Food Social Practices

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DOI: 10.1177/1469540512456919

2012 12: 306Journal of Consumer Culture Lorenzo Domaneschi

qualityFood social practices: Theory of practice and the new battlefield of food

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Article

Food social practices:Theory of practice andthe new battlefield of food qualityLorenzo DomaneschiUniversity of Milan-Bicocca, Italy

AbstractGiven the growing transitional character of food, on its way from farm to fork, a risingnumber of people and institutions affect what we eat, governing how food is produced,consumed and distributed day-to-day. The sociological response to these transform-ations lead to a conceptualization of food as a dynamic field, crucial to the understand-ing of how we negotiate production and consumption as specific and meaningful sets of activities. In this article, I suggest applying the recent conceptualization of practicetheory in order to understand the increasing complexity of food issues. I start by

illustrating some basic sociological works on consumption of food quality, then I presentthe main outcome of a qualitative research study about the commercial cooking in aNorthern Italian city. The issue of food quality and the effects of its social constructionon consumers habits are eventually discussed.

Keywordsfood quality, identity, material culture, practice theory, sociology of food

IntroductionBack in 1995, in a far-seeing paper, Ferguson and Zukin posed a rhetorical ques-tion about the absence of a sociological paradigm to analyse food, hitherto a subject considered only by anthropologists, historians or psychologists. They alsoreminded us how the transitional character of such a topic, moving from theraw to the cooked, from the eye to the mouth, from the bare minimum necessaryfor survival to egregiously conspicuous consumption (1995: 196) probably made iteven more difficult for the sociological community to address such a subject.

Corresponding author:Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan-Bicocca, Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, 8,20126 Milan, Italy.Email: [email protected]

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Fifteen years later, we can easily understand the growing transitional character of food, as on its way from farm to fork it changes hands many times, often crossingcontinents. In fact, an increasing number of people and institutions affect what weeat, governing how food is produced, consumed and distributed day-to-day. Yet,while long-standing actors such as the largest food retailers gain more and morepower, new actors from civil society such as consumer associations show resistanceto such trends, promoting community control over food and farming. The socio-logical reaction to these social transformations maybe doesnt accomplish whatFerguson and Zukin wanted, but it has certainly made its way to a conceptualiza-tion of food as a dynamic eld, crucial to the understanding of how we negotiateproduction and consumption as specic and meaningful sets of activities (Warde,1997; Ashley et al., 2004). However, most researchers involved in this still-under-construction sociological work about food continue to emphasize the eco-nomic power of major institutional actors such as transnational corporations or,when they happen to mention culture, it is often just in relation to consumers. Thistrend has eventually caused the discipline to split into two different scienticarenas a sociology of food and a rural sociology separating the knowingfood issue from the growing food one (Goodman and DuPuis, 2002).

This article aims to deal with recent literature about the most fruitful efforts toovercome this dichotomy (Murcott and Campbell, 2004; Morgan et al., 2006),going beyond the explanations that look either at the economic institutional

forces or the reexive consumers. After a brief review of the most recent contribu-tions that have tried this route, the article will present the so-called practice turn incontemporary theory (Schatzki et al., 2001; Reckwitz, 2002) and its possible andprotable sociological application to the eld of food studies (Halkier et al., 2011).Then, in order to critically build the argument, a short discussion of an empiricalapplication to a specic national case will be offered, questioning the value of practice theory when researching the production of (food) quality in the particularcase of commercial cooking.

The practice turn in contemporary food studiesIn order to overcome the dichotomy between agro-food theory and the sociologyof food, scholars recently started to consider the opportunity to investigate pro-duction and consumption of food within the same framework (Murcott andCampbell, 2004). A diffuse theoretical and mostly empirical discontent grew, infact, because the sociology of food couldnt account for most institutionalchanges in global corporate power in the food industry, while the agro-foodtheory soon understood how both the commodity system and corporate industry

couldnt be analysed outside the networks of meaning and micro-moralities withinwhich they are embedded (Phillips, 2006). Since then, there have been a signicantnumber of theoretical endeavours to ll this gap (Morgan et al., 2006). Althoughthe literature is quite composite, it may be useful to sketch here three differentsolutions proposed in the past decades.

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A rst very much discussed attempt to reconnect production and consumptionin the eld of food is generally imputed to Fine and his colleagues (Fine et al. 1996)who presented the theory of System of Provisions, according to which verticalstructuring in food production and horizontal relationships in food consumptionshould be factored in as they are necessarily built up reciprocally. Despite one of the standpoints of this conceptualization indeed being the connection betweenmeanings attributed to foodstuff and its organic peculiarity, most critics concen-trate on the lack of consideration for the materiality of food, and propose a secondway out to the productionconsumption debate. In fact, drawing on Actor Network theory and other contributions to sociology of science (Latour, 2005),Goodman and his colleagues (Goodman and Watts, 1997) argue for an integratedapproach to overcoming the dichotomy between nature and culture, where materi-ality and human agency work symmetrically for the construction of socially differ-entiated food-networks of producers and consumers. In this theory, a multiplicityof actors are mobilized, with multiple interrelated rationalities. Finally, a thirdframework of analysis, Convention theory has been applied to the food sector(Morgan et al., 2006). Closely allied to ActorNetwork theory and relying onpolitical and moral studies (Boltanski, Thevenot, 1991) it shares with this perspec-tive the assumption of a mutual agreement among participants (producers andconsumers) in creating networks of coordination as opposed to the simple impos-ition of a dominant party. This coordination is intended to give rise to conven-

tions supported by formal and informal institutional forms, which bind actstogether and x mutual expectations (Salais and Storper, 1992).

All in all, those three attempts to investigate the food sector illustrate respect-ively an economic-driven perspective (System of Provision), a science-driven one(ActorNetwork theory) and a politics-driven one (Convention theory). In spite of their quite obvious differences, Id like to focus now on what they actually have incommon. A couple of issues, in fact, reappear constantly in this debate as the mainarguments at stake:

1. The encounter between human and non-human and the relational position-ality between the two, which entails the so-called process of embodiment asmuch as the different social valorizations attributed to the two.

2. The governance of different mobilizations of resources, notwithstandingwhether this governance comes back to either systems, networks or conventions.This leads to mapping the power relations that address how foodstuff andhumans mobilized thorough the agro-food network end up in a consumersbody and mind.

In this light, the quite recent examination of a practice turn in contemporarytheory (Schatzki et al., 2001; Reckwitz, 2002) seems to perfectly answer the ques-tion of how to explicitly keep the previous two issues together in the same frame-work. Variously nuanced, the notion of practice portrays action as an ongoingembodied and situated social process, which is inevitably confronted with the

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temporality and spatiality of social experience, networks and structures. Moreover,a model of practice appears to be particularly useful for studying economic pro-cesses and especially economic agency not just without relying on the primacy of individual rational choice (Sassatelli, 2007; Warde, 2005) but mostly because itmanages to highlight the political effects of identity building (Trentmann, 2007).As Reckwitz put it, since a practice is [ . . .] a routinized way in which bodies aremoved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the worldis understood (2002: 250), the relational link between human and non-humanstands for a crucial concern in a theory such as this (Pickering, 2001). At the sametime, whereas social agents are considered to be carriers of practices the individ-ual being merely the intersection point of many practices him-/herself they arerather a consequence of the nature of the social organization of practices (Warde,2005). The question of how agents are positioned within a practice and, in addition,how the latter is positioned itself across a broad range of practices become a secondcrucial issue of the theory. In the present case, then, these two issues will bring us toconsider the cooking practice both inside the kitchen, where the manipulation of foodstuff is crucial, and outside the kitchen, where the representation of foodstuff isequally essential.

Finally, I suggest that food social practices could be a crucial device in order tosociologically investigate the food sector considering both the human and non-human relationality and the governance of different mobilization of resources as

two sides of the same empirical phenomenon.

Food quality as a field of social practicesAs illustrated above, the recent sociological literature on food issues has tended tosolve the complex transitional character of food recalled by Ferguson and Zukin(1995) by joining production and consumption matters in the same theoreticalframework. The general idea is that relationships from both these two sides of the food sector are inextricably intertwined in the process of food valorization

and they simply cant be investigated separately. Now what is signicant is that thisvalorization is increasingly taking the shape of a process of qualication, wherequality become a category to evaluate competing systems for the delivery of food aswell as new procedures for guaranteeing food standards and different criteria forselecting and judging foodstuff used by consumers (Harvey et al., 2004). Therefore,quality should be treated as something made, not given, whereby there is a set of competing forces, emerging from the products themselves and from the socialcharacteristics of the persons pronouncing judgments, from which a particularvalue called quality can be constructed (Harvey et al., 2004).

Such a process of qualication, then, can be investigated according to twodifferent analytical dimensions. First, it should imply a eld of mutual positioningof human subjects and non-human objects and materials involved in the process.Second, according to a dynamic perspective of the same eld of positions, it shouldimply the competing forces that are at stake in order to rule the process.

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Hence, food quality as a (battle)eld of social practices consists in a given coord-ination of human and non-human resources in a particular place and time that is opento a change according to the mobilization of such resources due to the power relationsthat emerge from this coordination .

Food quality is then considered a by-product of particular social practicesas long as it coincides with a particular positionality within a social eld of institutionalized standards that the practices of food production and consump-tion themselves contribute to xing, each according to different power rela-tions. In this light, the social denition of food quality emerges empiricallyfrom a process of transformation of a bunch of material qualities of food(biological, organic, etc.) into a unique symbolic value named quality . Of course, the same process could happen retroactively, when a legitimate den-ition of quality assigns centrality back to a bunch of material qualities. Forexample, the specic case of pizza napoletana verace, which quite recentlybecame part of a food quality scheme (Traditional Speciality Guaranteed)translates the exact dimensions of the disc-shaped dough into an essentialfeature of quality, in the same way as the quality scheme of the mozzarelladi bufala (Protected Designation of Origin) converts the specic attribute of the fresh milk into a universal sign of quality itself.

Such a theorization of food quality marks a difference from most classical socio-logical approaches to food, interested either in nal consumers (Lupton, 1996;

Gronow, 2004) or dedicated to agro-business (Arce and Mardsen, 1995;Winter, 2003). In fact, it focus rather on the ways in which different subjects orobjects (as suggested by ActorNetwork theory) in different elds of practicescompete for the authority (as highlighted by Convention theory) of dening theiractual character. The outcome of this process of institutionalization of a differen-tiated eld of practices of production and consumption of food is, then, toempower and disempower particular sets of resources, considered a mixture of human and non-human assets.

Now, in order to show how to accomplish such an analysis, I present a case

study on commercial cooking in Italy, as a particular food social practice, takenfrom an empirical research project into Italian commercial cuisine and the relativeinstitutionalization of a territorial version of food quality. 1 The purpose of carry-ing out this research was to particularly examine the effects of the mobilization of sets of resources from production to consumption and vice versa starting from thesocial practice of commercial cooking, in order to interpret how every chef pos-itions themselves in the eld, not only among the others professionals, but espe-cially with regard to non-human assets.

According to many practice theorists (Reckwitz, 2002), cooking is just one of the

so called integrative practices, the more complex practices found in and consti-tutive of particular domains of social life (Schatzki, 1996: 98). These are distin-guished from dispersed practices, including describing, explaining, questioning,reporting, examining and imagining (1996: 91), that can take place within andacross different domains or subelds. In other words, cooking as a professional




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practice can only take place inside a professional kitchen of any kind of commercialactivity. Therefore, it is rst necessary to illustrate the structure of this particulardomain inside which commercial cooking takes place. This illustration coincidesindeed with the display of the mutual positioning of human and non-human resources highlighted above. Then, it becomes possible to investigate thedynamic of the same particular domain, looking for the power relations featuringthe eld.

A case-study of a territorial version of food quality in anorthern Italian city

In order to rst give the heuristic dimension to the eld of power where the culinarypractice analysed is situated, I must start from the historical trajectory of the elditself. I chose to study the gastronomic eld of a particular northern urban centre inItaly because it illustrates the empirical pattern of the broader national eld as awhole (Benporat, 1999; Capatti and Montanari, 2005). The socio-historical ana-lysis of the progressive institutionalization of the Italian gastronomic eld presents,in fact, a couple of interesting features, especially when compared to the Frenchand the American contexts.

In the case of French gastronomic eld, many researchers have already shown

how commercial cooking led to a shared denition of food quality later known asnouvelle cuisine (Rao et al. 2003) on the basis of a national-oriented market andthe hegemony of the pre-revolutionary cuisine resulting from the central politicalinuence of the Parisian court (Boudan, 2004; Ferguson, 2004). By contrast, thelack of a comparable national political situation coupled with the commercial pri-macy given to the trade between different county towns contributed to the Italiangastronomic eld being structured in a very different way, on a regional if noturban basis (Capatti and Montanari, 2005). Accordingly, the actual structure of the food supply-side is still mostly based on small businesses with a low rate of

capital-intensive production (ISMEA Report, 2009), where innovation still relieson highly human-embodied competences.Such structural features of the eld and the relative orientation they entail

towards investments in local raw materials can be discovered as well in thecharacter of the professionals who inhabit such a eld. Therefore, followingFines ethnography of restaurant work (1996) in a US second-tier metropol-itan area, the research focused on a similar urban context in northern Italy, 2

in order to capture a sample of cooks that are sociologically interesting [just]because they are not elite artists (Fine, 1996: 16). In this case, they are

supposed to build up quality standards within their job practice and basicallywithout any given formal tradition from schools or disseminated by authori-tative media criticism. Although, unlike the case of the American gastronomiceld accurately examined by Ferguson and Zukin (1998), where nancial andsymbolic investments in schools and gastronomic criticism indeed played a

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signicant role in the denition of an American commercial cooking practice,in the Italian case neither of these institutional resources have actually beenimplemented. Until recently, in fact, the majority of schools where cooks aretrained as semi-qualied workers and the national media that only invested ingastronomic criticism as a marginal part of their editorial mission left a blankspace for the construction of quality standards in commercial cooking thatcould only be lled by the domestic memories and the embodied experienceof each individual cook. Accordingly, despite the growth of expenditure oneating out, the demand-side still presents one of the highest rates of foodconsumption at home in the EU area (ISMEA Report, 2009).

From this point of view, the situation of the subjects that I interviewed seemednot very different from their American colleagues, analysed by Gary Fine (1996) orby Ferguson and Zukin (1998) in the case of New York. However, there is animportant difference in the case Im discussing: while in the American context theemployment of institutionalized economic and cultural resources (for example, theopening of schools of cooking, following the French pattern) has made possible rst of all politically the development of an American culinary practice(Ferguson and Zukin, 1998), in the Italian case completely different means interms of resources and constraints have eventually led to a similar process. Froma close examination of my interviews, it is quite clear that it is a specic combin-ation of embodied cultural capital in terms of family origins and social capital

in terms of reciprocal trust with their employees support and stabilize the practicesof quality in the gastronomic eld.

As I am interested in the analysis of the production of food quality through thelens of culinary practice, I shall focus on the reconstruction of the particu-lar starting point usually described by chefs as crucial in the history of theircareers. The rst of the following extracts 3 is taken from the story of a cookwhose family, for more than 20 years, has kept working in a small valley in theurban hinterland:

The very beginning was twenty years ago . . . [. . .] the choice was perhaps . . . not reallybalanced . . . the idea was to do something innovative at that time, but always linked tothat . . . that was a bit of our history . . . [. . .] to be sure, it has remained [a lot] of thatperiod and of that experience, in us, in some particular way, because our parentsdenitely have continued to help us for some years since then . . . So about that experi-ence what remains for sure is a very strong bond with the local agriculture and with our farmers, right the farmers of our valley . . . (Family Cook 2, Outback)

In cases like this, although the reference to the cooks family as a central starting

point is presented here as a natural part of the local environment, nevertheless theparticular connection between agricultural production and the gastronomic supplyis clearly highlighted, a specic connection that could be provided only by his ownrestaurant, properly designed to be the material version of such a symbolicconnection.




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In other cases, however, it is just the cooks family and his relative diningexperience that can be regarded as the main reference where the origin and motiv-ation of his career is located:

well . . . to my family, the practice of cooking has always been important . . . in the sensethat eating at home was the moment when you were all together . . . and then, both lunchand dinner . . . all together . . . we were a family of seven persons with grandparents, andsoit was animportant time thatone whenwesit at the table . . . myauntwas always homeand cooked, my mum had the shop, so . . . I spent so much time with my aunt . . . and itsbeen just then that it started this passion seeing her cooking every day, and very actualregional cuisine, most of the time . . . (Restaurateur Cook 3, City Centre)

Finally, it is not only the geographical position between hinterland and city centre,but also the kind of biographical path accumulated and tied in a particular site,situation or a group of people, that makes a difference in the various stories of those chefs. From the rst point of view, for those who have a personal trajectorystrongly linked to a specic location, the culinary practice is mostly described bylinking the criteria of quality to the characteristics of their own territory, which isrepresented, at the same time, as both the instrument and the ultimate goal of thecooking practice:

the soul of our cuisine is . . . well . . . when I was a kid, I used to go . . . I mean, I didntwork in a restaurant . . . but I used to go hunting for mushrooms, just like I actuallydid this morning . . . I used to go in the wood and all of a sudden a particular smellcame out from a chestnut grove immediately after the rain . . . or the tiny inklingof . . . undergrowth, or even the mushroom reek that usually came out . . . well . . . sucha sensation, such particular light breeze last since I was a boy . . . or maybe the smell Ifelt when I squeezed a grape of vermentino wine, from our soil . . . that I could feel thefragrance . . . I mean . . . I still do it, 40 years later . . . and I try to let feeling the samesmell and fragrances in my restaurant . . . in my dishes . . . thats what I call the

soul . . . of my territory . . .denitely . . .without that, nothing would make sense tome [. . .]. (Commercial Cook 1, Male, Outback)

As one can see, at this point in the story a particular emphasis on scents, smells andthe ability to directly manipulate the fruits of the land emerges: in this case, thiskind of cook is in the position of being able to spend these resource s, emphasizingolfactory and tactile component of the food.

Here, the ethnographic eldwork may help to illustrate this very crucial per-spective on the manipulation of foodstuff. As Fine noted, certainly every kitchen

has its share of distinct smells, touches, sounds and tastes (1996: 239); neverthe-less, during my eldwork, I could well understand how there was something moreabout smell and touch for the cooks I followed in their work. Two different cooks,working in two different kind of kitchens, share, in fact, a specic value assigned,respectively, to the tactile and olfactory aspect of the cooking practice.

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Excerpt 1 - (Family Cook 2, Male, Outback)M, Assistant Cook; L, Head Cook

[Three hours before the dinner, L and M are preparing the line, cutting vegetables andmaking sauces and avourings. Im looking around the kitchen, standing betweenthem while L is explaining the kind of customers they usually serve.] While L is talkingto me, I start looking at his hands involved in what seems to be a very complex job: heis manipulating some stuffing he has just prepared in order to make some sh balls. Ifollow the process while he goes on telling me some story about a noisy customer; hestarts picking a very small piece of stuffing from a bowl, putting it in his left hand androlling it until he come out with a perfect micro-sphere. After he completed aboutthirty sh balls in less than three minutes, I interrupt him asking: How can you besure theyre not going to split up when youre frying them? He seems to think aboutmy (weird?) question, then tells me: They never did, its all about the way you rollthem. I guess I roll them just like my mother used to do, so they never split up oranything. Then he starts rolling again and tells me: In fact, I mean . . . its alwaysabout raw materials, of course, but this is the only place you can nd this kind of rolling, my friend . . ..

Excerpt 2 - (Restaurateur Cook 3, Male, City Centre)A, Head Cook

[Early in the morning, Im with A who let me follow him during his shopping ses-sion at a farmers market in the city centre.] When we approach a stand with alot of colourful vegetables Im about to stop, thinking he is going to have a lookat such a wonderful collection of veggies; but he keeps walking until he reaches avery small stand, apparently not at all tempting. He smiles gently at the owner

who immediately suggests three different kinds of green salads to him: accordinglyhe starts smelling one after another for almost three minutes, eventually pickingone. Once we leave, I cant help but ask him I thought you would have pickedthe good-looking vegetables, they would have looked amazing once in the dish,wouldnt they? He looks at me, quite disappointed, and answers: Well, I only trustmy sense of smell. Thats it. I wonder if a beet will smell like it should, when I pickit . . . Im not a photographer, Im a cook: my taste and my smell are my whole cook-ing, eventually.

In this way, they explicitly position themselves on the opposite side to the stan-dardized media discourse focused on the visual component. 4 At the same time,once they move away from the logic of large-scale production with a good distancebetween raw materials and manufacturing processes, those cooks bring into playtheir ability to present themselves as manipulators of original scents and smells,




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a specic skill where food cultivation and food preparation become closer andcloser to each other.

This originality can come from the environment in which the cook develops but,in different ways, it can also be derived from the routines of the cooks domesticcuisine, as described by this restaurateur-cook from the city centre:

[the decision about how to prepare a dish] also depends on the mood . . . a year ago, forexample, I prepared a ne dessert that I still have on the menu now . . . it was a sweetrose syrup that helped me to remember my parents one . . . in fact, they ran a very oldgrocery store, here in Genoa, a long time ago . . . and I grew up amid drugs and spicesand all of these things, right? . . . also a lot of people used to come to buy from my dadand my grandfather . . . and my dad personally did the rose syrup . . . [. . .] thenI thought about making a dessert starting from that syrup [ . . .]. (RestaurateurCook 3, City)

Again, these same scents, smells and tactile memories become the reference andmeasurement of the avour to be found in the practice of cooking. The same smellsand tactile memories will be those that the cooks intend as the ultimate ingredientto bring within their own cookery and the one in which they will eventually lookfor conrmation in the judgement of their customers:

so that for whoever happens to taste it [a particular dessert made with a local fruit],quite often, his judgement goes like this: it reminds me of when I was ababy . . . because [ . . .] these are sensations that take me back and so on . . .and I likethis . . . I mean . . . it sounds nice when a customer tells you he remembers his pastthanks to your dishes . . . mostly because its the exactly same sensation I feel whenI cook . . . often the same memories . . . (Commercial cook, Male, City Centre)

The ethnographic eldwork may help again to illustrate the specic relationshipbuilt between humans actors and artefacts inside such a particular outline of cook-

ing practice. Of course, cooks always prepare the meals through a substantial useof physical tools the positioning and accessibility of which in the surrounding havean important inuence on the structure and ongoing organization of the activityitself (Galatolo and Traverso, 2007). The following excerpt will show the particu-lar perspective those kind of cooks maintain about technological equipment andthe consequences of its participation in the social denition of quality.

Excerpt 3 - (Commercial Cook 1, Male, Outback)

R, Assistant Cook; G, Head Cook[Im in the kitchen with R and A, 20 minutes after the dinner has been served. We aredrinking some very good red wine, relaxing and talking freely. Im handling asiphon, playing with it.] R starts looking at me and the siphon, then he turns to

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G saying: I hate that crap, every time Ive got to deal with it . . . its just annoying . . ..I smile and wait for G to answer. He looks rst at R, then he looks at me, nallysaying: I dont like either that crap, man . . . its denitely not my idea of cooking todope food with air or whatever. I mean, I feel like cheating, you know . . . but its justlike with re or water . . . you need them to transform raw materials . . . you only needto be able to control all these elements, if you want not to be controlled by them, if youknow what I mean . . ..

Such an accent on both the symbolic and material investment of a class of subjects(here, commercial cooks in a present urban area) on a set of objects, materials andtechnologies (local raw materials, kitchen utensils and procedure seized on domes-tic competencies) and a relative shared concept of what cooking actually means(linked to the memories of a person or to a territory) eventually stand for a mutualpositioning within a practice of human and non-human resources, in the senseillustrated above.

All in all, this explains how the institutional context contributes to situate acultural practice such as cooking, precisely in the sense described by the concept of the eld power (Bourdieu, 1992). The specic structuring of the category of foodquality in the urban context discussed here allows us to nd a sort of reverse pathto the one described, for example, by Ferguson (2004) in his analysis of the eld of French gastronomy. The culinary practice studied comes from a complete reversal

of the social hierarchies of legitimacy operating in the French case. Instead of having schools and guides that are able to transform some cooks into chefs(Ferguson, 2004), it quite the opposite seems to happen in the Italian case. Here,we are witnessing a rather positive encoding of the rst term at the expense of thesecond, so that the very denition of quality is socially constructed symbolically(in the stories of subjects) and structurally (through institutional agencies), aroundthe same gure of the cook, considered to be a subject alternative to the logic of industrial cookery as much as to those of the French high-cuisine tradition.

In conclusion, the social denition of food quality has been fabricated together

with other social forces inside the gastronomic eld mixing the particular pro-fessional features of commercial cooks with the relative meaning assigned to somefoods over others, the social representations of restaurants, the particular technol-ogies to be used in food transformation and, last but not least, a particular set of consumer identities. All of these assets, nally, emerge and, at the same time, cometo be analytically decipherable within the same food social practice (Miller, 1998;Warde, 2005).

Made in Italy or taste in Italy? A discussionIn the previous discussion based on data from empirical research in a northernItalian urban area, I tried to show how food quality can be investigated startingfrom the same particular social practice of commercial cooking. In that case, aparticular territorial version of food quality emerged not only as a result of a




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specic agronomic reference or as a symbolic power exerted by a specic class of subjects, but rather more as a much more complex mobilization of ecological,institutional and biographical resources. Weve just seen above, how specicsmells coming from the terroir are presented as a sort of treasure transmittedfrom past family life and how they eventually become an institutional standardfor the denition of food quality, for example when embodied in food qualitycertication schemes or when embodied in the evaluations of food guidebooks.

Such quality, thus, becomes the object itself of commercial trade as illustrated inthe case of the work of cooks in restaurants. They appear specically involved ingathering together the different parts of the food production process as a guaranteeof quality itself for consumers. The following ethnographic excerpt about the prep-aration of a very traditional recipe called cappon magro seems to be a goodillustration of such an arrangement in commercial cooking practice.

Excerpt 4 - (Restaurateur Cook 3, Male, City Centre)A, Head Cook

[Its 6.10 in the morning, Im with A at the underground open-air sh market near thesea port. Hes waiting for a private sherman who apparently works as a sort of personal supplier to him arriving with a particular kind of sea bass and some craysh.]

While waiting, A tells me about the trick to choosing the best sh, but when his friendarrives A seems to just trust his supplier, never looking inside the bag. [Its 8.40 in themorning, Im with A at a very small kitchen garden near his wifes mother house,where hes looking for a bunch of vegetables.] While his mother-in-law is picking thevegetables, he keeps telling me about the features of vegetables freshness, but onceagain he doesnt even look at the bag. [Its 11.25, Im inside the kitchen, A is goingback and forth between the cookers and the knife apparently with a sort of rhythm.] Astarts putting together different ingredients in a plate, combining the cappon magro.He is using, almost at the same time, his hands, a couple of different knives, a small

pot with vegetables and every once in a while he checks the oven for another recipe heis preparing. Before I can ask him anything about this sophisticated coordination of movements and timing, he looks at me, saying: You see . . . the only secret to therecipe of the cappon magro is about the care of it . . . of course, only professionalscan really care about it . . . giving it the attention, the time and the precision itdeserves . . . I mean only professionals can care for every single ingredient from thecradle to the grave , if you know what I mean.

In this case, it becomes empirically visible how a specic mobilization of human

resources (choosing and trusting specic suppliers) and non-human assets(choosing and practicing the cooking instruments) from all the parts of the pro-duction activity is addressed towards a process of empowerment of their positionover other subjects in the food system , namely large-scale industry, on the one hand,and amateur cooks, on the other.

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The practices and the accounts of commercial cooks show how these subjects tendto highlight the olfactory and tactile dimensions of their practice over the visual oneson which the dominant discourse of the media is usually focused (Bell and Valentine,1997). At the same time, they try to take advantage by staying away from the capital-intensive production where raw materials and nished products are more and moreoutdistanced. Rather, they insist on their exclusively individual skill to provide acuisine where cultivation and cooking are factored into the same practice.

According to what we can see from the above analysis, the most signicantsocial product of culinary quality-oriented practice is to convey to the gure of the commercial cook and to his/her kitchen, his/her resources, his/her employees,etc. the greatest number of these different processes. 5 Along with this, it leads torepositioning the objects, places, technologies and subjects that are associated withthem. If in the industrial culinary practice, for example, these moments should bemore and more separated, located in different places and linked to different tech-nologies, some commercial cooks present themselves as capable of governing symbolically and structurally a number of these processes. In this way, theyhave secured themselves with the complicity of various institutional actors thatsupport the integration of this practice a sort of monopoly over the legitimateprocesses of qualifying foodstuff.

In other words, the capability to accumulate multiple processes becomes moreand more equivalent to the very social denition of quality itself in fact associated

increasingly with the expression from farm to fork.Consequently, while the contested notion of food quality is publicly encoded

with a strong attribution to territorial origin and then considered as a given set of resources that are exclusive possessions of a particular environment with specicagronomic features, the latter is rather often absent, as in the case examined above.The local version of the food quality is in fact much more understandable as theby-product of the acquired system of personal relations of trust built around thegure of the cook, derived, in turn, from a certain endowment of embodied culturalcapital sustained, again, by an emerging institutional framework.

When we observed or listened to the cooks, from the point of view of theirrestaurants, emphasizing the importance of recalibrating the whole productionchain on the culinary moment, as well as the relevance of a thorough knowledgeof how to handle or smell certain foods, clearly there was at the stake the possibilityof building a space for new consumers geometrically calibrated on their capabilitiesand skills.

The sociological analysis of food quality starting from commercial cooking as afood social practice allows us to focus on the ongoing process of opening andclosing of this particular domain to new resources, so that the eld of genres

and styles it produces the eld of quality is intended as a eld of social inclusionand exclusion: rst, of course, for consumers. Hence, to stay with my empiricalexample, many of the distinctions embodied in the subject of the cook can also befound in the provision policies and the marketing strategies, until they start to beembedded in job contracts and in food laws or food quality schemes, and become




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institutional standards to evaluate cultural investments in public and privateschools and economic investments in particular gastronomic genres. Finally, thesociological analysis of the practice of commercial cooking bring us to the socialreconstruction of a broader governance of food quality , addressed alongside theframe of territoriality and, nally, available, once again, as an institutional device for consumers to get used to the gastronomic social space .

Conclusion: De-humanizing (consumer) theoryThe routes by which food reaches many of us imply, as suggested, a meticulouslyorganized network of human and non-human resources. On its journey from farmto fork, food changes many hands, it often crosses many countries and it is increas-ingly subjected to screening to keep it safe during all its journeys. These newprocesses are re-shaping the power relations within the food system. This way tolook at the food sector seems then to concern two sides of the same coin: thehuman/non-human networks of social agents involved and the shifting balancein the governance of the food system. Both of these can be factored in the sametheoretical framework of food social practices .

In conclusion, the theory of social practice (Schatzki et al., 2001; Reckwitz,2002) helps food studies to move beyond such classical perspectives focused onfood as a cultural consumption object oriented for more or less reexive consumers

(Douglas and Isherwood, 1979; Appadurai, 1986; Cook and Crang, 1996) as well assuch theories that consider food as the product of a more or less capital-intensivesystem of provision (Fine et al., 1996; Salais and Storper, 1997). Rather, the socio-logical investigation of food social practices allows us, rst of all, to apply differentpossible theoretical aspects, from the sociology of science (Latour, 2005) to polit-ical sociology (Mardsen, 2000), to consumption studies (Warde, 2005). Second, thisframework would help to de-humanize theory (Pickering, 2001), so to speak, andparticularly (food) consumer theory, moving the focus from the individual to thesocial practices responsible for the production of (food) quality. Thats only pos-

sible as long as the social agent producer or consumer is never treated as theonly subject of the practices he/she accomplishes (Bourdieu, 1980; Schatzi et al.,2001); the consumer is rather only one of the multiple human and non-humancomponents of these practices.

AcknowledgementsWith grateful thanks to Enzo Colombo and Roberta Sassatelli for their insightful commentson earlier versions of this work. I also would like to thank both the referees for their helpfulcomments on a previous draft of this paper.

Notes1. In the case Im about to discuss the interviews are based on my broad PhD research

project carried out in a northern Italian city, drawing mostly on Bourdieus model of fieldanalysis (1992) in order to triangulate different methodologies. Ultimately, the research

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comprised a set of ethnographies in six restaurants, an historical reconstruction of thenational gastronomic field, a discourse analysis of media coverage on food issues and,finally, 42 in-depth interviews with key actors from both the urban and the national scale.

2. I quote here some passages from a larger body of interviews with a selection of com-mercial cooks so called because they carry out their activities in the kitchens of res-taurants in Genoa city centre, a medium urban centre in the north-west of the state, withabout 600,000 inhabitants. Their selection was justified by taking into account the spatialvariable (near/far from the city centre), the commercial variable (osteria/tavern/restaur-ant) and, finally, the organizational variable, distinguishing between restaurateur cooks(property owners or individual managers), employee cooks (bound by an employmentcontract with the property) and family cooks (owners or operators along with familymembers). The interviews aimed to trace the biographical and the professional trajectoryof the cooks in order to reconstruct the narrative presentation of culinary practice. Thefieldwork was conducted between September 2005 and January 2007, producing a total of 42 interviews, accompanied by some ethnographical sessions, aimed at urban cooks andexperts in the food sector (journalists, writers, critics, celebrity chefs) at national andregional level (Domaneschi, 2007).

3. The emphasis on the visual component in media representations of food which someeven describe as gastro-porn (Smart, 1994) is due to the particular interplay between themedia logic of making everything spectacular and the gastronomic logic of artifice (Belland Valentine, 1997).

4. See the analysis of some of the most important Italian food magazines in the researchmentioned above (Domaneschi, 2007).

5. It is worth noting here how the statistical prevalence of meals still consumed at homenationally does not in any way contradict the fabrication of quality illustrated above. Infact, the narrative and practical schemes made up by the cooks interviewed are strategic-ally addressed in order to draw on and work on the same consumer identities that areempowered by such a statistical tendency.

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Lorenzo Domaneschi is currently working as research fellow in sociology in theDepartment of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy.He has been involved in different national and international research projects deal-ing with cultural consumption and social identity transformations. He has pub-lished a number of research papers and essays on national and ethnic identity,citizenship and cross-cultural consumption.


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Food Social Practices