Yes [laughs], yes, I don’t want to offend grandma!
These results refer to the fact that, under such conditions, individuals are more likely to eat beyond their hunger and, what is more, eat products with high energy density.
In the context of daily eating together, the practices of the individuals present at the table are modified. Indeed, the rules integrated by the person in charge of the food, in the role of a good provider (Evans 2011), instead assume the provision of varied and balanced food, while taking care to ensure the pleasure of the people eating. Roxane explains:
– We rarely eat the same thing twice in a row, it happens but hey…
– Why?
– Well, because it’s true that at lunchtime… it’s true that we like eating in the evening.
– OK, you both feel like you eat fast at lunch so in the evening you don’t want to do that?
– Yes, that’s it: it’s a more quiet time.
Thus, the feeling of shared pleasure around a meal implies eating certain foods and avoiding others (e.g. leftovers). In particular, the results confirm that starting a household or having a child encourages the preparation of balanced meals.
In addition to these results, between an eating together practice that can be characterized as “festive” and another that is more “daily”, the results make it possible to distinguish households in which eating together is established/systematized/codified, whereas in others this practice is more flexible/random. This is notably the case of Amélie, who tries to maintain the family meal with her daughter, despite the fact that she has difficulty extracting her from her video games:
That’s the problem, she spends a lot of time playing video games, so it has a lot of influence on our eating habits because it’s often “come to the table, come to the table, come help me make food, save, come and cook dinner…!” So, in fact, I waste time asking her for help, so after a while I get tired of it, I leave what I’m doing, I give up, I make fries and ham, “come on, you’re eating, you have to go back to school”, so it has an influence.
For Noémie and her mother, on the other hand, the rules of the shared meal are established, knowing that “every evening [they] eat together”, and that they have even gradually established weekly rituals such as “leftover meals” during which they finish all the leftovers of the week, as well as “junk food meals”, during which they allow themselves to deviate from their respective diets.
In conclusion, the results allow us to account for the diversity of practices by distinguishing between eating together practices that can be described as “festive” or as “everyday”, and by distinguishing between systematized/anchored eating together practices and others that are more flexible/random
1.3.3.2. Eating together: the influence of constraints and the centrality of food in the meal
The practices of eating together can be distinguished according to the degree of constraint they represent for individuals, and according to the centrality of food during the shared meal. We thus identify eating together on a day-to-day basis, with the members of the household, but which can be experienced as a constraint or as a source of frustration.
– She is absorbed by her video games, so it is very difficult to have habits, to stick to my eating habits and to impose them on my child because she is the child of divorce, there are habits that she has at her father’s house and those she doesn’t… that I find difficult afterwards when she comes back here to make her break the habit.
– But when she’s here, do you eat at the table?
– Well, I eat by myself, so that’s during the week when she goes to school, and on weekends we eat at the table (Amélie).
In this type of practice, consumers try to maintain eating together, either to follow nutritional recommendations or because (like Amélie) they see it as an opportunity to share a moment with their loved ones. For others, eating together on a day-to-day basis with household members can be synonymous with shared pleasure on a daily basis. In this case, it is generally a spontaneous and pleasant practice:
It is also when we eat almost directly after we’ve arrived home from work, we cook and sit at the table, so it is still the time when we tell each other about our day, we are both a little quiet and we do not want to be disturbed by our phones (Marie).
In a more festive setting, eating together can be experienced as a way to get together with friends/family for special events (birthdays, reunions), but without this moment being centered on the food or on the cooking and esthetics of the meal:
– If someone comes to eat at your house, what do you do?
– Well it’s… I have to force myself to anticipate I know that so-and-so is eating here so what am I going to prepare for them… and often I’ll make them the simplest things possible because I hate elaborate dishes, so often it’s going to be risotto with a salad as a starter.
– OK, so in fact when people come here it’s just to have a good time, but eating together is incidental because you have to eat?
– Exactly (Sabrina).
On the other hand, in other cases, eating together allows friends and family to get together, but the food is central. Thus, the experience of being together sometimes begins even before the meal (guests come to cook):
The last time we had a Mexican night, so we made fajitas and stuff, the other night we spent three hours making sushi, everyone with their own thing [laughs], so yeah, it’s not bad, it’s true that we cook a lot with our friends too, it’s great (Camille).
In these types of practices, the esthetics and content of the meal are central.
Based on these findings, the remainder of this chapter offers an analysis, in the form of a discussion, of the conditions for the emergence of eating together practices. This analysis is conducted in light of Shove et al.’s (2012) framework of practice theories, described above.
1.4. Eating together: materials, meanings and skills
Eating together may seem like a harmless and simple practice for many people. For others, however, there are many reasons why this practice does not emerge or continue. The purpose of this section is to shed light from practice theories (and in particular from the theoretical framework of Shove et al. (2012)) on the question of the feasibility of eating together, with a view, in particular, to opening up avenues for facilitating eating together in everyday life.
Meeting around a meal, whether in a daily family setting or for more exceptional and/or convivial meals with people from outside the household, depends on the “material” feasibility of this meeting: having sufficient and suitable space, and being able to organize the physical meeting. Thus, there are material elements on several scales: on a more microscale, tangible elements are used to implement the practice: for example, having tables and chairs, plates and cutlery for the guests:
Personally, I eat standing up at home in the corner of the kitchen, which is very bad, but as soon as I am in Montpellier [at my girlfriend’s house], I absolutely have to take my tray, my plate and sit down at the table, it is a sine qua non condition, but otherwise she does not accept that we eat standing up near the corner of the fridge (Maurice).
Beyond the question, on a microscale, of the material needed to eat together, there is the question of the logistical feasibility of the meeting. This is a broader scale of the material environment, corresponding rather to the infrastructure. Everyday life is arranged in a given time and space, in which consumers