Mundane normativity and the everyday handling of contested food consumption

Abstract

Much contemporary public debate focuses on food consumption. Societal and individual health, risk, climate change, sustainability, animal welfare and food quality are all issues which influence the culturally established or traditional food routines practised in every day life. This cultural contestation and debate suggests that consumption in everyday life is already a site of normative action. Yet existing research has focused largely either on political and ethical consumption, or on tacitly reproduced routines in consumption. The mundane processes in which explicit and implicit ways of handling normative issues are entangled have received little attention, either empirically or theoretically. This article seeks to consider these issues in detail, suggesting a new framework for empirical investigations of processes of reproduction and change in consumption patterns. It introduces two new terms in mundane normativity – expectable and acceptable consumption – and uses examples to show how these terms can help better understand mundane normativity from a practice theoretical perspective. Material from four different Danish research studies on contested food consumption exemplifies these new terms. The article suggests that the terms expectable and acceptable consumption can enable consumption researchers to examine more variety in relation to the normative in consumption and investigate the intertwined processes of reproduction and change in consumption better. Furthermore, the article argues that analysing mundane normativity points towards an issue in consumption that practice theoretical research has not yet addressed sufficiently – social hierarchies.

Consumption and society in the 21st century

“…Bente Halkier (2022) and Marie Plessz, Séverine Gojard and Marie Zins (2022) address food consumption, and its normative prescriptions. Halkier takes up the contested aspects of food consumption -such as issues around health, sustainability and animal welfare -and explores the notion of 'mundane normativity', understood as 'acceptable and expectable consumption'.…”