Senses and Sensibilities

Abstract

This article examines changes in tastes and practice in the context of establishing and maintaining a new cross-national couple relationship. Interviews provided accounts of the experience of change among fourteen Anglo-French couples. We describe two processes of change which, because accentuated in cross-national couples, reveal mechanisms lying behind the transformation and stabilisation of tastes and diets. Explanation of the evolution of taste and diet can be found in the interplay between aesthetic and ethical drives, incorporated bodily practices, and social mechanisms of legitimation and integration. To make sense of gustatory and dietary change, tastes are best understood through their insertion in meaningful sequences, patterns, and series.Keywords: Britain, cross-national couples, disgust, eating habits, family meals, France, senses, tastes. This paper examines changes in the eating practices of new Anglo-French couples from their initial encounters into the early years of living together as a household. New dietary components have first to be coped with and appropriated, and then maintained in the longer term. We explore the interplay between aesthetic and ethical drives, incorporated bodily practices, and social mechanisms of legitimation and integration which are at stake in such dietary and gustatory change.

Social Interaction as Key to Understanding the Intertwining of Routinized and Culturally Contested Consumption

“…Food practitioners are able to recognize procedures for cooking and eating if there is a sufficient degree of regular coordination to such procedures, and regular coordination comes from cooking and eating being played out interactively. For example, when new couples move in together, cooking together often reveals shared or not so shared procedures in making meals (Darmon and Warde, 2016).…”