as there are consumption guidelines for fruit and vegetables, dairy products, etc. Despite this, on the Manger Bouger website, a section asks the question “Why is it important to get together for regular meals?”1. Eating together is therefore a more comprehensive practice of balanced nutrition, and is more in line with a balanced lifestyle. Indeed, eating together is beneficial for several reasons:
– promoting the structuring of meals (starter–main course–dessert), which itself promotes nutritional diversity;
– avoiding skipping meals;
– taking the time to eat (favorable to better digestion and a better perception of the signs of satiation);
– cooking fresh products (healthier than processed products, which are generally saltier, more fatty and less natural).
In France, despite the fact that the conviviality of meals remains central among the discourse of the French population (Mathe et al. 2014), eating together is less and less in line with the evolution of lifestyles, affected in particular by demographic changes (e.g. composition of households, activities of their members) or changes in food supply (e.g. prepared and individualized dishes). The INCA2 study published in 2009, based on data collected in 2006 and 2007, highlights a trend towards a destructuring of eating patterns among the youngest members of society (15–35 years), which has been increasing since 1999.
Similarly, it is clear that the time spent in front of screens and the solicitations of smartphones at all hours of the day and night can interfere with maintaining time to eat together, parasiting the interpersonal relationships essential to conviviality. The INCA3 study (Anses 2017) emphasizes that the time spent daily in front of screens (excluding work time) is constantly increasing, with an average increase over the last 7 years of 20 minutes in children and 1 hour and 20 minutes in adults. As a result, eating together is not self-evident, and more support is needed.
In conclusion, eating together is at the heart of the PNNS’s concerns but is not the subject of accompanying measures, and current lifestyles make it difficult to maintain this practice which contributes to a healthy lifestyle. Faced with this observation, a study of the different practices of eating together and a reflection on the conditions of implementation of these practices are necessary.
1.3. Understanding the emergence and maintenance of eating together
This section adopts a practice-based approach to study eating together from a holistic perspective, that is, by taking into account all the elements related to the existence of practices. These elements are the material conditions, the necessary skills and the meanings associated with the emergence or maintenance of the practice.
1.3.1. Benefits of practice theories to the study of eating together
Practice theories are a set of theories and concepts whose principle is understanding everyday and routine activities by studying the emergence of practices as a result of the context rather than by analyzing the choices made by individuals to arrive at a behavior. Schatzki, a founding author of this theoretical trend, inherited from the work of Bourdieu and Giddens, defines practices as sets of activities that involve and are linked by knowledge, skills, meanings and material elements (Schatzki 1997). Reckwitz, another seminal author, positions himself in relation to Schatzki’s ideas by adding the study of habits and routinized actions. Reckwitz (2002) defines practices as a type of routine behavior that consists of several interconnected elements: forms of bodily activities, mental activities, “things” and their use, accumulated knowledge in the form of understandings, skills, emotional states and motivational knowledge. Thus, social practices are taken as the unit of analysis; individuals are considered to be “carriers” of practices.
Shove et al. (2012), building on the seminal work of Reckwitz (2002), propose a simplified framework to empirically explain the emergence, maintenance and demise of practices. According to this framework, a practice emerges and is maintained as a result of a combination of three elements: skills, meanings and materials (Shove et al. 2012) (Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1. Diagram of the conceptual framework from Shove et al. (2012), as presented in Spurling et al. (2013). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/seredelanauze/evolution.zip
“Skills” refer to what an individual needs to know in order for a practice to emerge and be sustained. Skills are also found, in a more abstract way, in the knowledge related to a practice. Thus, under the term “skills”, we can distinguish between physical abilities, know-how and knowledge.
The “material” element refers to what is tangible and mechanically or physically constrains or enables an action. This element groups objects and technologies (Reckwitz 2002; Shove and Pantzar 2005; Warde 2005) with infrastructure (Hargreaves 2011).
“Meanings” refers to “the social and symbolic significance of participating [in an action] at any given time” (Shove et al. 2012). This notion can be translated into the concept of the teleoaffective structure described by Schatzki (2005, pp. 42–55) or in terms of purpose and emotion, a form of goal-oriented engagement (Warde 2005).
Practice theories have been used to understand the emergence or to accompany the implementation of more sustainable practices (e.g. Hand et al. (2005), who study the evolution of hygiene practices and Gram-Hanssen (2010) who studies heating practices in relation to energy savings). Practice theories can furthermore be used to understand the emergence, maintenance or disappearance of practices at different scales: at the scale of a society (e.g. Shove and Pantzar 2005), or at a more individual scale, to understand how a particular practice is implemented by a particular individual or household (e.g. the practice of recycling in households (Fournier-Schill 2014)). Our chapter opts for this second approach in order to understand, at a micro level, what explains the existence and maintenance of the practice of eating together at the household level. The following section presents a qualitative study conducted for this purpose.
1.3.2. A two-stage qualitative study to understand how consumers “eat together”
The methodological challenge of our work is not so much in observation, or in revealing the existence and arrangement of practices, but rather in understanding their origin or their construction. Moreover, applying practice theories does represent a methodological challenge, as it can be tricky to accurately describe how an action is socially constructed (Hargreaves 2011). Our work is therefore exploratory and comprehensive in nature, which justifies the choice of a qualitative approach. The research methodology is composed of two stages, which serve to describe and understand the implementation of the “eating together” recommendation by consumers, in order to identify the skills, material and meanings on which it is based.
1.3.2.1. Step 1: Semi-structured interviews based on projective collages
The qualitative approach involves looking for diversity of practices, with the aim of understanding the mechanisms of adoption of these varied practices. Turrentine and Kurani (2007) propose a sampling method known as “illustrative sampling” which aims to ensure the diversity of the object studied. As our qualitative approach involves looking
