How people navigate the foodscape? Analyzing the diversity of households’ food procurement practices - INRAE - Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

How people navigate the foodscape? Analyzing the diversity of households’ food procurement practices

Résumé

Although the food environment is thought to affect food behaviors, studies’ results are inconsistent. Beyond the heterogeneity of the methods used, different studies underline the importance of individuals' perception of their food environment on their practices. It is necessary to look beyond the causal analysis of the relationships between the spatial distribution of food outlets and individual food practices. We need to study how people navigate their food environment, thus moving to a foodscape approach. In this study, we investigated how people organize themselves practically, in time and space, to procure food. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 households in the Montpellier-city region, France. We then analyzed their food procurement practices, the reasons and the meaning they give for their choices and their practices. We identified eight patterns of food procurement logics (i.e. coherent combinations of choices and practices), that we labelled: budgetary, efficient, avoidance, relational, physical accessibility, recreational, product, and committed. The terms and arguments used in the budgetary, efficient and avoidance logics highlight a "constrained" foodscape, due respectively to the budget, the time, and the sensitive relationships with others implied by this social activity of "shopping". Conversely, the terms and arguments used in the relational and recreational logics reflect a "chosen" foodscape associated with the satisfaction people gain from these practices. The logic of physical accessibility leads to discourses that oscillate between constraint and opportunity. Finally, in the case of product and committed logics, respondents' discourses depend on the characteristics of the products sold, the shops or the shopkeepers, whatever the landscape associated with the places concerned. Our results thus suggest that the relationships between foodscapes and procurement practices differ according to diverse combinations of such logics. These results contribute to explain why even when public actions strongly impact food environments, households’ food procurement practices do not necessarily change, as they are part of routines and respond to diversified logics. Thus, a policy aiming at opening new food outlets in neighborhoods must take into account the households’ logics. It is on the basis of this knowledge that a process of co-design of projects aimed at changing foodscapes should be initiated, if public stakeholders want to have a concrete impact on inequalities of access to healthy food.

Domaines

Géographie
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Dates et versions

hal-04633534 , version 1 (03-07-2024)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04633534 , version 1

Citer

Simon Vonthron, Coline Perrin, Christophe-Toussaint Soulard. How people navigate the foodscape? Analyzing the diversity of households’ food procurement practices. 12. Conference AESOP-SFP, AESOP Sustainable food planning group, Jun 2024, Bruxelles, Belgium. ⟨hal-04633534⟩
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