Everyday Food Practices : Commercialisation and Consumption in the Periphery of the Global North (Anthropology of Well-being: Individual, Community, Society)

In Everyday Food Practices, Tarunna Sebastian explores the teaching and learning dimensions of people’s food choices and practices as they are played out in their everyday lives and local community. Using multi-sited critical ethnographic methodology, Sebastian followed people on their journeys while planning, shopping, preparing, cooking, and eating food. These journeys reveal that supermarket corporations play a hegemonic role, creating and sustaining class-based diets and cultural dynamics which undermine individual agency. Rebuking corporate hegemony, food education at counter-cultural sites—such as farmers’ markets, food cooperatives, and community gardens—seeks to empower people with knowledge and skills derived from socially and environmentally sustainable food curricula. However, class and ethnicity-based patterns of engagement compromise learning at these sites. Sebastian argues that, by contrast, the embodied experiences of inter-generational, home-based food practices are more effective in teaching sustainable cooking skills and the production of healthy meals.