Exploring food choice as social practice :
appreciating the context of family feeding in Kahnawake, Québec, Canada

Models of individual-behaviour currently represent the dominant understanding of food choice in public health nutrition. This model frames food choice as a dietary intake behaviour rationally decided by individuals in response to multiple personal and environmental determinants. While useful in describing determinants of individual dietary behaviours, the model cannot explain food choice as a social process shaped in relation to  people and places associated with diverse contexts. This thesis presents the Food Choice Practice Framework to explore food choices as social phenomena. Using the concept of social practice, food choice is proposed as an interplay of social structure and agency. The framework provides a means for identifying food choices as activities patterned among, and constituting, day to day life. It furnishes concepts to identify how social structures reinforce routinized food choice activities. Social structure is examined using Giddens' notions of rules and resources and operationalized as: shared systems of meanings, social norms, material resources, and authoritative resources that enable or constrain desired food choices. The empirical work from two studies supports the proposition that food choices are social practices. The first study in the thesis examines food choice practices in families. We identified food choices as five distinct routinized activities integrated among the usual feeding activities of 20 families with young children. The second study elaborated the rules and resources of food choice practices from the study families. We then analyzed how rules and resources could explain both enabled and constrained food choice practices experienced by families in the specific routine of creating regular meals and snacks. Adequate allocative and authoritative resources helped explain enabled routine food choice practices, while challenges could be understood as coming about through limited resources. Rules could constrain or enable food choice practices through sanctioning norms and meanings associated with creating meals. The empirical work supports understanding food choices as routinized activities that are socially structured and which characterize families. According to Giddens' structuration theory routinized practices that endure through time form social institutions. Therefore routinized food choice practices shape characteristic styles of eating patterns in families, as well as contribute to the constitution of families themselves. This understanding identifies new directions for the way food choice is conceptualized in public health. Health Promotion programs designed to improve nutrition are key strategies for the prevention of chronic disease and improvement of population health. Food choices can be approached as shared activities that describe social groups, and explained as socially structured by rules and resources present in the contexts of food choice practice.

Keyphrases: nutrition, structure sociale-agence, Giddens, routines, health promotion, nutrition, family food practices, social structure-agency, Giddens, social practice, routines, social context, food choice, public health