All practices are shared,but some more than others: Sharedness of social practices and time-use in food consumption

Abstract

Even though we spend less and less time cooking and eating, food consumption remains a corner stone of the temporal organisation of everyday life. This paper is interested in how and to which extent food practices can be described as shared. We situate our investigation at the confluence of practice theories and the empirical analysis of time-use surveys. While qualitative research highlights the interrelations between many activities and agents necessary to consume food, quantitative data, such as time-use surveys, underscore the shared temporality of eating. We ask whether practices are shared beyond being socially recognised and mutually understandable forms of actions. Accordingly, we are interested in how some practices might be described as more shared than others, or shared in different ways? We identify three characteristics of sharedness: participation, commitment and temporal concentration. The latter is a key indicator of dispersed collective activity, inasmuch as participants engage in the practice in similar ways even without coordinating explicitly around it. We measure and compare the characteristics of sharedness by analysing the Dutch time-use survey 2011 (N = 2,005). Such an analysis offers empirical evidence for our characterisation of sharedness by mapping five food-related practices (eating a meal, snacking, cooking, shopping, and cleaning) onto five dimensions of temporality (duration, sequence, periodicity, synchronisation, and tempo). The characteristics of sharedness afford a systematic framework to analyse culture in dispersed collective activity. Our analysis also provides novel vistas to reflect upon power in shared practices by investigating their temporal concentration.