding of social interaction lends itself more readily to becoming woven into a practice theoretical approach.

The first thematizing of social interaction suggested is to see social interaction as a dynamic in achieving coordination in unfolding the processes of how to perform food provisioning, cooking and eating in everyday life. Routinized performing of food activities is done together with others, in front of others, and in relation to others. Food practitioners are able to recognize procedures for cooking and eating if there is a sufficient degree of regular coordination to such procedures, and regular coordination comes from cooking and eating being played out interactively. For example, when new couples move in together, cooking together often reveals shared or not so shared procedures in making meals (Darmon and Warde, 2016).

Making such a suggestion necessitates discussing both the category of routine and the category of conventionality in relation to social interaction. Regarding routine, the terms routine and habit have been used almost interchangeably (Crossley, 2013; Ilmonen, 2001; Southerton, 2012) to cover the dispositioned, repetitive, tacit, embodied, practical-sense-based ways of carrying something out in everyday life. Nick Crossley (2013) suggests that within phenomenological and pragmatist discussions, the habitual is seen as a combination of the dispositional character and the tacit, embodied character of action. In addition, Dale Southerton (2012) argues that habits and routines have been roughly used to name the same kind of social processes, namely a mixture of social dispositions, procedures, and sequences. He settles for the term ‘routines’ to cover (1) the dispositional (like habitus in the Bourdieu (1990) tradition), (2) the procedures of how-to-do, and (3) the sequencing of enacting – the repetitive and regular ways of doing something. Other researchers prefer to separate the two terms. Alan Warde (2016: 146–148), for instance, criticizes the term ‘habit’ for being too narrow and bound up with the individual as actor. Instead, he distinguishes between the process term ‘habituation’, consisting of repetitive, mindless self-actuation, and the term ‘routines’, consisting of the sequencing of regularly accomplished procedures, based on a practical sense of how-to-do. The two terms complement each other in the sense that habituation covers the processes by which practitioners draw upon dispositions for performing, whereas routines cover the ways in which performances are accomplished. I lean towards Warde’s understanding of routines.

Both understandings of routines however point towards the importance of social interaction as a dynamic in the emergence of shared-ness of practices. Barry Barnes argues in favour of an interactional approach to practice theories, because he assumes that people orient themselves towards each other; he understands routines as part of shared practices, which are accomplished by interdependent competent members of collectives (Barnes, 2001). Thus, he underlines the interaction that takes place in communities, collectivities or social networks, which I see as parallel to my understanding of the performing of practices together, in front of, and in relation to others.

Regarding conventionality, conventions can be seen as guidelines in everyday life to evaluate how competent and appropriate different performances are (Warde, 2016: 129–130). Thereby, the normative character of practising also becomes part of the shared-ness of practising. Joseph Rouse highlights how practice theories tend to encourage attention to what he calls publicly accessible performances, and thus has the potential to connect practices and conventionality (Rouse, 2007). Performances can only be accessible to others if done in social interaction. So, I interpret Rouse’s use of ‘publicly’ as meaning shared collectively, and not necessarily in a large-scale public manner. This interpretation also addresses a concern as to whether accessibility is necessarily discursive, which it is not, since this can also consist in watching, reflecting and learning as part of tacit socialization (Molander and Hartmann, 2018) within particular socio-material settings (Hargreaves, 2011). Another advantage in coupling routines and conventionality via social interaction is that the notion of seeing practices only as regularities can be avoided, since the category of conventionality in Rouse renders practices and conduct normative. Furthermore, I draw upon John L. Martin (2011) who makes a parallel point of avoiding seeing rule-bound action merely as regularity in his book on explaining social action. Martin has been drawn into practice theoretical discussions of how to understand institutionalization (Warde, 2014: 293) because he defines institutions as referring “. . . not to a pattern of regularized conduct, but the intersubjectively valid representations of the patterning of that regularized conduct” (Martin, 2011: 303), and he underlines the importance of the reciprocity of interaction (2011: 304).

The second thematizing of social interaction suggested is that social interaction is a dynamic in making visible the intersection of food practices with other practices. The relations and overlaps between the multiplicity of different practices in everyday life is one of the features often assumed and included in consumption research based on practice theories (e.g. Shove et al., 2012: 81–96). Since people are not only practising food activities in their everyday lives, but usually a number of overlapping kinds of activities, some adaptation, negotiation and even conflict arises as part of the food conduct; for example, when mothers juggle time-scheduling logistical practices with parenting practices and cooking practices, and come up with inventive combinations of home-made and ready-made parts of meals (Carrigan and Szmigin, 2006). In other words, each of the different practices – including food practices – are organized and become accomplished through each of their different sets of routines and conventionalities. The conjunction of these different sets of appropriate performing lead to adaptations and negotiations, which become particularly visible in both bodily and discursive social interaction. Coming back to the category of routines, the intersection of practices can potentially be seen in the highlighting of sequencing as part of the routinized performing of practices (Southerton, 2012: 341; Warde, 2016: 127). Southerton (2012: 345–349) adds to this the importance of the temporal dimension to routinized practising, such as how time is used as a resource, how practices configure temporalities, and how temporal rhythms shape performances. Thus, timing of the different intersecting practices in their conjunctive sequencing is part of holding together the accomplishment of appropriate performing in social interaction. Coming back to conventionality, a tendency inherent in practice theoretical perspectives on consumption is to critique the individualized portfolio-model of mundane action. Josh Whitford, for example, understands conventionality as mutual social expectations concerning how and how competently other people act (Whitford, 2002: 352), which I then stretch to cover conjunctions of different practices.

The third thematizing of social interaction suggested is that social interaction is a dynamic that demonstrates the often hybrid character of the routinized and the reflexive modes of consumption performances (Adams, 2006; Wilk, 2009) – in this case food consumption. Ethnomethodology is sometimes referred to as one of the classic roots of practice theories (Warde, 2005). The ethnomethodological concepts of reflexivity and accountability of routine action and interaction can be seen as including both tacit and discursive modes in shared senses of ‘knowing how to go on’ (Garfinkel, 1967). Social interactions make both the routinized enactments and the reflexive discursive expressions accessible in peoples’ social networks. For example, a group of friends partaking in a study realized through their social interaction that they had not treated the raw eggs for a party-dessert the way they routinely anticipated they all would do – namely pouring boiled water very briefly over the eggs in their shells – and therefore ended up commenting on the public discourses of food risks (Halkier, 2010: 101).

Making this suggestion about social interaction points to clarifying the category of cultural contestation as well as coming back to both routines and conventionality. Cultural contestation has not been a much-debated category in practice theoretical approaches to consumption, but it is usually related to problematized, charged, political or conflictual cultural distinctions used in particular fields (e.g. Ross, 2007). Without using the exact category, consumption and consumer culture research analyses what could be called culturally contested consumption (see e.g. Eglitis, 2011; Friedman and Kuipers, 2013). In the area of food, cultural contestation in media and everyday social networks that question established food routines is based on a number of public and political issues, such as health (Dodds and Chamberlain, 2016), sustainability (Vihalemm et al., 2016), risk (de Krom, 2008) and food quality (Holm, 2003). Climate is the latest issue of food cultural contestation, where meat eating is being deemed less acceptable on the grounds of global climate problems (Twine, 2018). In this way, although cultural contestation problematizes certain existing routines, new routines are also set up. Practices in food conduct tend to evolve over time as a result of (among other things) the mixture of routinized and reflexive processes in carrying out the mundane food activities. Cultural contestation is a dynamic that feeds into these processes with conditions and resources. Thus, the routinized and the reflexive aspects of consumption should not be seen as a binary construction, but rather a mixture of a continuum and a typology, where there are different degrees and different types of the mixing of the routinized and the reflexive.

I link the category of cultural contestation to the category of conventionality. Not only does conventionality contribute to ordering practices and the performing of practices regarding both tacit routinized and reflexive discursive modes of food conduct. It can also be informed by cultural dynamics going across different practices, such as general understandings (Welch and Warde, 2017). In the area of food conduct around meat consumption, cultural questionings and reactions to questionings are informed by as different general understandings as, for example, meat-eating as freedom to choose, meat-eating as masculinity, and meat-eating as climate-crisis.

The fourth and last thematizing of social interaction suggested is that social interaction works as a dynamic for achieving normative accountability (Rouse, 2007) of food performances in everyday life. I here refer back to my interpretation of Rouse’s use of the term ‘publicly’ as meaning collectively shared. When food practitioners interact with each other, they get a practical sense but also a discursive understanding of what kind of food conduct is seen as socially expected and acceptable, what is considered as normal and legitimate to do and say: for example, when mothers with babies are together in baby-groups and calibrate how much use of convenient ready-made baby-food is considered normal (Brembeck and Fuentes, 2017). In the area of food, there seems to be a growth and variety of food cultural repertoires to cook and to eat and to use as legitimations for food conduct. Examples of such food cultural repertoires are Mediterranean, new Nordic, paleo, low carb, raw food, 2–5 fasting, vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian and so on. Ordinary consumers are increasingly at least potentially in touch with this multiplicity of food cultural repertoires thanks to the media-saturation in everyday life (Couldry, 2004). For example, the potential popularity of the vegetarian and vegan food cultural repertoires can be seen in the amount of cookbooks on shelves, blogs on the internet and specific food stuff in mainstream supermarkets and corner shops (Fuentes and Fuentes, 2017). I understand this suggestion on interaction and normative accountability as parallel to some of the conclusions in Welch and Warde’s text on general understandings in practice theories (Welch and Warde, 2017: 194–195), where the authors state that general understandings can be used for identification and justification in performing practices.

Empirical Exemplifications of Social Interaction and the Tacit-Reflexive Relations in Contested Food Conduct

In this section, I exemplify the workings of the four proposed analytical connections between social interaction and more or less routinized and reflexive conduct in everyday life food practicing. I exemplify the analytical propositions by using material from across four different qualitative studies of different kinds of contested food conduct, all informed by a practice theoretical perspective (Warde, 2005, 2016). In other words, the following section is not an empirical analysis, but a number of exemplifications for conceptual purposes. By drawing on four different studies, rather than one, I suggest a potential meso-generality of the propositions in so far as each proposition is not the product of a single study. The four empirical studies drawn upon are the following:

Cooking from scratch among Danish female lifestyle-magazine readers (Halkier, 2009). Data materials consist of a combination of individual biographic interviews (Atkinson, 1998) and re-interviews with women, auto-photography (Heisly and Levy, 1991) of cooking and meals, and network focus groups (Barbour, 2007) with members of different generations of women.

Food routines and healthier food discourses among Pakistani-Danish families (Halkier and Jensen, 2011). Data materials consist of a combination of individual interviews (Holstein and Gubrium, 2003) with the main cook in the family, family interviews (Frey and Fontana, 1993), auto-photography of meals (Heisly and Levy, 1991), and participant observation (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995) mainly in homes, but also at a party.

Use of convenience food among young Danes from the province of Zealand (Halkier, 2017a). Data materials consist of a combination of individual interviews (Holstein and Gubrium, 2003) in the homes of the young participants, and network focus groups (Barbour, 2007).

Use of meal-box schemes among Danish families (Hertz and Halkier, 2017). Data materials consist of a combination of individual interviews (Holstein and Gubrium, 2003) with the main cook in the family, participant observation in homes (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995), and network focus groups (Barbour, 2007).

Social interaction is expressed in the data in different ways, all being covered by the rough definition of social interaction in the theoretical section. First, social interaction is expressed as co-present co-enactments between participants in participant observation situations and in focus group interactions. Second, social interaction is expressed as co-present co-enactments between participant(s) and researcher in interviews, focus groups and participant observation. Third, social interaction is represented as descriptions and narratives about co-enactments, where these can be both together, in front of and in relation to. Thus, I follow the argument made by Atkinson and Coffey (2003) of having a more symmetrical view on different qualitative data production methods, rather than favouring participant observation data as the only valid gateway to knowledge about practices.

Each of the analytical propositions – coordination, visibility of intersection, hybridity of the routinized and reflexive, and normative accountability – can be analysed in the data-materials for each of the four studies. Because of lack of space, I only exemplify each analytical connection on the basis of data from two studies.

Achieving Coordination through Social Interaction

The first suggestion was that social interaction is a dynamic in achieving coordination in how to provide for food, how to cook and how to eat. The shared-ness and conventionality of routinized and reflexive ways of accomplishing food activities is dependent upon social interaction in its various forms. In the research project on how family members handle meal provisioning through subscribing to a meal-box scheme,¹ a tendency to provide for meals and cook in a fairly planned manner when using the meal-boxes emerged across social differences among the parents participating in the project. The planned way of cooking entails routinized planning, structuring and timing the acquisition of foodstuff, the actual cooking, and the meals for a longer period, thus distributing specific parts of the practice of cooking into time-slots, which requires coordination with other family members (Southerton, 2012). In the families, this coordination is achieved through various kinds of interaction, ranging from the whole family sitting down at the dinner table on a Sunday and planning the week ahead, to the parents keeping in touch over mobile phone with each other’s adaptations of their mutual shopping list in the digital cloud. In the following example, Helene² describes the coordination in their family:

During the weekend, we usually make a meal-plan for the coming week, so we find out who are at home which days, who is cooking when, and then we try to make a plan. And then simply write it into the calendar, Monday is chili con carne, Tuesday is tortillas, Wednesday is something else. And then we go out shopping on the Sunday, Paul and I and maybe one of the kids.

In the periods or situations where the parents did not use the meal-boxes, this pattern of planned provisioning and cooking was only one out of three ways of cooking; the other two are the improvised type and the audit type (Jackson, et al., 2018: 170–176). Both the improvised way and the audit way of cooking also required explicit coordination for upholding the routines of food provisioning. In the more improvised way of cooking, where meal provisioning has a day-to-day or situational character, getting in touch with other family members can be very important, because this can be part of ‘saving the dinner’ by, for example, phoning a teenage son on the way home from work and asking him to start the oven in order to make sure dinner is timed for everybody. The audit way of cooking involves keeping a running dialogue with other family members about what they would like to eat on particular days, and how this lives up to what is expected from a proper family meal. Thus, the audit way of cooking also involves social interaction for coordinating meal conduct.

An example from the study of Pakistani Danes and healthier food discourses shows that this kind of coordination through interaction takes place at quite detailed levels of cooking. The following extract is from a family interview where both parents (and the children) participate, and it is clear from the serving of snacks in the situation and the narratives about cooking that they both participate in the cooking at home. However, describing their cooking routines together in the interaction of the family interview also enables them to negotiate the coordination of how much oil they usually put into the different dishes they cook. Through interaction, the husband adapts his account of the amount of oil used to his wife’s description:

Mustafa:

Fresh garlic, right. We press garlic and put on top. It takes two to three hours with the marinade, you know. And then it lies in the fridge, and then afterwards, because it is a healthy food, that we roast in the pan.

Interviewer:

Yes.

Mustafa:

We put very little in, two dinner spoons, or one dinner spoon, maximum two dinner spoons of oil in the pan.

Ayshah:

I think you probably mean teaspoon.

Mustafa:

Yes, teaspoons.

In this example, conventionality in coordination can also be noted. Ayshah and Mustafa coordinate the size of the spoons for oil, and across the differences between the participants in the study, size of spoons were being used to express degrees of proper healthiness in cooking. Social interaction in both examples seems to be indispensable for achieving coordination of the carrying out of the food practices at different levels of detail. At the same time, social interaction as coordination helps upholding or living up to conventionality in food conduct such as providing home-made family meals and eating healthier.

Social Interaction Makes Intersection with Other Practices Visible

The second suggestion was that social interaction is a dynamic in making the overlaps between food and other practices clearer and more recognizable in everyday life. This can also enable people’s managing of the potential mutual support and tensions between the different routinized practices and their conventions of conduct (Shove et al., 2012). This seems especially pertinent when different practices are carried out at the same time. In the following two examples, cooking practices intersect with respectively social relationship practices and healthier living practices. In the first example, the overlapping practices intersect supportively, whereas in the second example the overlapping practices are in tension with each other. In the project on convenience food use among young Danes, one of the main results is that providing for meals in a convenient manner is considered socially expected and normal across social and cultural differences among the young. But serving convenient meals for others when they are guests in the home is not necessarily acceptable, this depends upon the kind of relationship and type of convenient food and how they intersect. Meal provisioning and relationship reproduction can support each other, as in this following example, where Per explains how different kinds of food are appropriate for different kinds of guests and occasions:

But it’s a bit like this, it also depends on what kind of guests they are. If it’s family, then it’s something we make ourselves, but if it’s only me getting five friends over for playing cards . . . then it’s probably pizza.

Here, social interaction is enacted as the mode of performing in relation to others. This is an example of intersecting practices supporting each other. However, the same pattern, but reversed with tension between the practices can be seen in an example from the study with the Pakistani Danes and healthier food discourses. In the following extract, two sisters-in-law from one of the family interviews are talking about a third female family member and her cooking routines, and the performing of tasty meals is contrasted with performing healthier living activities:

Maria:

My sister, do you know what she does? She only uses two teaspoons [of oil], and then when the onions have coloured, she takes the oil out and throws it away. And then she finishes the dish, that’s why her food tastes so bad

Sada:

Jasminas?

Maria:

Yes, because she takes the oil out. When she HAS browned the onions.

Sada:

I have wondered about why it tastes like does.

Maria:

Then she puts all sorts of other ingredients in.

Sada:

But then she can say that she did actually use oil.

Maria:

Yeah. . .but she doesn’t use a lot. You know, she nearly uses nothing. She uses it only to brown with and then she takes it out and throws it away.

[laughter]

Sada:

That’s not good. That definitely doesn’t taste nice.

Maria:

No, it doesn’t taste good, but then she feels she has done a good deed, right . . . NOW we are eating healthy.

Here, the social interaction between the two women make explicit a potential tension between cooking ‘proper’ Pakistani food with lots of oil that tastes good, and cooking healthier meals for the family. The last enactment from Maria that makes a joke, almost mimicking a public health campaign (NOW we are eating healthy), suggests a conflictual overlap between cooking practices and their conventionality on the one hand and caring practices of managing the health of the family and their conventionality on the other hand.

Social Interaction Demonstrates the Hybrid Character of Routinized and Reflexive Modes of Performances

The third suggestion was that social interaction enables the recognizability in everyday life of the mixing of routinized and reflexive elements (Wilk, 2009) in food practising. It is thus suggested that social interaction does not only underpin routinized procedures, but also supports reflexive parts of food practising. So, the two modes of performing food conduct are intertwined and to a degree where it perhaps makes more sense to see the routine and the reflexive in food conduct as a continuum or a typology, rather than a binary construct. Cultural contestation of food conduct on the basis of different food issues strengthens this hybridity through the conventionality of conduct and its negotiations. In the two following examples, elements of cultural food contestation are present. In the first example, it is contestation of convenience food, and in the second example, it is contestation of meat. The first example comes from the study of cooking from scratch among female lifestyle-magazine readers. In the following extract from a focus group with women in their 20s, three women from the same social network discuss whether you can serve a particular kind of honey cake for guests. This routine enactment of guest serving is negotiated in relation to a convention of serving home-made cake for guests, which relates to the cultural contestation of convenience food in general (Jackson et al., 2018: 40–44):

Pia:

Honey cake slices, I also don’t fancy that.

Susy:

Honey cake slices, they’re absolutely fine.

Pia:

No, no, no, no, no, no!

Susy:

Yes.

Pia:

No, no, no girls . . . cake is something you bake yourself.

Susy:

Yeah, but I could . . . (Pia: [interrupts] Even if it’s Amo³ . . .) . . . put them on a dish and serve them for guests, honestly really Pia, you could do that too.

Pia:

No, no.

Anna:

There are different guests.

Susy:

Yep.

Pia:

I could never . . . [pause, laughter, everybody talks at the same time] . . . serve honey cake-slices . . .

Susy:

No, honey cake slices, they are good.

Anna:

[he, he] They are good.

Pia:

IF I should serve something ready-made, then it had to be you know cookies, REAL cookies, not clammy Karen Wolff cookies,⁴ but . . . (Anna: [interrupts]: I have never tasted those . . .) . . . such cookies that have been treated and . . . such luxury stuff.

The interactions in the social network group make explicit the reflexive element of how to handle guest servings to such a degree that Pia ends up changing her initial routine enactment of ‘cake for guests must be home-made’.

A parallel kind of mixing of routinized and reflexive elements of food performances are being negotiated among some of the parents from the study on meal box-schemes. In an extract from one of the focus groups with parents who know each other from their social network, they explain in their interaction how they routinely experience eating too little meat and not feeling sated when having meals cooked on the basis of their subscription to the meal-boxes.⁵ But as part of the interaction, they also enact expressions linked to the cultural contestation of meat (Twine, 2018):

Gro:

And there I also wrote that there wasn’t sufficient meat.

[. . .]

Bent:

I actually experienced, that I economized with my meat, I remember. I sat there and made that tiny lump stretch all the way. Just like when you are only allowed to drink one glass of red wine, then you can actually easily manage anyway. And that was how it was with that meat, and then you do eat extraordinarily more green than otherwise.

Karen:

Yes, I like it.

Bent:

Yeah, but I also think it’s really fine. My stomach liked it too.

Karen:

Yeah, but I think it’s good.

Martin:

But it is. And it’s what they say you should. You know, eat less meat. But I’m just not there. It’s not that I am a ‘meat-boy’. But I just want to feel full.

The enactment from Martin has a legitimizing touch, using the nickname category ‘meat-boy’: He shows the others in interaction that he knows the public discourses about not eating too much meat in order to eat healthier and more climate-friendly, but that his routines are different, due to embodied experiences.

Achieving Normative Accountability through Social Interaction

The last suggestion was that social interaction works as a dynamic for making normativity accessible (Rouse, 2007), that is, explicitly, collectively shared. In everyday food provisioning, cooking and eating performances, it is through interaction that suggestions, improvisations, adaptations and negotiations of what is considered normal and legitimate ways of practising food become explicit and thus reflexively knowable. Often, what seems to be expected and acceptable becomes enacted in negotiations about less normatively legitimate performances. This is exemplified in two different extracts from two different studies, but both include a focus on the relationship between convenient food and cooking from scratch. Thus, both examples show how a general understanding of convenience food as less acceptable is being used in interaction as justification for the judgement of performances (Welch and Warde, 2017: 194–195). In the study of female lifestyle magazine readers, one of the situations that demonstrates the importance of social interaction to normative accountability is related to Christmas family dinner food. In the following extract from an individual interview, Thea explains the Christmas dinner preparations in her parents’ home:

We were over there for Christmas, and she [the mother] had, yes she had bought ready-made rice porridge in one of those plastic bags, right, to make the ris a la mande,⁶ and it was really like this, when I opened the fridge, they were just lying there, and I was just like, okay, we are going to have a good Christmas, I am not going to make a scene, and then I just went out to Emil [the partner] and said, do you know what’s in the fridge [laughs] . . . she obviously doesn’t bother to make the porridge . . . it didn’t taste too good either, that was really a bit of a miss, not stirred with love!

Both the reported interaction between the partners and between Thea and the interviewer makes the normative ‘breach’ clear. By using ready-made rice porridge, the important Christmas dessert is not a sufficiently large labour of love, which is otherwise how cooking from scratch procedures turn foodstuff into gifts of love (Moisio et al., 2004).

In the study of convenience food provisioning, cooking and eating among young Danes, particular types of ready-made and take-away food is enacted as normatively less acceptable across all social and cultural differences in the sample. However, across these differences, convenience food is understood as a type of food that is expected to be eaten among the age-group. In the following extract from one of the focus groups, one of the women questions the normative acceptability of the food display on social media from young people in digital interaction, based on the socially expected kind of food she claims she knows from her routine eating interactions in her network:

I think that sometimes you should be careful about . . . not to . . . you know, expose yourself all the time at Facebook . . . or Instagram like a health freak, I think. I don’t know but . . . yeah, sometimes you can think, ‘really, come on . . . you did eat a pizza yesterday you know’. (Nynne)

Here Nynne refers to digital social interaction around food taking place through social media. The social media interaction makes publicly accessible particular enactments of food conduct, that are considered sufficiently acceptable to be posted and collectively shared, in this case the ‘healthier’ ones. But she questions the instances of publicly accessible food conduct as being too different from what is socially expected from meals in her age-group.

Conclusion

As a reaction to the cultural turn in consumption research, the introduction and uses of practice theories in sociological studies of consumption have tended to leave out a number of analytical elements that otherwise have a strong history in the analysis of consumption and consumer culture, such as discourse, cultural representation, symbolic elements of consumption and reflexivity. The rationale has been to restore a focus on routines, practical sense, tacitness, embodiment, materiality and dispositions in the study of consumption. However, one of the results tends to be that some conceptual babies were thrown out with the bathwater.

One of the analytical elements that has been under-theorized and underused in empirical consumption research due to this academic boundary work is the concept of social interaction. In the article, I argue that social interaction is integral to understanding the relations between reflexive and tacit parts of consumption.

Most practices that generate consumption are both routinized and reflexive. Food practice is a clear example of this, and food conduct is used as a focus in the conceptual as well as in the empirically exemplifying parts of the article.

In the article, I outline and conceptually ground four analytical suggestions for how the culturally tacit and reflexive become linked through social interaction. The four analytical suggestions are empirically exemplified on the basis of different qualitative studies of contested food conduct. The four analytical suggestions are: achieving coordination through social interaction; social interaction makes intersection with other practices visible; social interaction demonstrates the hybrid character of routinized and reflexive modes of performances; achieving normative accountability through social interaction. There are several analytical implications of the conceptual suggestions in this article. First: will a stronger inclusion of social interaction downplay routines and routinized modes of consumption, and overstate the active agency of everyday life at the expense of routines and their dispositions and practical sense? Not all areas of consumption become equally explicitly questioned, leading to normative negotiations and justifications, and the playing out of cultural contestation tends to be different in different everyday lives (Sayer, 2005). Having said that, the risk of over-stating active agency perhaps builds upon the assumption that social interaction is linked primarily to action and discursive reflection, and the main point of this article is to argue that the routinized and reflexive parts of consumption are intertwined through social interaction and its links with conventionality in practices.

A related and methodological challenge is whether conceptualizing social interaction in more detail is running the risk of relying too much on discursive empirical data-types such as interviewing, which are not necessarily very good for investigating and describing highly embodied and routinized kinds of practising in everyday culture (Martens, 2012). This is indeed a challenge when handling empirical research, but also a challenge that has been raised on the assumption that there is a methodological ‘gold standard’ for investigating practices, which is participant observation. If we accept that practices generating consumption can be characterized by different mixes of tacit and reflexive modes, methods will have to include some kind of discursive data. Different research questions on consumption point towards different mixes of methods in empirical studies, and thus indicate the different weights accorded to, for example, interview data in these questions (Halkier, 2017b).

Finally, a stronger inclusion of social interaction could be argued to result in keeping practice theoretical consumption research stuck at a micro-level of analysis (Warde, 2014) and not being able to understand and investigate the institutionalization and institutionalized structures and conditions of consumption and consumer culture. However, including social interaction explicitly can involve analysing how practitioners draw upon general understandings in coordinating, negotiating and regulating how to consume, thus actually relating to large-scale cultural and social dynamics (Welch and Warde, 2017: 194–195). Furthermore, there are examples of theorizing where social interaction is cast as the necessary condition of institutionalization, both as part of practice theories (Hargreaves et al., 2013) and as being drawn into practice theoretical discussions (Martin, 2011: 303–304).

So, reappraising the cultural in practice theories on consumption is to walk a tightrope between different assumptions about what ‘belongs’ to a practice theoretical perspective on the one hand, and experimenting with what can be learned from empirical patterns in mundane practising.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Bente Halkier

Notes

Author biography

Bente Halkier is a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research focuses on consumption and everyday life with a particular interest in food. Recent publications include: Political food consumerism between mundane routines and organizational alliance-building. In M. Micheletti, M. Boström and P. Oosterveer (eds): The Oxford Handbook of Political Consumerism (2019, Oxford University Press); and with P. Jackson et al. Reframing Convenience Food (2018, Palgrave Macmillan).

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