ESA Conference 2019

When Digital Devices Come Home for Dinner - Devising Food Consumption

Emma Samsioe, Christian Fuentes

Digital devices are increasingly intertwined with everyday life. Websites, web shops, social media, QR codes, smartphones, smart watches, and other digital artefacts are now incorporated into our ordinary consumption, replacing other entities and reconfiguring our practices. In the area of food consumption, digitalization has given way to a number of digital food platforms such as food box scheme, food sharing apps, and online food stores. These digital platforms are often presented as sustainable alternatives leading to the increased sales of ecological products (online stores), diminishing food waste (food sharing apps), or promoting healthy vegetarian lifestyles (food box schemes).

In this paper we want to explore if, how, and under what conditions digital food platforms are able to “disrupt” household’s food consumption and promote sustainability. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a food box scheme company, Årstiderna, which presents itself as promoting sustainable, healthy vegetarian food, and combining insights and concepts from practice theory and STS, we set out to explore what happens as these digital market devices enter the household.
Preliminary findings show that this digital food platform disrupts and reconfigures household’s food practices, taking over some of the tasks of food planning and food shopping, thereby decompressing time and creating pockets of time that can be used for cooking and eating. However, this “work transfer” comes at a price, as what is cooked, how and how it is enjoyed is now configured by the market device.

Modes of Shopping Constituting a Local Street: A video-ethnography of shopping as a practice

Devrim Umut Aslan

In the last decades spatiotemporal manifestations of shopping are changed radically in conjunction with proliferation of car usage, internationalization of retail, and establishment of out-of-town malls. The social, cultural, and economic backgrounds of this axis alteration and its implication to the city life have been discussed thoroughly. However, the main empirical focus laid mostly on the mainstream and spectacular geographies of shopping. There is little literature on how shopping is enacted in “other” shopping geographies, particularly on local shopping streets.

Södergatan, established as the main street of a working-class district in Helsingborg, Sweden, after going through modernization phases, today it mostly hosts so-called migrant entrepreneurships, service-based premises, and grocery stores. This study examines the major modes of shopping on this local shopping street in order to understand how shopping geographies outside of mainstream ensure their relevance. It contributes to the literature on shopping geographies from a cultural perspective, particularly on the co-constitutive interrelation between enactments of shopping and arrangements of shopping places. While doing this, the study engages in “practice theory”, which supplies a profound conceptual vocabulary and dynamic epistemological gaze for concentrating on shopping as the main analytical unit. The major method employed in the research is video-ethnography, due to its capability to synchronically appreciate enactments of shopping, shoppers’ reflections, the sensory and material environment of the street, and the movement within.

The research shows that there are some major place-specific modes of shopping that are enacted in the street and in the district, and these modes of shopping, bundling with each other, materially and sensorially co-constitute the street into a meaningful, integral and convivial part of the city.

The Swedish Backstage of the Sociology of Food and Eating: Fractalization of Boundaries in Scientific Work

Nicklas Neuman (Uppsala University) Jonas Bååth

In recent decades, sociologists have come to take an increased interest in food, institutionalizing “the sociology of food and eating” through British sociology of the 1980’s. From the 1990's and onward, this strain of sociology has also developed and grown in the Nordic countries. Finnish and Danish sociology in particular, but also Norwegian sociology, have placed the study of eating, drinking and procuring food at the center of its disciplinary endeavors and several scholars have become influential in the sociology of consumption. But less so in Sweden, the largest Nordic country, and it is the aim of this paper to explore the reason(s) for this. In Sweden, social scientific approaches to food and eating have primarily been developed within applied food research, e.g. culinary arts and sciences, dietetics and nutrition. Here, sociological theory is often drawn upon in order to explain issues such as the development of food habits, foodwork and gastronomy, but with minimal or no ambition of sociological theory development. The “audience”, instead, has been the culinary and dietetic professions, the health sciences and public actors with an interest in consumer behavior related to food and eating. Analyzing the targeted debates and research questions posed in the sociology of food and eating in Sweden since the 1970’s, we thus explore the conspicuous absence of food in Swedish sociology, discussing possible paths for a Swedish sociology of food and eating to become as established as in Finland, Denmark and Norway. In particular, we suggest analyses of food industries, rural sociology, welfare state politics and the role of capitalism in shaping consumption through production.