Social Practice Approaches to Family Food Dynamics

Social practice approaches reconceptualise family food as more than individual choices, focusing instead on routinised activities shaped by shared meanings, material arrangements and embodied competences. Within this framework, family food dynamics emerge through the performance of meals, negotiation of tastes and the distribution of tasks among household members. These practices are embedded in temporal rhythms, cultural norms and resource constraints, which together influence what is cooked, how it is eaten and who participates. By attending to the interdependencies of actors, artefacts and know-how, this perspective illuminates how culinary routines reproduce or transform patterns of health, sociality and environmental impact. It also foregrounds the ways in which children’s preferences, gender roles and intergenerational relations are co-constituted through food provisioning, meal negotiations and shared rituals. Practically, this approach underpins interventions that seek to modify not just individual behaviour but the broader configurations of family life, aiming for sustainable, equitable and harmonious foodways across diverse settings.

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Social Practice Approaches to Family Food Dynamics publication trend

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Technical terms

Social practice theory: A theoretical lens that explains social phenomena in terms of routinised activities comprising meanings, materials and competences.

Capability approach: An analytical framework focusing on individuals’ real freedoms to pursue valued ways of life, here used to understand choices in food practices.

Food provisioning: The ensemble of activities involved in planning, purchasing, preparing and serving food within households.

Materiality: The role of physical artefacts and infrastructures (such as kitchen equipment or time availability) in shaping culinary routines.

Agency: The capacity of household members, especially children, to influence and negotiate the content and structure of family meals.

References

1. Contrasting approaches to ‘doing’ family meals: a qualitative study of how parents frame children’s food preferences. Critical Public Health (2015).
2. The NutriAct Family Study: a web-based prospective study on the epidemiological, psychological and sociological basis of food choice. BMC Public Health (2018).
3. Fulfilling food practices: Applying the capability approach to ethnographic research in the Northern Netherlands. Social Science & Medicine (2021).