This seminar is cancelled.
With Sarah Kelsey, University of Nottingham.
This is an online seminar and all are welcome. Please contact sue.davis@nottingham.ac.uk for the link.
Part of the Economic Worlds Seminar Series.
Precarity and rising food and fuel prices have seen the ever tightening of shopper budgets, which along with health, nutritional and environmental concerns can make the supermarket shop a terse and complex affair for individuals and households as they struggle to balance and weigh up their food choices. This paper draws on Warde’s (1997) work identifying four sets of binary opposed food concerns (economy, extravagance, health, indulgence, care, convenience, novelty and tradition) to analyse qualitative fieldwork undertaken in 2019 with consumers who self-identified as yellow-sticker shoppers who target reduced-price supermarket food. In addition to in-depth qualitative interviews the research also employed accompanied shops, fridge rummages and participant photography designed to follow the food into the home and look at the socio-material arrangements for this type of provisioning.
The paper will outline findings from a preliminary analysis which reveals how food concerns are negotiated by shoppers who are already restricted in their choice set. This provides original insight into modern domestic arrangements and household organisation such as food preparation and storage as well as understanding into how these are enacted at the site of provisioning.
Warde, A (1997) Consumption, Food and Taste. London: SAGE.