Since the works of Halbwachs (1913), the study of food patterns has consistently been considered as a gateway to the study of social structure in French sociological literature. The subject was investigated further in the 1970s by authors such as Bourdieu (1979). The relationship between food practices and social position together with its underlying mechanisms were subject for debate in the 1980s. For some, food practices were related to class positions through socially acquired dispositions (Grignon and Grignon, 1980), whereas others considered that they merely echoed immediate situational constraints especially of a temporal and practical nature (Herpin, 1980). The objective ofthe present article is to revisit this debate with updated data on the evolution of French society over the past thirty years and recent sociological investigations and in particular the study of time from the practice theory perspective. The data used was quantitative data generally not available to sociologists. They consist of a combination of information on food purchases and self‐reported data on time allocated to domestic activities.