A Theory of Grocery Shopping

Food, Choice and Conflict

Shelley Koch

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857851536
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Sociologie

Grocery shopping is an often ignored part of the story of how food ultimately gets to our pantry shelves and tables. A Theory of Grocery Shopping explores the social organization of grocery shopping by linking the lived experience of grocery shoppers and retail managers in the US with information transmitted by nutritionists, government employees, financial advisors, journalists, health care providers and marketers, who influence the way we think about and perform the work of shopping for a household's food. The author provides insight into the contradictory messages that shape how consumers provision their households, and details how consumers respond to these messages. The book challenges the consumer choice model that places responsibility on the shopper for making the "right" choice at the grocery store, thereby ignoring the larger social forces at work, which determine what products are available and how they get to the shelves.

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The Economic and Social Context of Grocery Shopping

When an American mother buys baby carrots and a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store on her way home from work, she crosses many disciplinary boundaries. To understand the whole process, at the very least we must discuss the emotional, unpaid, and waged labor she engages in; the economics of the retail store, the producers and distributors; the policies that have shaped transportation, agriculture, and welfare; and the experts who provide her with information about food consumption. The shopper herself has a story: how she feels about feeding her family, what difficulties she encounters at the grocery store and at home, her relationships with the people she shops with and for. Thus, the oft-denigrated act of grocery shopping is a useful prism through which to view the intersection of individual choice, cultural production, and the larger political economy.

While this task appears daunting, feminist scholars have already noted that the activity of grocery shopping sits at the nexus of two vital institutions: the household and the market economy (DeVault 1991; Weinbaum and Bridges 1976). In order to ground the experiences of the shoppers presented in the following chapters, it is necessary to highlight important developments in both institutions over the course of the twentieth century. This chapter will discuss how grocery shopping has evolved with changes in household composition and the expectations of mothers, the evolution of the supermarket as a retail strategy, and the rise of food experts and marketers, all playing against the backdrop of the larger economic ethos of consumer sovereignty. This short history will provide the scaffolding from which we can understand the discourses that shape grocery shopping, how and by whom these discourses are produced, and how these processes affect shoppers’ decisions at the grocery store.

THE HOUSEHOLD

Who is doing the grocery shopping for the household? Although men have increased their share of household labor since the 1960s (Allen and Sachs 2007; Coltrane 1997; Sayer 2005), grocery shopping and food preparation are still women’s work, with at least 65 percent of all grocery shopping and 68 percent of meal preparation for households done by women (U.S. Department of Labor 2007a). Marketing data suggests that shoppers with the most difficult and time-consuming work of feeding the household are shoppers with children (Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council of North America 2008). According to the American Time Use Survey, between 2003 and 2007 mothers on average spent one hour grocery shopping a week, compared to half an hour for men (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008). However, married mothers, both fully employed and unemployed, are twice as likely to grocery shop on an average day than married fathers, employed and unemployed (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008).

Changes over the past thirty years in women’s wage labor have greatly impacted their unpaid household labor. Women, especially mothers, have entered the labor force in large numbers since the 1960s. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, women comprised 46 percent of the total U.S. labor force in 2002 and are projected to account for 47 percent of the labor force in 2016. A record 68 million women were employed in the United States—seventy-five percent of employed women worked in full-time jobs, while 25 percent worked on a part-time basis (U.S. Department of Labor 2007b). Nearly 72 percent of mothers with children under eighteen were in the labor force in 2009 (U.S. Department of Labor 2010). By contrast, in 1950, only a third of women over the age of sixteen were in the labor force (U.S. Department of Labor 2000). However, having additional children decreased mothers’ paid work hours such that employment rates for mothers with four or more children was 56 percent (Krantz-Kent 2009).

In addition to being in the workforce, more women are heading households by themselves. In 2007, 23 percent of households were headed by a single mother compared to 6 percent in 1970 (Bianchi 2010). Working mothers report fewer hours devoted to housework but, with paid and unpaid labor, report higher workloads than unemployed women, often forgoing leisure and sleep to get everything done (Bianchi et al. 2000; Bianchi 2009). Eating food in restaurants is one strategy for managing this labor. In 1970, 69 percent of food was eaten at home, whereas in 2009 this figure had dropped to 51 percent (U.S. Department of Agriculture/ERS 2009). However, due to the recession grocery stores are reporting that many shoppers are going back to preparing food at home (Food Marketing Institute 2010).

One option for affluent mothers to bridge the gap between wage work and unpaid household labor is to hire domestic workers and nannies. The women now feeding some affluent families are often poor, immigrants, and/or women of color (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002; Tronto 2002). In addition to feeding households, women of color and immigrants are also cooking and serving our food in restaurants and schools (Liu and Apollon 2011).

Not only are women procuring and preparing food, this work is intimately connected with women’s role and their identity as mothers in households. This was one of DeVault’s (1991) central findings, in which she argued that food work as part of women’s caring work in the household contributes to their subordination. Dorothy Smith (1999) further argues that this role of mothers as the key to healthy and successful children is central to the “standard North American family,” the paradigmatic form of family that assumes a mother who subordinates her unpaid labor and attention to the needs of her children and household. In the standard North American family paradigm, mothers are primarily responsible for raising well-adjusted, healthy, and successful children regardless of the practical or material conditions in which they find themselves. Of course the reality of the family form has diverged significantly from the traditional nuclear family, but nostalgia and the social organization of society perpetuate this ideology.

“Intensive mothering” is an extension of this standard North American family ideology. Sharon Hays (1996) argues that, with the exodus of women out of the household and into the workforce, anxiety over who will provide the nurturing necessary for raising children has manifested into an all-encompassing belief in intensive motherhood. Child rearing should be child-centered, expert-guided, labor-intensive, and emotionally involved, which puts the responsibility for all facets of children’s lives squarely on the shoulders of individual mothers (Hays 1996). Intensive mothering ratchets up the expectations for motherhood as a means to show our commitment to nurturing; thus, raising children is not something mothers should do on the fly without much thought and preparation, nor should mothers look to earlier generations to find examples. Food, as it connects to health, well-being, and ultimately life, is a critical responsibility of mothers and the stakes are high.

The initial choice of whether to breastfeed or use formula is a good example of the emotional and often public battle with feeding a mother faces. New mothers are often sent home with conflicting messages: breastfeeding is best, but here’s a formula sample in your free diaper bag. Make sure to choose wisely. The story one mother in my study relayed about her dilemma with breastfeeding illustrates the interconnection of intensive mothering and food work. Kelly Jones had a job that she liked, but decided to stay home after she had her first child because she wasn’t convinced her daughter would be fed properly without her. She says:

And I think that the nursing thing is really more than anything, how I ended up staying home. Now looking back on it, it seems kind of silly to me but at the time, when you are that new mother and a couple months went by and your baby still wasn’t taking a bottle, I just couldn’t in my head figure out how she was going to eat while I wasn’t there. Now if another mother would talk to me about it I would probably be able to tell her rationally, it will work out, it will be a couple week adjustment but you will figure it out. But at the time I couldn’t figure it out, I felt kind of panicked about it. It wasn’t worth it to me and again I was in a situation where I could make that choice with Jerry’s [her husband] help but everyone can’t choose to do it.

She confesses that although she enjoys staying at home with her kids, she is scared of trying to get back into the job market after a long hiatus.

The combination of intensive mothering and the new food movements (i.e., local, organic and natural foods, slow food) have silently increased expectations for feeding families. The slow food movement promotes home-cooked meals eaten in a leisurely manner to create a space in which food and socialability can be appreciated. However, eating at home with family members has diminished in large measure because of the increased pressure on women’s time from wage work, child-related obligations, and the lack of support from spouses (Allen and Sachs 2007). Home gardening is another example of how the food movement is in contradiction with women’s roles as mothers and workers. To produce food at home, women often have the triple responsibility of working, preparing dinner, and weeding the garden (or cajoling family members to do it). A frank discussion of a more gender equitable division of household labor might mitigate some of these contradictions, but doesn’t appear as an important aspect of new food movements.

FOOD EXPERTS

Even though more mothers work outside the home, they are still expected to fulfill their responsibility of producing healthy and well-adjusted children. One way they are to accomplish this task is to utilize information from experts on successful child development and efficient household management. Expert knowledge about food and household management comes from dieticians, extension workers, physicians, policy makers, industry representatives, and the media sources through which this information is disseminated.

As mothers’ status shifted from producer of food to consumer during the early twentieth century, their work became increasingly subject to new sources of knowledge about how to choose the right food products and produce the most efficient household. Women became food purchasers rather than growers, and as the number of choices rose at the supermarket, they needed information on how and what to purchase. While the food industry developed new marketing practices as a means to direct purchases, home economists provided information on the basics of maintaining households in a consumer society. These institutional experts stepped in to provide information on how to be a good household consumer. Using the language of science to create a more rationalized consumption system, home economists became mediators between industry, government, and consumers and played an important role in shaping consumer products and their usage (Goldstein 2006). Women and mothers did not “ingest” this information entirely or uncritically, but expert information certainly became an important point of reference for grocery shoppers in the twentieth century.

Ironically, home economics developed as an academic and practical discipline because many educated women, shut out of mainstream professions like economics, carved out a niche in the academy through domestic sciences. Ellen Richards, one of the founders of the American Home Economics Association, was the first woman to receive a degree from MIT in chemistry. Turned down for private chemistry positions, she eventually became an instructor in “sanitary chemistry” and applied science to everyday problems women faced in their households (Stage 1997). Rather than confining women to the home but without directly challenging the cult of domesticity, Richards envisioned a place for women in the larger community based on their domestic skills. She was the chief nutritionist for the New England Kitchen in 1890, a community-based food kitchen that sold soups, stews, and puddings to the working classes to be taken home for dinner, as well as one of the founders of the Boston School of Housekeeping, which certified women in domestic service (Stage 1997).

But the larger economic ethos of the time was caught up in the efficiency movement. Frederick Taylor was developing scientific management techniques to rationalize the factory, and the home economics movement imported that shift into the household. The household became the site of women’s labor and home management experts used methods taken from time and motion studies in industry to streamline household tasks such as food preparation, dishwashing, and laundry (Strasser 1982).

Christine Frederick, an early advocate of Taylor’s efficiency studies and a home engineer, declared that housewives must become purchasing agents for the household: “[E]very woman running the business of homemaking must train herself to become an efficient ‘purchasing agent’ for her particular family or firm by study, watchfulness and practice” (Strasser 1982: 247). Scheduling and planning were crucial to efficient household management: meals should be planned one or two weeks in advance with every ingredient needed on a “purchasing sheet” (the forerunner to our modern list). Planning would keep material and financial waste down and reduce the effort expended on food preparation. For example, one type of cooking should be used in every meal to economize on effort, whether it be boiled, baked, or fried, and any food left should be incorporated into future meals. In this way, the “left over” becomes a “planned over” and waste is minimized (Strasser 1982: 214). But the overall goal of household efficiency was to save time for other household tasks such as helping the husband with his business or working with the kids.

Not only were experts rationalizing food procurement, scientists and experts were also standardizing how we should eat. Scientists working in the progressive era of the early 1900s sought changes to standardize the American diet in the face of increasing numbers of immigrants (Levenstein 2003). Between 1880 and 1930, W. O. Atwater, a chemist and the first director of the USDA’s Office of Experiment Stations, discovered that food can be broken down into constituent parts; that is, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats (Roth 2000). Dubbed the “father of American nutrition,” Atwater viewed the body as a machine and food as fuel for that machine (Mudry 2006). From this mechanistic perspective, chemists and scientists who worked for the United States Department of Agriculture reduced food to its component categories—calories, fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Home economists with the USDA borrowed this scientific understanding of food to create food buying guides as early as 1917 and taught the public about proper eating using numbers (Mudry 2009).

Atwater directed his prescriptions to eat more protein to the working classes, but it was actually middle-class housewives who began to learn the vocabulary of protein, fat, and carbohydrates (Levenstein 2003). Trained home economists in the 1940s and 1950s used this foundation of efficiency and standardization to educate the public about food and household management. Home economists at this time were usually well-educated women who were writing and teaching other women to become good household managers. These women sought to educate the public through courses taught in schools, colleges, and extension services and through articles in popular publications. As more women entered the paid workforce, less time was available for housework, so these experts provided information on how to manage time effectively. Also, as new consumer products such as dishwashers and washing machines came on the market, these educators were available to advise consumers on selection and use of these new items (Stage 1997).

Although home economics went through a decline in the 1970s and 1980s, the content is still taught under the rubric of family and consumer science. The College of Home Economics at Kansas State University, for example, has been renamed the College of Human Ecology and those who complete the B.S. in human ecology are employed as educators in high schools and mid...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Economic and Social Context of Grocery Shopping
• 2 The Work of Grocery Shopping
• 3 Shopping and the Nutrition Discourse
• 4 The Efficient Housewife Discourse
• 5 The Consumer Control Discourse
• 6 Competing Discourses and the Work of Food Shopping
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index