Foodwork while Living Alone

The main project I have been working on since starting my position at the University of Illinois investigates food practices in the context of living alone. Family foodwork is a common focus of academic, public, and policy attention aimed at improving the physical and mental health of populations and managing food insecurity. Yet, this focus leaves behind a rapidly growing and uniquely vulnerable group: people who live alone. 

People who live alone face particular cooking challenges and are at heightened risk for poor nutrition. They also face added risks to their mental health due to social isolation and stigmatization. At the same time, single-living people are still situated within families, and cultivate relationships and connect with others through food. This research 1) examines the impact of living alone on household food meanings and practices, 2) interrogates their implications for health, 3) assesses what role life course stages and social inequalities play in mediating these relationships, and 4) works to better understand the role food plays in social relationships and connectedness. Despite its many tragedies, the COVID-19 pandemic has offered opportunities to rethink both the role of cooking in our lives as well as the meaning of our relationships and how to cultivate them in isolated circumstances. This project works to illuminate the complex meanings of foodwork in isolation in ways that can help people in diverse circumstances cook and eat in ways that nourish their bodies and souls and help connect them to their families and communities.

This is a trans-disciplinary mixed-methods project that combines qualitative interviews, food diaries and photo-voice activities with a quantitative survey and discourse analyses of various media devoted to “cooking for one.” We also incorporate community-based participatory action components through the use of community asset mapping workshops. The project’s co-investigators – Drs. Brenna Ellison, Melissa Ocepek, and Melissa Pflugh Prescott ­– cross-cut information-sciences, nutrition, and agricultural economics. This project is currently in the data analysis stage. 

Family Foodwork

My dissertation, entitled Domestic Foodwork in Value and Practice: A Study of Food, Inequality and Health in Family Life, explored home-cooked family meals – the cultural ideals and expectations around them, as well as their navigation by diverse parents. Under the advisement of Drs. Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann and Melissa Milkie, I studied the relationships between discourses and practices surrounding family foodwork to understand how they both reflect and shape inequalities in a variety of realms including gendered labor, economic disparities, health outcomes, and consumer politics.

The first paper from this project, which is published in Social Problems and won the American Sociological Association Consumers and Consumption Section’s Graduate Student Paper Award, examines gendered and classed moralizing frameworks in news media that assign responsibility for unhealthy family meals as a social problem. The second paper, published in Gender & Society, locates the persistence of gender inequalities in home cooking within a cultural schema around learning to cook. I have also written about this paper on the Gender & Society Blog. My third paper, available in early view in Gender, Work & Organization, interrogates the relationship between labor and pleasure in foodwork, exploring how the emotional experience of this relationship reflects as well as transcends income inequalities and its intersections with gender and race. As a whole, the dissertation advances scholarly understanding of the ideals, meanings and emotions encompassing family foodwork, their embeddedness with social inequalities, and the opportunities they present for resistance and social change.

More recently, I have been building on this research in two ways. First, Dr. Priya Fielding-Singh and I have co-authored a review article in Sociology Compass arguing that mounting research in the sociology of foodwork is critical for advancing trans-disciplinary scholarship working to understand the causes and consequences of nutrition inequities. Second, I have explored public perceptions of family foodwork and food insecurity on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic had catastrophic impacts on almost all aspects of life, including food systems, while casting renewed light on our relationships with others and asking us to reconsider our responsibilities to our communities and society’s most vulnerable. I have studied how people conceive of these changes in online social media forums. In one article, published in Agriculture & Human Values, I examined how people framed hunger on Twitter during the early pandemic, and who they believed should be responsible for ending it. Through this, I build understanding around whether crisis conditions such as COVID-19 can shift longstanding societal narratives about hunger. In another article, published in the Journal of Family Communication, I analyzed how people framed the impacts of lockdown conditions on their family’s food practices, and in doing so, build clarification around how routines and rituals are conceptualized in the disciplines of Family Communication and Family Science.

The Cultural Politics of Meat Consumption

I have been working with Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann for many years on research for their SSHRC funded project that seeks to understand the ideas, beliefs and practices around meat consumption in North America in order to think about new possibilities for reducing meat consumption or consuming in more ethical and sustainable ways. The aims of this project are to show: (1) how meat consumption has been framed in the public sphere as a consumer good and a social problem; (2) how consumers perceive and make sense of the amount and kinds of meat they eat and how meat is embedded with particular values; and (3) the perspectives and motivations behind emerging alternatives to industrial meat. This is a mixed-methods project, drawing on a discourse and content analysis of news stories and advertisements about meat, qualitative analysis of individual and focus groups interviews with consumers and participants in alternative meat production, and quantitative analysis of a national-survey on meat consumption.

My interest in this project has been around examining why most consumers continue to eat meat despite rising concerns about the meat industry’s negative environmental, ethical, and health outcomes, as well as how consumers, states, and civil society are differentially drawn on to promote positive food system change under neoliberalism. One paper from this project, “Maintaining Meat: Cultural Repertoires and the Meat Paradox in a Diverse Socio-Cultural Context”, considers how cultural repertoires based in identity (gender and ethnicity) and liberty (consumer sovereignty and apathy) help people make sense of maintained meat-eating despite strong reasons for reduction. It is published in Sociological Forum. In another paper, we interrogate people’s prototypical thinking about meat eaters and vegetarians to show that while these prototypes reinforce binary perceptions of gender difference, they do so while allowing for important intersectional complexity. It is published in Poetics. We have also turned to our attention to producers, in an article in Sociologia Ruralis, to understand how producers view consumers’ role in the ethical meatscape and in doing so, interrogate the implications of consumer-driven models of food system change. One of the final pieces from this project is a book, co-authored with Josée, Shyon and Dr. Emily Kennedy, entitled Happy Meat: The Sadness and Joy of a Paradoxical Idea. In this book, we explore the complex emotional and moral undercurrents surrounding meat eating and the role that ‘happy meat’ plays in shaping them. The book is scheduled to be published in June 2025.

Immigration, Diaspora & Ethno-Racial Food Politics

At Illinois, I have been collaborating on a project, led by Dr. Mina Raj, that works towards two goals: 1) examining the role that food plays in family caregiving for older adults within racial and ethnic minority communities, and 2) assessing how to promote inclusive, culturally-appropriate foods within long term care facilities. Our first article from this project has come out in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association (JAMDA) and examines how dieticians and food service directors conceive of the facilitators and barriers to implementing culturally inclusive diets into hospitals and long-term care facilities.

My interest in this topic nonetheless began in my M.A. in anthropology, where I conducted ethnographic research with a group of Southern Sudanese refugee women to examine how cosmopolitan food orientations structured their diasporic identities and challenged gendered inequalities in their community. This research received student paper awards from both the Canadian Food Studies Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society, and was published in the latter’s flagship journal, Anthropologica. Throughout my Ph.D., I maintained a working relationship with my Master’s supervisor, Dr. Helen Vallianatos, and we co-authored a paper, published in Qualitative Sociology, on how structural inequalities embedded in immigration and economic insecurity manifest in the embodied health outcomes and subsequent boundary work of Arab Canadian immigrant women.

In Toronto for my Ph.D., I conducted interviews with foodies who also identify as people of colour, in order to explore ethno-racial inequalities permeating foodie culture. An analysis of these interviews showed that the normative framing of foods as “authentic” and “exotic” within foodie culture possesses the potential both to encourage cross-cultural understanding and to essentialize or exacerbate ethno-cultural difference. Participants’ experiences highlighted how cultural capital works alongside ethno-racial inequalities, and reveals the racial tensions within foodies’ attempts to reconcile the democratic and distinctive tendencies encompassed within contemporary foodie culture. This work has been published in Cultural Sociology and was awarded the Canadian Food Studies Association’s 2018 Student Paper Award. It was also featured in an article in Eater on ‘What Authenticity in Food Meant in 2019.’

Food and Femininity

In 2016-2017 I worked on two book chapters with Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston on the topic of food and femininity, one reviewing femininity within ethical consumption entitled “A Kind Diet: Cultivating consumer politics, status, and femininity through ethical eating” (The Handbook of Food and Popular Culture, 2017), and the another exploring the work of feeding children, entitled “Calibrating Motherhood” (Feeding Children Inside and Outside the Home, 2018). These papers are based on interview and discursive data on motherhood and feeding. The first chapter provides an overview of ethical eating debates alongside an analysis of Alicia Silverstone’s bestselling book series, The Kind Diet. The second chapter shows how mothers work to distance themselves not only from the negative extreme of the uninformed or uncaring “bad mom”, but also the positive extreme of the overly-controlling or anxious “obsessed mom.” We demonstrate how mothers work to stake out territory between the “bad” and the “obsessed” through ongoing practices of calibration: the process of performing socially desirable food femininities by actively distancing oneself from polarized extremes.

In another co-authored project, published in Food, Culture & Society, my co-authors, Alexandra Rodney, Sarah Cappeliez, Josée Johnston and I, analyzed performances of femininity on food blogs, mapping out bloggers’ challenges crafting aspirational yet relatable feminine voices in a postfeminist context.