Everyday Eating in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden: A Comparative Study of Meal Patterns 1997-2012

(Paperback)

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The chapters in this volume concentrate on the mundane and ordinary eating practices of the everyday, showing how these are linked to change in modern society. The contributors present a collection of systematic empirical results from a unique study based on representative samples of four Nordic populations - Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden - conducted at two time points, 15 years apart. The results of this unprecedented longitudinal survey leads the contributors to question many commonly held beliefs about the presumed and feared collapse of the traditional eating habits, family meals, and regular meal patterns. As the social organization of eating is in many ways related to developments in other social institutions such as family, education, and work, chapters provide interesting insights into contemporary society, with key topics selected for scrutiny including gender, food types, diet and health, and cooking practices. Additionally, the chapters highlight changes in the gendering of food practices and signs of increasing informality around meals.

Reviews

This book is a must-read for researchers and students working in the sociology of food. Eating is treated as a social phenomenon in its own right, and the book covers all of the key issues. The cutting-edge, theoretically informed analyses of eating in modern everyday lives are based upon solid and systematic empirical comparison, not only across the different Nordic countries, but also across time. * Bente Halkier, University of Copenhagen, Denmark *
Important and insightful, benefiting from a rare opportunity to conduct a re-study of eating habits and routines, this book provides a detailed and systematic comparative picture of continuity and change in eating practice across the Nordic countries. It is a study with wide substantive and methodological significance for the sociology of food and eating. * Alan Warde, University of Manchester, UK *
A fantastic piece of scholarship. Drawing from research that is longitudinal and comparative across multiple countries, the authors tell a story about food consumption that few have the data to tell. * Michael Carolan, Colorado State University, USA *

Author Bio

Jukka Gronow is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Social Research at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Lotte Holm is Professor at the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.