How and why do people store food? What norms, skills and items are involved in practices of stocking up and keeping food in pantries, refrigerators, and freezers? Despite an increasing interest in everyday food practices within food studies, research on domestic food storage practices is limited. In this article I depart from a practice theoretical framework to explore how food storage practices are made meaningful and involve certain competences and materials, with focus on preparedness. I draw on findings from a study on food storage in Sweden using an open-ended questionnaire and popular consumer magazines. The findings show that storing food is a concrete way of managing daily food work, time, social obligations, and potential societal crises. Households' food storage practices are attempts to manage and control everyday life with its routines and disruptions, and the immediate, distant, or imagined future. However, societal advice for of long-term storage, for example for crises, is challenged by normalized storage spaces, skills, and values attached to food and food storage. I conclude by proposing that a new rationale relating to storage economy may influence the meaning, competences, and materials of food storage practices in favor of household preparedness.

In this paper we present a methodological toolbox as a useful research approach for investigating domestic food practices. Consumption research often relies strongly on interviews or surveys. While helpful, such methods inevitably create a distance between the verbalization of the studied practice and the practice itself, inviting post hoc rationalization. The toolbox helps the researcher to get closer to the studied practice by combining interviews with methods based on observation, visualization and verbalization, in or close to practice. The toolbox holds a variety of methods and we describe fridge stories, food mapping, shop-alongs and food diaries. Through a practical discussion of the advantages and difficulties of these methods, and their combined use, we hope our paper can be useful to other researchers and students interested in everyday food practices.

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Would you share your freezer with your neighbours? Today, most Swedish households have access to a home freezer, but in the middle of the 20th century, collective freezer lockers offered affordable access to modern technology. Geographers have suggested that encouraging collective cooling practices could reduce environmental impact. The aim of this article is to investigate collective freezer lockers as a cultural phenomenon, and thereby getting closer to collective cooling practices, and to discuss the conditions for (re-introducing) collective freezer practices. Through personal narratives and media material, I trace meanings, norms, and discourses that formed part of these practices. The lockers were involved in daily practices of food, managing distances and social relations, and declined when home freezers became depicted as more affordable and rational. I conclude with discussing the possibilities and implications of a potential upscaling or revitalising of the practice of collective freezing.