'Women, men and children queuing for food during post-war rationing'

Families and Food

Methodological innovations for studying habitual practices

The Family and food project aimed to advance knowledge about how to research the 'disconnect' between behaviour and constructed meanings in habitual food practices. The project did this by exploring the usefulness of narrative methods in food research and through the analysis of archival data of different types, for example diary data and visual data. By focusing on three existing datasets, the study aimed to examine both the cultural meanings of food in particular contexts at particular historical moments and the methodological issues involved in the analysis of secondary narrative data from different sources.

A number of methodological questions were addressed, including:

• What archival material is available for the analysis of family food practices?
• Which methods have been used in the analysis of archival data and how can these be developed?
• How do cultural and/or historical distance and proximity affect the interpretation of these data?
• How can we contextualise and integrate these analyses with other data?
• What stories are we able to find and construct about family food practices?
• What place does food occupy in people's narratives of their lives for different audiences?
• What tales can and do we tell about our fieldwork practices?

Publications and outputs can be found here