Everyday consumer transactions have the same potential for unexpected consequence whatever the age of the consumers involved. Young and old alike can find that products and services fail to live up to performance claims and that they are left with problems not easily resolved, or costs that are difficult to recover. While not overlooking consumer heterogeneity – especially on the basis of age – older consumers are arguably distinguishable in terms of the social and financial context in which they make decisions and attempt to redress problems. In 1988, attention was drawn to the need for consumer education to look beyond generic objectives to the specific situation of older people and their transactions. More than a decade later, in an allegedly consumer‐oriented society, the issue is revisited here to assess the argument's current relevance. Despite the increased availability of information for decisions and consumer protection, difficulties persist in the way information is presented or accessed. Chameleon‐like, old problems become manifest in new unfamiliar ways and invalidate experience. Consumer education today is as important as it was in 1988. Arguably, technological change means that the need for a better understanding of dangers, rights and redress procedures is greater than ever and the needs of older people in increasingly complex private and public sector transaction environments are all the more pressing. However, a fundamental revision of the way we approach the design of products, services and environments is needed to improve prospects for older consumers.

It is something of an understatement to speak of the UK, and many similar societies, as being obsessed with the mastery of time. From hesitant beginnings in the transformation of production processes and the development of mass transportation systems, the need to co-ordinate activities in time, and accomplish tasks with ever greater speed, has permeated virtually all aspects of everyday life. Many goods and services are sold on the basis of speed, efficiency or explicitly in terms of how much time they can save us. The specific characteristic of speed becomes the master variable on which we distinguish between brands and judge the progress made by manufacturers or providers. Using food as one example of this phenomenon, we can see the congruity of fast food, microwaveable frozen products, pizza deliveries to your door, street grazing and the fragmentation of family meal occasions. Set against this is an apparent countertendency to imbue the past ± when things were slower ± with particular symbolic value. Traditional becomes a metaphor for high quality; a description of ingredients and processes that were in more generous measure than could be expected today. In this, it also serves as an implicit justification for price premiums. Again, using food as an example, products and packaging often make liberal use of the imagery of yesteryear, the farm, the country kitchen, allusions to fresh or natural ingredients and old-fashioned ways of doing things. In this article, we examine the paradoxical relationship with time which seems increasingly commonplace in the final years of this century and draw on a wide range of secondary source materials to demonstrate this. It is argued that nostalgic 1 products and leisure practices can be understood not as an irrational, even pathological, reflection of longing for the past but as a coping strategy for the contradictions. Given the centrality of consumer behaviour and social patterns to the field of home economics, there is a need to reflect the issue in teaching and research. Correspondence P. Lyon, School of Management and Consumer Studies, University of Dundee,Whatever the extent of our involvement with the recent past, experiences cannot be authentic. Retrieval is necessarily, and often consciously, selective. We require the best that yesterday had to offer, we do not require those aspects

Comparisons between younger and older women in the kitchen usually focus on the historical argument that younger women do not have the domestic cooking skills of their mothers or grandmothers. At one level, this is convincing because there is now demonstrably greater reliance on ready meals and processed foods, and less on the home production of meals from raw ingredients. Compared with the immediate post‐Second World War years, not so much time is routinely spent in the kitchen, and food preparation is no longer a task central to the lives of many women. The availability of meals or meal components requiring less domestic labour and improved kitchen technology are both factors in this transformation of women's lives. However, they are not just available to the young. So, this research questions the impact of these factors across the age spectrum. Older women may have had very different domestic experiences earlier in their lives but have they now converged with the practices of younger women? How do younger and older women compare in terms of their food practices and the cooking skills they currently use in the kitchen? Using Scottish questionnaire data from a cross‐national study, this paper reports on the differences and similarities for 37 younger women (25–45 years; mean 32 years) and 43 older women (60–75 years; mean 68 years) in their actual use of specific food preparation and cooking techniques, the kind of meals they made, and the extent to which they ate out or ordered in meals for home consumption. Results indicated that while there were some differences in food preparation, the use of fresh ingredients and the style of cooking undertaken in the home, these were mostly marginal. There were similar response patterns for the adequacy of their domestic facilities and equipment. There was, however, a notable divergence in their patterns of eating meals out, or phoning out for meals. These data suggest that while younger and older women – different cooking generations – do differ, the way they differ is related more to current lifestyle factors than to any highly differentiated domestic food preparation and cooking skills.

In the UK, television cookery programmes engage the attention and enthusiasm of large audiences. Celebrity chefs are household names whose books nearly always top best‐seller lists. Magazines and newspapers routinely include meal recipes and reports on food‐related issues. In this sense, the domestic preparation of food has probably never attracted greater public interest. Paradoxically, much is also now said and written about the general loss of practical cooking skills. The latter takes on a special significance especially in relation to adverse changes in UK eating patterns and food safety problems. The paper contributes to an understanding of this paradox by examining what has happened to food preparation skills. The 20th century was a context for massive social and technological changes, and these were reflected in the domestic environment. Among younger cohorts many of traditional food preparation skills have atrophied but to some extent we can view this in terms of changed timescales of acquisition. Also, on the basis of historical evidence, there may be grounds for optimism in a re‐evaluation of the extent and diversity of cooking skills in the past.

Survey evidence on the living conditions of older people has a long and creditable history in Britain. Booth's work alerted policy makers to the often dire circumstances of older people, and accounts of their housing, diet, domestic arrangements and general quality of life stiffened resolve to ensure an adequate minimum standard of living in old age. At the start of what has been termed the welfare state, there were two important studies of old age in the works of Rowntree and Sheldon. In their depiction of the lives of independent elderly people, they provided a useful mid-century benchmark on progress.The question of income and support infrastructure recurs over the decades and, in many ways, these concerns are central to the question of adequate diets with implications for health and wellbeing. The possibility, or otherwise, of being able to afford, buy and prepare food which is of appropriate nutritional and social quality, is fundamental to an independent life in old age. Using food as a focus for review, this article maps what has been said about the circumstances of independent elderly people and what has been done to support them in the community. It is concluded that while considerable progress has been made over the century, their relative position remains problematic. This is especially the case for those living on their own in old age and with a reliance on the basic state pension.