Peter Jackson, Helene Brembeck, Jonathan Everts, Maria Fuentes, Bente Halkier, Frej Daniel Hertz, Angela Meah, Valerie Viehoff and Christine Wenzl, Reframing Convenience Food, Palgrave, 2018; Kindle £9.97, hbk £10.03 (Amazon).
|
RATING: 82
|
Buy this book?
|
Yes
|
The recent resurgence of interest in Marxist Feminist social reproduction theory, reflected in special issues or dedicated sections of Historical Materialism (24, 2, 2016), Monthly Review (71, 4, 2019), Radical Philosophy (2.04, 2019), and Viewpoints (5, 2015), marks it out as one of the most dynamic areas in contemporary critical political economy. It is a frequent point of reference at What's Worth Reading, as earlier reviews of the work of Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever, Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill, Heather Brown, Shulamith Firestone, Antonella Picchio, and Lisa Vogel indicate. My own perspective on it is derived from the Grundrisse, where Marx suggests that every limit appears to capital as a barrier to overcome, so that it 'seeks to subjugate every moment of production itself to exchange and to suspend the production of direct use values not entering into exchange, i.e. precisely to posit production based on capital in place of earlier modes of production, which appear primitive from its standpoint’ (Pelican Edition, 1973: 408). This produces a dynamic perspective in which aspects of ‘the activities associated with the maintenance and reproduction of peoples’ lives on a daily and intergenerational basis’ (Ferguson et al., 2016: 27-28) are 'taken over' or transformed by capital over time, with no absolute limit. If the case of intergenerational reproduction through commercial surrogacy is one that is still restricted to petty rather than industrial capitalism (see for example Dasgupta and Dasgupta, Lewis, and Pande), daily maintenance and reproduction are not. It is fifty years since Margaret Benston, in a classic article recently reprinted, noted that 'convenience foods, home delivery of meals and take-out meals are widespread' (Benston [1969] 2019: 8). Now, this neat comparative study by eight authors with equal status, addressing the topics of commercial baby food in Sweden, supermarket ready meals in the UK, workplace canteen food in Germany, and home-delivered meal boxes in Denmark, with some comparative reference in each case, provides a good opportunity to explore this area. The fact that the authors do not adopt an explicit social reproduction perspective is by the way. Their 'theories of practice' perspective sees practices as routinized types of behaviour 'which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, mental activities, "things" and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge', that provide a conceptual middle ground between individual action and social order: 'From this perspective, the unit of analysis is the practice - not individuals (who are the carriers of those practices) or structures (which only exist insofar as they are reproduced through practices)'; so 'practices are at the centre of the social world, constituting the ‘site of the social’ in conjunction with the material arrangements amidst and through which practices transpire' (7, where Schatzki (1996) is a primary source). This approach encourages them to examine 'how specific practices such as cooking and eating are negotiated within a wider set of domestic routines and responsibilities', and sees 'food' as a process that 'has no meaning outside the practices and bodily processes of food production and consumption' (ibid). It is employed deftly and with a minimum of fuss, and with a degree of consistency throughout that reflects close contact and cooperation between the authors. At the slight cost of adopting the rather ugly word 'conveniencization', they place the emphasis on how specific foods come to be regarded as convenient, the commercial forces that enable it to happen and the socio-technical innovations involved in its development, and the ways in which new types of convenience food have become embedded in consumers’ lives, combined with other kinds of food to become part of their everyday diet (2-3). Of particular value from my perspective, they focus not only on social process, but also on the ideologies and moral discourses that surround convenience food - particularly in relation to appropriate gender and mothering roles, but also to other social values such as healthy eating and concern for the environment.
Following the introduction, discussed above, and chapters on the history of convenience food and convenience food as a contested category, successive chapters draw on the case study material through a sequence of specific themes. The topics addressed are the normalization, temporalities, spatialities and moralization of convenience food, cooking and convenience, and convenience, sustainability and health. As they note, salting, pickling, drying and other techniques date back centuries: infant formula was available in the 1860s, and tinned Heinz baked beans were on sale in the UK in the 1880s. But these authors start their 'short history' of convenience food with 'the frozen TV dinner in 1950s America' (actually pioneered on US airlines and by Findus in Sweden in the 1940s, they add later). Swanson's frozen meals were advertised by a 'modern housewife' returning from shopping: 'I'm late, but dinner won't be!' (16). Health concerns about the amount of salt, sugar and other additives in commercial baby food were already being raised in the 1960s, and Amy Bentley (2014, p. 163) is quoted as suggesting both that 'little jars of products laden with sugar, salt, and starch were gateway foods to the industrialized American diet', and that 'commercial baby food made it easier and more convenient for women with small children to enter the paid work force and stay there'. For the convenience food industry to develop on a substantial scale, complementary scientific and technological advances were required. 'In the kitchen,' they note, 'without fridges, freezers, electric stoves or microwaves, most convenience foods would not be convenient' (20). Beyond the kitchen, the establishment of the 'cold chain' - the ability to create an unbroken refrigerated path from picking or production through to transport and retail to the end consumer - was essential. It is touched on here, but dealt with in glorious detail in Jonathan Rees' superbly readable and informative Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances and Enterprise in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Introduced in the UK from the 1960s, convenience foods were soon stratified by class - Smash and Angel Delight for the proletariat, and Marks and Spencer's Chicken Kiev - with actual garlic! - and Chicken Cordon Bleu for the middle classes. In terms of national comparison, the UK is to the fore, with a chilled ready meal market of £2.6 billion by 2012 (it's easy to find estimates around £5 billion today); and 'ultra-processed' food was reported in the Guardian (3 February 2018) as making up 50.7 per cent of UK food intake, compared to 46.2, 14.2 and 10.2 per cent in Germany, France and Portugal respectively. That said, the recent wave of chopped salads and vegan and vegetarian convenience food, and investment in new 'alternative proteins' - barely covered here - demonstrates the capacity of the industry to respond to changing preferences. In the cases of Denmark, Germany and Sweden, three features stand out - the relatively later and less intensive development outside the UK, the early appearance of US multinationals (notably, with Kraft's introduction in Germany of the 'immensely popular Miracoli pack ... a cardboard box that contained spaghetti, tomato sauce in a pouch, grated cheese and a herb-spice mix', 31), and, significantly, the drawing of domestic provisioning into international politics, with the Marshall Plan financing the introduction of supermarkets in Denmark 'in order to increase productivity in the retail sector' (27), and the latest General Electric kitchen design being used as the setting for the 'kitchen' debate between Khrushchev and Vice-President Nixon at the American exhibition in Moscow in 1959 (29). As the authors comment, 'The mechanization and modernization of European kitchens did not just happen but were an explicit goal of economic policy, partially bound up in the great East-West antagonism of the Cold War era' (37).
The following chapter addresses the fact that just as convenience food is a socio-culturally contested category, there is no clear definitional conceptualization of convenience food in the research world either (48). This leads to the discussion of conveniencization, or 'convenient food provisioning, cooking, eating and wasting' (50), in their 'practice-theoretical' approach (49-57):
'First, a practice-theoretical approach focuses on the organization and accomplishment of mundane practices. Second, the unit of analysis is practices and ways of practicing. Thirdly, every context consists of a multiplicity of different intersecting practices. Fourthly, material arrangements are important parts of practices and practicing. And finally, practicing takes place on the basis of notions of socially expectable and acceptable conduct' (49).
The affinity of this approach with social reproduction theory is immediately apparent. Theirs is an open-ended analytical framework, clearly not specifically presented as a lens through which to explore the changing relationship between domestic and industrial production, or to situate the family in the wider 'history of industry and exchange' (Marx and Engels, German Ideology, in Collected Works, 5, p. 43). The same is true of the analysis that follows in succeeding chapters on the normalization, temporalities, spatialities and moralization of convenience food. All the same, the approach and the material presented both lend themselves readily to such a perspective, as they meet entirely the insistence that an historical materialist approach must always start and never deviate from the empirical manner in which men and women produce their lives. So, following their framework, I pose the following question:
As women and men go about the process of securing the maintenance and reproduction of their lives in the context of the increasing domination of capital over them, how does their practice change in the specific area of 'provisioning', as reflected inter alia in the use of commercial baby food, the purchase of ready meals, the consumption of canteen food at the place of work, and the purchase of meal kits or boxes for cooking at home; how are their changing practices in these areas reconciled with their own ideas and broader social norms about these processes, with what effects?
In other words, I suggest, as a way through the material, that conveniencization, as depicted here, can be seen as a set of concrete practices that respond to and enable adaptation to the changing world of work, as more women enter the labour market, increasingly on a full time basis, the proportion of single-person households increases, and new techniques become available and new products are offered by capital to satisfy the needs of the working population for nutritional self-reproduction. It is just the kind of work that should be done in social reproduction theory, as indeed it is (see for example Szabo, 2011, cited pp. 41, 47, who adopts an explicit social reproduction perspective). So I read the rest of the book with this in mind.
The first topic addressed is normalization, understood as a dynamic and never-stable process involving a multiplicity of interactions: in the case of commercial baby food it 'involves a continuous interplay between medical science, health care, advertising, product and packaging innovation, socio-economic changes and ideas such as "scientific motherhood" and "consuming motherhood"' (71). The mass production of baby food in jars and cans dates back about 100 years, and is marked over time by health scares (over contamination, or high sugar or salt content and artificial colouring), and responses by manufacturers (in new procedures, and a shift to organic and sugar- or salt-free alternatives); in the meantime, its use is made easy by innovative packaging (recently, 'the soft, squeezable and often colourful food pouch', 82), or by its association by manufacturers with positive goals (weaning onto solid food) and standards: Semper, the Swedish company featured, promotes 'real food. For babies. Naturally tasty food, cooked from the best ingredients. Nothing strange, no shortcuts and no additives. Real food—since we cook food using the best ingredients, with no preservatives and no strange additives. For babies—since our food contains just the right amounts of nutrients, size of pieces and good taste that suit a developing baby' (74). Different parents use it different ways - habitually, occasionally, to reassure themselves regarding 'expert' advice on type and texture of early solid foods, when outside the home, when the baby refuses other food, and so on. And although a residual sense exists that homemade food is somehow better, thinking adapts: ‘My advice’, says one respondent, 'is not to fuss. If you do not want to make a lot of food yourself, it is OK to buy ready-made. You should not feel shame for buying everything ready-made and not cooking yourself’ (73). Once normalized in this way, commercial baby food, where relevant, fits easily into daily routines and time management, and is accepted as 'convenient'. In short: 'Commercial baby food offers a material arrangement of food provisioning, cooking and feeding that supports convenient and morally appropriate ways of acting' (84); and 'conveniencization of infant feeding implies a shift where skills and knowledge regarding, for example, nutrition, meal composition and cooking, as well as the handling of parental concerns, are relocated from the consumption domain to commercial service-providers' (87).
The following chapter, on 'temporalities', links these considerations to 'the growth of female participation in the labour force,
the socio-technical changes associated with the development of the ‘cold-chain’ in food manufacture and the growing use of domestic refrigeration and microwave cooking' (89), before going on to address changing generational attitudes to food, and 'changes over the life course' in which food habits may change (as with young single men and the elderly living alone). Overall, the focus is on what Alan Warde (a central figure in this literature) has called 'the intransigent problems of scheduling in an increasingly de-routinized society' (90). In the original article from which this reference is taken, he goes beyond the increase in female participation in the labour market to identify the more general fragmentation of labour time and its implications for household management:
'The existence of "convenience food'' symbolises a new stage in the development of space-time ordering. The reason for its increasing and widespread usage is not so much a function of people wanting or liking it, but as a response to a particular configuration of problems in the temporal organization of daily life. Many people are constrained, in the face of more pressing social obligations, to eat convenience foods as a provisional response to intransigent problems of scheduling in a de-routinised society. Processing food through hypermodern convenience devices is required because there is a tendency for too many people to be too often in the wrong place' (Warde, 1999: 526).
Here the focus is on individual and household strategies of 'time-shifting' rather than 'time-saving', in a context in which the greater flexibilisation and informalisation of work routines makes coordination more difficult, and it applies not only to cooking, but also to shopping and eating. The following chapter turns its attention to the phenomenon of 'retail distribution, food preparation and eating taking up ever wider spaces as supply chains have becoming increasingly globalized and food consumers have become increasingly disconnected from places of agricultural production' (117). In other words, it addresses the global supply lines of convenience food (mainly through the issue of the awareness or lack of it of provenance and food miles), along with a principal focus on 'industrial' production in the workplace, and passing reference to the increasing tendency for food to be consumed outside the home, and 'on the move'. The initial context here is the Fordist organisation of production. Ulrike Thoms (2009: 131) is cited (122) as arguing that ‘canteens did not evolve out of collective action but were created by factory owners, their costs calculated as an investment in the creation of healthy and strong workers, their bodies interpreted as machines that needed the right fuel in sufficient quantities to work properly’. Cooking on such an industrial scale, especially from scratch, involves technology and equipment not usually available in domestic kitchens, such as blast chillers, convection ovens or conveyor dishwashers (128), along with a relatively advanced division of labour; and the calculation made here is that 8 to 10 million meals are served in German canteens every day (131).
The authors then turn, in what are the most thought-provoking chapters in the book, to the 'moralization' of convenience foods, and 'cooking and convenience'. The first of these is understood as the 'process through which preferences are converted into moral values, both in individual lives and at the level of culture (137). It takes as its starting point the suggestion that: ‘To cook a proper dinner for one’s family is an important part of a woman’s understanding of her own identity and an implicit part of realizing the ideal family and the ideal home’ (Bugge and Almås, 2006: 210, cited p. 138), but ranges across the practices of households of a variety of kinds, including single men, retired couples and single mothers. Challenging arguments along the lines that resort to convenience foods reflects 'a lack of knowledge about foods and their properties, an absence of the skills required to cook and care for oneself or one’s family, and an inability to transfer such knowledge to future generations', it makes the counter-argument that 'the use of convenience food can be justified as an expression of care for family members as well as distant others' (139). As Katherine Turner shows for 1920s Boston, the history of surveillance and condemnation of working class women who resort to such products as shop-bought pies and other baked goods is a long one (Turner, 2006, cited 142); Jamie Oliver pops up as a contemporary example. In response to such opinions, 'advertisers sought to reframe convenience foods as vehicles through which women might successfully mobilize a discourse of love or care' (144), presenting them not as superior to home cooking, but as part of a continuum that made for versatility, flexibility, readiness for contingencies, and so on. The authors find that such perceptions, reinforced by the material pressures that households face, are widely reflected among consumers. So 'for many of our participants from across a range of social and economic backgrounds, convenience food was articulated as a vehicle through which care could be expressed; for example, by enabling them to accommodate the needs and preferences of different family members, to demonstrate thrift and economy in managing financial resources, or to help avoid food waste and consume more sustainably' (147) - or they add later, as part of 'self-care', or to spend more 'quality time' with family members (154). The ethics of provisioning as household practices shift over time (see also Meah and Jackson, 2013) to incorporate convenience food as a positive resource, while self-deprecating humour is used to ward off residual feelings that its use is a dereliction of duty to oneself or others. Whether one sees this as reflecting success in corporate advertising strategies, the tendency for ideas to adapt to material circumstances, or simply ways of coping, the relevance to the question of how households adapt 'smoothly' to varied pressures in ways that further the advance of capital into the domestic sphere is clear.
Following the same theme, the chapter on cooking and convenience takes up the claim that there has been a decline in cooking skills associated with the increased availability of convenience food. Its principal focus is on meal boxes in Denmark (think Hello Fresh! for the UK - 'Cook seasonal, fresh food from scratch, in the comfort of your kitchen' - other ready-to-cook boxes are available). First, what counts as 'cooking from scratch' and where convenience food kicks in (shop-bought bread, butter, cheese, canned goods, dried pasta and suchlike have long been normalized as 'staples') changes over time; second, new technology and products require new skills, and all along the spectrum from convenience to cooking from scratch particular meals require forethought, planning, shopping, timing, adaptation, and so on. Use of a meal box service requires forward planning and use of the internet; it can enhance cooking skills, as new dishes supported by recipe cards widen the repertoire of cooks who may habitually stick to a fairly limited range of dishes; and by the same token it makes, for the most part, for a healthy and varied diet. At the same time, it reflects a relatively advanced division of social labour, as ingredients are prepared on an industrial scale and delivered to individual private kitchens where the final production of the meal takes place.
As noted, this book was not written as a contribution to social reproduction theory. In fact, the project on which it was based aimed to answer four questions: how ‘convenience food’ is understood by consumers and how its use relates to understandings of ‘healthy eating’ and environmental sustainability; with what specific practices (shopping, cooking, eating, disposing) convenience food is associated; how such foods are incorporated within different household contexts and domestic routines; and to what extent current practices are subject to change (towards more sustainable and healthier practices)' (221). The final substantive chapter, on sustainability and health, suggests that consumers do think about these issues, but not very much. Overall, the conclusions are clear and convincing: the strategy of shifting the focus to practices and processes through which particular kinds of food provide different kinds of convenience for consumers in different circumstances, implemented through the selection of four contrasting types of convenient food across four countries produces a rich composite picture. They find that 'most households combine different kinds of food and different methods of food preparation to varying degrees in their everyday lives'; practices are convenient if they help time-pressed consumers struggling to synchronise domestic schedules within busy modern households (223); and they are not associated with a decline in cooking skills and culinary competence, but rather reflect a range of relevant skills (225). Convenience food is varied in character, integrated into household routines, and thoroughly normalized.
When you look at this material from the perspective of social reproduction, and especially with the idea in mind that capital accepts no limits, a number of points stand out. First, individual capitals seeking to find new products that will replace areas of non-capitalist production, find rick pickings in the broad field of convenience food. Second, this in turn facilitates increased entry to the labour market (for women in particular) and the introduction of 'flexible' and fragmented patterns of work. Complex chains of reaction result, in a manner that is apparently 'spontaneous'. At the same time, as more women go out to work, men do not take up the slack by increasing their participation in housework. On the evidence here, 'convenience' products make it possible for women to 'manage' a double role, exactly as described by Marx in Capital (Vol. 1, Penguin, 1976, ft. 39, p. 518). Third, looking across the range of examples here - baby food, ready meals, canteen meals, and meal boxes - and the range of household types considered, the picture that emerges is that consumers of all kinds, however poor, however burdened and however busy, uncomplainingly slot into a place in the varied regimes of daily maintenance - developing new skills, managing new processes, adapting their ideas to embrace new realities, engaging to some degree at least in new discourses around health and sustainability, and learning new eating patterns and habits that fit in with the changing world of work around them. In other words, the kitchen as much as the work place is a school for the neoliberal citizen.
References
Bentley, Amy. 2014. Inventing baby food: Taste, health, and the industrialization of the American diet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press (also see a nice 2012 lecture at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWJEuVcHYQ).
Benston, Margaret. [1969] 2109. 'The political economy of women's liberation', Monthly Review, 71, 4, 1-11.
Bugge, Annechen Bahr and Reidar Almås. 2006. 'Domestic dinner: Representations and practices of a proper meal among young suburban mothers, Journal of Consumer Culture, 6, 203–228.
Ferguson, Susan, Genevieve LeBaron, Angela Dimitrakaki and Sara R. Farris. 2016. 'Introduction', Special Issue on Social Reproduction, Historical Materialism, 24, 2, 25-37.
Meah, Angela, and Peter Jackson. 2013. 'Crowded kitchens: The "democratisation" of domesticity?', Gender, Place and Culture, 20, 5, 578–596.
Schatzki, Theodore R. 1996. Social practices: A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Szabo, Michelle. 2011. The challenges of ‘re-engaging with food’: Connecting employment, household patterns and gender relations to convenience food consumption in North America, Food, Culture and Society, 14, 547–566.
Thoms, Ulrika. 2009. Physical reproduction, eating culture and communication at the workplace: The case of industrial canteens in Germany 1850–1950, Food & History, 7, 2, 119–153.
Turner, Katherine L. 2006. 'Buying, not cooking', Food, Culture and Society, 9, 1, 13–39.
Warde, Alan. 1999. 'Convenience food: Space and timing', British Food Journal, 101, 7, 518–527.
Following the introduction, discussed above, and chapters on the history of convenience food and convenience food as a contested category, successive chapters draw on the case study material through a sequence of specific themes. The topics addressed are the normalization, temporalities, spatialities and moralization of convenience food, cooking and convenience, and convenience, sustainability and health. As they note, salting, pickling, drying and other techniques date back centuries: infant formula was available in the 1860s, and tinned Heinz baked beans were on sale in the UK in the 1880s. But these authors start their 'short history' of convenience food with 'the frozen TV dinner in 1950s America' (actually pioneered on US airlines and by Findus in Sweden in the 1940s, they add later). Swanson's frozen meals were advertised by a 'modern housewife' returning from shopping: 'I'm late, but dinner won't be!' (16). Health concerns about the amount of salt, sugar and other additives in commercial baby food were already being raised in the 1960s, and Amy Bentley (2014, p. 163) is quoted as suggesting both that 'little jars of products laden with sugar, salt, and starch were gateway foods to the industrialized American diet', and that 'commercial baby food made it easier and more convenient for women with small children to enter the paid work force and stay there'. For the convenience food industry to develop on a substantial scale, complementary scientific and technological advances were required. 'In the kitchen,' they note, 'without fridges, freezers, electric stoves or microwaves, most convenience foods would not be convenient' (20). Beyond the kitchen, the establishment of the 'cold chain' - the ability to create an unbroken refrigerated path from picking or production through to transport and retail to the end consumer - was essential. It is touched on here, but dealt with in glorious detail in Jonathan Rees' superbly readable and informative Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances and Enterprise in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Introduced in the UK from the 1960s, convenience foods were soon stratified by class - Smash and Angel Delight for the proletariat, and Marks and Spencer's Chicken Kiev - with actual garlic! - and Chicken Cordon Bleu for the middle classes. In terms of national comparison, the UK is to the fore, with a chilled ready meal market of £2.6 billion by 2012 (it's easy to find estimates around £5 billion today); and 'ultra-processed' food was reported in the Guardian (3 February 2018) as making up 50.7 per cent of UK food intake, compared to 46.2, 14.2 and 10.2 per cent in Germany, France and Portugal respectively. That said, the recent wave of chopped salads and vegan and vegetarian convenience food, and investment in new 'alternative proteins' - barely covered here - demonstrates the capacity of the industry to respond to changing preferences. In the cases of Denmark, Germany and Sweden, three features stand out - the relatively later and less intensive development outside the UK, the early appearance of US multinationals (notably, with Kraft's introduction in Germany of the 'immensely popular Miracoli pack ... a cardboard box that contained spaghetti, tomato sauce in a pouch, grated cheese and a herb-spice mix', 31), and, significantly, the drawing of domestic provisioning into international politics, with the Marshall Plan financing the introduction of supermarkets in Denmark 'in order to increase productivity in the retail sector' (27), and the latest General Electric kitchen design being used as the setting for the 'kitchen' debate between Khrushchev and Vice-President Nixon at the American exhibition in Moscow in 1959 (29). As the authors comment, 'The mechanization and modernization of European kitchens did not just happen but were an explicit goal of economic policy, partially bound up in the great East-West antagonism of the Cold War era' (37).
The following chapter addresses the fact that just as convenience food is a socio-culturally contested category, there is no clear definitional conceptualization of convenience food in the research world either (48). This leads to the discussion of conveniencization, or 'convenient food provisioning, cooking, eating and wasting' (50), in their 'practice-theoretical' approach (49-57):
'First, a practice-theoretical approach focuses on the organization and accomplishment of mundane practices. Second, the unit of analysis is practices and ways of practicing. Thirdly, every context consists of a multiplicity of different intersecting practices. Fourthly, material arrangements are important parts of practices and practicing. And finally, practicing takes place on the basis of notions of socially expectable and acceptable conduct' (49).
The affinity of this approach with social reproduction theory is immediately apparent. Theirs is an open-ended analytical framework, clearly not specifically presented as a lens through which to explore the changing relationship between domestic and industrial production, or to situate the family in the wider 'history of industry and exchange' (Marx and Engels, German Ideology, in Collected Works, 5, p. 43). The same is true of the analysis that follows in succeeding chapters on the normalization, temporalities, spatialities and moralization of convenience food. All the same, the approach and the material presented both lend themselves readily to such a perspective, as they meet entirely the insistence that an historical materialist approach must always start and never deviate from the empirical manner in which men and women produce their lives. So, following their framework, I pose the following question:
As women and men go about the process of securing the maintenance and reproduction of their lives in the context of the increasing domination of capital over them, how does their practice change in the specific area of 'provisioning', as reflected inter alia in the use of commercial baby food, the purchase of ready meals, the consumption of canteen food at the place of work, and the purchase of meal kits or boxes for cooking at home; how are their changing practices in these areas reconciled with their own ideas and broader social norms about these processes, with what effects?
In other words, I suggest, as a way through the material, that conveniencization, as depicted here, can be seen as a set of concrete practices that respond to and enable adaptation to the changing world of work, as more women enter the labour market, increasingly on a full time basis, the proportion of single-person households increases, and new techniques become available and new products are offered by capital to satisfy the needs of the working population for nutritional self-reproduction. It is just the kind of work that should be done in social reproduction theory, as indeed it is (see for example Szabo, 2011, cited pp. 41, 47, who adopts an explicit social reproduction perspective). So I read the rest of the book with this in mind.
The first topic addressed is normalization, understood as a dynamic and never-stable process involving a multiplicity of interactions: in the case of commercial baby food it 'involves a continuous interplay between medical science, health care, advertising, product and packaging innovation, socio-economic changes and ideas such as "scientific motherhood" and "consuming motherhood"' (71). The mass production of baby food in jars and cans dates back about 100 years, and is marked over time by health scares (over contamination, or high sugar or salt content and artificial colouring), and responses by manufacturers (in new procedures, and a shift to organic and sugar- or salt-free alternatives); in the meantime, its use is made easy by innovative packaging (recently, 'the soft, squeezable and often colourful food pouch', 82), or by its association by manufacturers with positive goals (weaning onto solid food) and standards: Semper, the Swedish company featured, promotes 'real food. For babies. Naturally tasty food, cooked from the best ingredients. Nothing strange, no shortcuts and no additives. Real food—since we cook food using the best ingredients, with no preservatives and no strange additives. For babies—since our food contains just the right amounts of nutrients, size of pieces and good taste that suit a developing baby' (74). Different parents use it different ways - habitually, occasionally, to reassure themselves regarding 'expert' advice on type and texture of early solid foods, when outside the home, when the baby refuses other food, and so on. And although a residual sense exists that homemade food is somehow better, thinking adapts: ‘My advice’, says one respondent, 'is not to fuss. If you do not want to make a lot of food yourself, it is OK to buy ready-made. You should not feel shame for buying everything ready-made and not cooking yourself’ (73). Once normalized in this way, commercial baby food, where relevant, fits easily into daily routines and time management, and is accepted as 'convenient'. In short: 'Commercial baby food offers a material arrangement of food provisioning, cooking and feeding that supports convenient and morally appropriate ways of acting' (84); and 'conveniencization of infant feeding implies a shift where skills and knowledge regarding, for example, nutrition, meal composition and cooking, as well as the handling of parental concerns, are relocated from the consumption domain to commercial service-providers' (87).
The following chapter, on 'temporalities', links these considerations to 'the growth of female participation in the labour force,
the socio-technical changes associated with the development of the ‘cold-chain’ in food manufacture and the growing use of domestic refrigeration and microwave cooking' (89), before going on to address changing generational attitudes to food, and 'changes over the life course' in which food habits may change (as with young single men and the elderly living alone). Overall, the focus is on what Alan Warde (a central figure in this literature) has called 'the intransigent problems of scheduling in an increasingly de-routinized society' (90). In the original article from which this reference is taken, he goes beyond the increase in female participation in the labour market to identify the more general fragmentation of labour time and its implications for household management:
'The existence of "convenience food'' symbolises a new stage in the development of space-time ordering. The reason for its increasing and widespread usage is not so much a function of people wanting or liking it, but as a response to a particular configuration of problems in the temporal organization of daily life. Many people are constrained, in the face of more pressing social obligations, to eat convenience foods as a provisional response to intransigent problems of scheduling in a de-routinised society. Processing food through hypermodern convenience devices is required because there is a tendency for too many people to be too often in the wrong place' (Warde, 1999: 526).
Here the focus is on individual and household strategies of 'time-shifting' rather than 'time-saving', in a context in which the greater flexibilisation and informalisation of work routines makes coordination more difficult, and it applies not only to cooking, but also to shopping and eating. The following chapter turns its attention to the phenomenon of 'retail distribution, food preparation and eating taking up ever wider spaces as supply chains have becoming increasingly globalized and food consumers have become increasingly disconnected from places of agricultural production' (117). In other words, it addresses the global supply lines of convenience food (mainly through the issue of the awareness or lack of it of provenance and food miles), along with a principal focus on 'industrial' production in the workplace, and passing reference to the increasing tendency for food to be consumed outside the home, and 'on the move'. The initial context here is the Fordist organisation of production. Ulrike Thoms (2009: 131) is cited (122) as arguing that ‘canteens did not evolve out of collective action but were created by factory owners, their costs calculated as an investment in the creation of healthy and strong workers, their bodies interpreted as machines that needed the right fuel in sufficient quantities to work properly’. Cooking on such an industrial scale, especially from scratch, involves technology and equipment not usually available in domestic kitchens, such as blast chillers, convection ovens or conveyor dishwashers (128), along with a relatively advanced division of labour; and the calculation made here is that 8 to 10 million meals are served in German canteens every day (131).
The authors then turn, in what are the most thought-provoking chapters in the book, to the 'moralization' of convenience foods, and 'cooking and convenience'. The first of these is understood as the 'process through which preferences are converted into moral values, both in individual lives and at the level of culture (137). It takes as its starting point the suggestion that: ‘To cook a proper dinner for one’s family is an important part of a woman’s understanding of her own identity and an implicit part of realizing the ideal family and the ideal home’ (Bugge and Almås, 2006: 210, cited p. 138), but ranges across the practices of households of a variety of kinds, including single men, retired couples and single mothers. Challenging arguments along the lines that resort to convenience foods reflects 'a lack of knowledge about foods and their properties, an absence of the skills required to cook and care for oneself or one’s family, and an inability to transfer such knowledge to future generations', it makes the counter-argument that 'the use of convenience food can be justified as an expression of care for family members as well as distant others' (139). As Katherine Turner shows for 1920s Boston, the history of surveillance and condemnation of working class women who resort to such products as shop-bought pies and other baked goods is a long one (Turner, 2006, cited 142); Jamie Oliver pops up as a contemporary example. In response to such opinions, 'advertisers sought to reframe convenience foods as vehicles through which women might successfully mobilize a discourse of love or care' (144), presenting them not as superior to home cooking, but as part of a continuum that made for versatility, flexibility, readiness for contingencies, and so on. The authors find that such perceptions, reinforced by the material pressures that households face, are widely reflected among consumers. So 'for many of our participants from across a range of social and economic backgrounds, convenience food was articulated as a vehicle through which care could be expressed; for example, by enabling them to accommodate the needs and preferences of different family members, to demonstrate thrift and economy in managing financial resources, or to help avoid food waste and consume more sustainably' (147) - or they add later, as part of 'self-care', or to spend more 'quality time' with family members (154). The ethics of provisioning as household practices shift over time (see also Meah and Jackson, 2013) to incorporate convenience food as a positive resource, while self-deprecating humour is used to ward off residual feelings that its use is a dereliction of duty to oneself or others. Whether one sees this as reflecting success in corporate advertising strategies, the tendency for ideas to adapt to material circumstances, or simply ways of coping, the relevance to the question of how households adapt 'smoothly' to varied pressures in ways that further the advance of capital into the domestic sphere is clear.
Following the same theme, the chapter on cooking and convenience takes up the claim that there has been a decline in cooking skills associated with the increased availability of convenience food. Its principal focus is on meal boxes in Denmark (think Hello Fresh! for the UK - 'Cook seasonal, fresh food from scratch, in the comfort of your kitchen' - other ready-to-cook boxes are available). First, what counts as 'cooking from scratch' and where convenience food kicks in (shop-bought bread, butter, cheese, canned goods, dried pasta and suchlike have long been normalized as 'staples') changes over time; second, new technology and products require new skills, and all along the spectrum from convenience to cooking from scratch particular meals require forethought, planning, shopping, timing, adaptation, and so on. Use of a meal box service requires forward planning and use of the internet; it can enhance cooking skills, as new dishes supported by recipe cards widen the repertoire of cooks who may habitually stick to a fairly limited range of dishes; and by the same token it makes, for the most part, for a healthy and varied diet. At the same time, it reflects a relatively advanced division of social labour, as ingredients are prepared on an industrial scale and delivered to individual private kitchens where the final production of the meal takes place.
As noted, this book was not written as a contribution to social reproduction theory. In fact, the project on which it was based aimed to answer four questions: how ‘convenience food’ is understood by consumers and how its use relates to understandings of ‘healthy eating’ and environmental sustainability; with what specific practices (shopping, cooking, eating, disposing) convenience food is associated; how such foods are incorporated within different household contexts and domestic routines; and to what extent current practices are subject to change (towards more sustainable and healthier practices)' (221). The final substantive chapter, on sustainability and health, suggests that consumers do think about these issues, but not very much. Overall, the conclusions are clear and convincing: the strategy of shifting the focus to practices and processes through which particular kinds of food provide different kinds of convenience for consumers in different circumstances, implemented through the selection of four contrasting types of convenient food across four countries produces a rich composite picture. They find that 'most households combine different kinds of food and different methods of food preparation to varying degrees in their everyday lives'; practices are convenient if they help time-pressed consumers struggling to synchronise domestic schedules within busy modern households (223); and they are not associated with a decline in cooking skills and culinary competence, but rather reflect a range of relevant skills (225). Convenience food is varied in character, integrated into household routines, and thoroughly normalized.
When you look at this material from the perspective of social reproduction, and especially with the idea in mind that capital accepts no limits, a number of points stand out. First, individual capitals seeking to find new products that will replace areas of non-capitalist production, find rick pickings in the broad field of convenience food. Second, this in turn facilitates increased entry to the labour market (for women in particular) and the introduction of 'flexible' and fragmented patterns of work. Complex chains of reaction result, in a manner that is apparently 'spontaneous'. At the same time, as more women go out to work, men do not take up the slack by increasing their participation in housework. On the evidence here, 'convenience' products make it possible for women to 'manage' a double role, exactly as described by Marx in Capital (Vol. 1, Penguin, 1976, ft. 39, p. 518). Third, looking across the range of examples here - baby food, ready meals, canteen meals, and meal boxes - and the range of household types considered, the picture that emerges is that consumers of all kinds, however poor, however burdened and however busy, uncomplainingly slot into a place in the varied regimes of daily maintenance - developing new skills, managing new processes, adapting their ideas to embrace new realities, engaging to some degree at least in new discourses around health and sustainability, and learning new eating patterns and habits that fit in with the changing world of work around them. In other words, the kitchen as much as the work place is a school for the neoliberal citizen.
References
Bentley, Amy. 2014. Inventing baby food: Taste, health, and the industrialization of the American diet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press (also see a nice 2012 lecture at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWJEuVcHYQ).
Benston, Margaret. [1969] 2109. 'The political economy of women's liberation', Monthly Review, 71, 4, 1-11.
Bugge, Annechen Bahr and Reidar Almås. 2006. 'Domestic dinner: Representations and practices of a proper meal among young suburban mothers, Journal of Consumer Culture, 6, 203–228.
Ferguson, Susan, Genevieve LeBaron, Angela Dimitrakaki and Sara R. Farris. 2016. 'Introduction', Special Issue on Social Reproduction, Historical Materialism, 24, 2, 25-37.
Meah, Angela, and Peter Jackson. 2013. 'Crowded kitchens: The "democratisation" of domesticity?', Gender, Place and Culture, 20, 5, 578–596.
Schatzki, Theodore R. 1996. Social practices: A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Szabo, Michelle. 2011. The challenges of ‘re-engaging with food’: Connecting employment, household patterns and gender relations to convenience food consumption in North America, Food, Culture and Society, 14, 547–566.
Thoms, Ulrika. 2009. Physical reproduction, eating culture and communication at the workplace: The case of industrial canteens in Germany 1850–1950, Food & History, 7, 2, 119–153.
Turner, Katherine L. 2006. 'Buying, not cooking', Food, Culture and Society, 9, 1, 13–39.
Warde, Alan. 1999. 'Convenience food: Space and timing', British Food Journal, 101, 7, 518–527.