Suchergebnisse

Bente Halkier og Lotte Holm:
Trust in food: Food consumption practice

Food consumption has become part of the political agenda in Denmark, in that responsibilities for environmental and similar concerns are increasingly being transferred to ordinary consumers. This article discusses how this new political agenda has influenced the every day understandings and practices as regards food consumption. It commences with a discussion of the concept of trust and its relevance to risk and handling risk in the arena of food consumption. Data come from a telephone survey carried out among a representative sample of adults in Denmark. On the one hand, Danish respondents expressed a general trust, and felt that the foods they eat are not harmful. On the other, they distrusted the safety of a list of specific but ordinary foods found on the market. In order to minimize risks, respondents employed differentiated shopping strategies, reflecting the structure of the food market. A majority of them replied that their shopping practices are influenced by concerns about health and environment, while only 8% report no concern at all about these issues. Danish consumers trusted personal networks more than either public food control systems or market mechanisms in order to procure good and safe food.

Purpose
This paper aims to present an analysis of the various dimensions of naturalness that shape the consumption practices of parents with young children.


Design/methodology/approach
The study builds on semi-structured interviews with 17 mothers and fathers focusing on parental decision-making in everyday consumption from pregnancy to the first years of the child's life.


Findings
Naturalness is a tool allowing parents to navigate in a world of risks and part of an everyday consumption practice that constructs and maintains children as vulnerable and parents as responsible. Parents perceive naturalness as something with three dimensions: familiarity, purity and culture. These three dimensions lead to different parental practices around consumption.


Originality/value
The analysis contributes to the authors' understanding of parenting, childhood, risk, safety and consumption by showing how and why parents of young children construct naturalness as a three-dimensional ideal in their consumption practices.

Based on a mixed methods approach, this article describes the prevalence of different levels of food budget restraints in a sample of 1,650 Danish households, and explores different types of coping strategies to deal with such restraints. Strategies concerned cooking, eating and buying food. A deeper knowledge of coping strategies was obtained by analysing qualitative data from interviews with thirty families who have experienced food budget restraints. Results revealed that more than 40 per cent reported some level of restraint on their food budget, while about 20 per cent experienced more substantial food budget restraints or food insecurity. Single parent households were at significantly greater risk of experiencing restraint than others. An investigation of coping strategies showed that some strategies, for example, using leftovers and cooking seasonal products, were common across all levels of budget restraint, while strategies affecting social life and taste preferences negatively were mostly applied when restraint was more severe. The qualitative analysis explored how the various strategies involved the potential for both positive and negative experiences for the individual, depending on the wider context surrounding the need to reduce household food budgets. Results from this study may be important for developing adequate measures to influence food purchases and eating practices in specific groups in situations of widespread economic turbulence in welfare societies.

The European Commission's recently published 'Farm to Fork' strategy seeks to facilitate a transition towards a sustainable food system. The strategy moves from a linear understanding of the food system towards a more circular view of the system's complex interdependencies. Despite these laudable intentions, it does not follow the guidance of the EU's Group of Chief Scientific Advisors that the path to a more sustainable food system requires 'moving from food as a commodity to food as more of a common good'. Drawing on our recent experience as authors of an Evidence Review Report on the European food system, we discuss how different framings of food shape the development of food policy, using the 'Farm to Fork' strategy as a key example.