Food Social Practices

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Consumer Culture
Food social practices: Theory of practice and the new battlefield of food
quality
Lorenzo Domaneschi
Journal of Consumer Culture 2012 12: 306
DOI: 10.1177/1469540512456919
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Article
Food social practices:

Theory of practice and
the new battlefield of
food quality
Journal of Consumer Culture

12(3) 306322
! The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1469540512456919
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Lorenzo Domaneschi
University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy
Abstract
Given the growing transitional character of food, on its way from farm to fork, a rising
number of people and institutions affect what we eat, governing how food is produced,
consumed and distributed day-to-day. The sociological response to these transformations lead to a conceptualization of food as a dynamic field, crucial to the understanding of how we negotiate production and consumption as specific and meaningful sets of
activities. In this article, I suggest applying the recent conceptualization of practice
theory in order to understand the increasing complexity of food issues. I start by
illustrating some basic sociological works on consumption of food quality, then I present
the main outcome of a qualitative research study about the commercial cooking in a
Northern Italian city. The issue of food quality and the effects of its social construction
on consumers habits are eventually discussed.
Keywords
food quality, identity, material culture, practice theory, sociology of food
Introduction
Back in 1995, in a far-seeing paper, Ferguson and Zukin posed a rhetorical question about the absence of a sociological paradigm to analyse food, hitherto a subject considered only by anthropologists, historians or psychologists. They also
reminded us how the transitional character of such a topic, moving from the
raw to the cooked, from the eye to the mouth, from the bare minimum necessary
for survival to egregiously conspicuous consumption (1995: 196) probably made it
even more dicult for the sociological community to address such a subject.
Corresponding author:
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan-Bicocca, Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, 8,
20126 Milan, Italy.
Email: lorenzo.domaneschi@unimib.it
Domaneschi
307
Fifteen years later, we can easily understand the growing transitional character of
food, as on its way from farm to fork it changes hands many times, often crossing
continents. In fact, an increasing number of people and institutions aect what we
eat, governing how food is produced, consumed and distributed day-to-day. Yet,
while long-standing actors such as the largest food retailers gain more and more
power, new actors from civil society such as consumer associations show resistance
to such trends, promoting community control over food and farming. The sociological reaction to these social transformations maybe doesnt accomplish what
Ferguson and Zukin wanted, but it has certainly made its way to a conceptualization of food as a dynamic eld, crucial to the understanding of how we negotiate
production and consumption as specic and meaningful sets of activities (Warde,
1997; Ashley et al., 2004). However, most researchers involved in this stillunder-construction sociological work about food continue to emphasize the economic power of major institutional actors such as transnational corporations or,
when they happen to mention culture, it is often just in relation to consumers. This
trend has eventually caused the discipline to split into two dierent scientic
arenas a sociology of food and a rural sociology separating the knowing
food issue from the growing food one (Goodman and DuPuis, 2002).
This article aims to deal with recent literature about the most fruitful eorts to
overcome this dichotomy (Murcott and Campbell, 2004; Morgan et al., 2006),
going beyond the explanations that look either at the economic institutional
forces or the reexive consumers. After a brief review of the most recent contributions that have tried this route, the article will present the so-called practice turn in
contemporary theory (Schatzki et al., 2001; Reckwitz, 2002) and its possible and
protable sociological application to the eld of food studies (Halkier et al., 2011).
Then, in order to critically build the argument, a short discussion of an empirical
application to a specic national case will be oered, questioning the value of
practice theory when researching the production of (food) quality in the particular
case of commercial cooking.
The practice turn in contemporary food studies

In order to overcome the dichotomy between agro-food theory and the sociology
of food, scholars recently started to consider the opportunity to investigate production and consumption of food within the same framework (Murcott and
Campbell, 2004). A diuse theoretical and mostly empirical discontent grew, in
fact, because the sociology of food couldnt account for most institutional
changes in global corporate power in the food industry, while the agro-food
theory soon understood how both the commodity system and corporate industry
couldnt be analysed outside the networks of meaning and micro-moralities within
which they are embedded (Phillips, 2006). Since then, there have been a signicant
number of theoretical endeavours to ll this gap (Morgan et al., 2006). Although
the literature is quite composite, it may be useful to sketch here three dierent
solutions proposed in the past decades.
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Journal of Consumer Culture 12(3)
A rst very much discussed attempt to reconnect production and consumption

in the eld of food is generally imputed to Fine and his colleagues (Fine et al. 1996)
who presented the theory of System of Provisions, according to which vertical
structuring in food production and horizontal relationships in food consumption
should be factored in as they are necessarily built up reciprocally. Despite one of
the standpoints of this conceptualization indeed being the connection between
meanings attributed to foodstu and its organic peculiarity, most critics concentrate on the lack of consideration for the materiality of food, and propose a second
way out to the productionconsumption debate. In fact, drawing on Actor
Network theory and other contributions to sociology of science (Latour, 2005),
Goodman and his colleagues (Goodman and Watts, 1997) argue for an integrated
approach to overcoming the dichotomy between nature and culture, where materiality and human agency work symmetrically for the construction of socially dierentiated food-networks of producers and consumers. In this theory, a multiplicity
of actors are mobilized, with multiple interrelated rationalities. Finally, a third
framework of analysis, Convention theory has been applied to the food sector
(Morgan et al., 2006). Closely allied to ActorNetwork theory and relying on
political and moral studies (Boltanski, Thevenot, 1991) it shares with this perspective the assumption of a mutual agreement among participants (producers and
consumers) in creating networks of coordination as opposed to the simple imposition of a dominant party. This coordination is intended to give rise to conventions supported by formal and informal institutional forms, which bind acts
together and x mutual expectations (Salais and Storper, 1992).
All in all, those three attempts to investigate the food sector illustrate respectively an economic-driven perspective (System of Provision), a science-driven one
(ActorNetwork theory) and a politics-driven one (Convention theory). In spite of
their quite obvious dierences, Id like to focus now on what they actually have in
common. A couple of issues, in fact, reappear constantly in this debate as the main
arguments at stake:
1. The encounter between human and non-human and the relational positionality between the two, which entails the so-called process of embodiment as
much as the dierent social valorizations attributed to the two.
2. The governance of dierent mobilizations of resources, notwithstanding
whether this governance comes back to either systems, networks or conventions.
This leads to mapping the power relations that address how foodstu and
humans mobilized thorough the agro-food network end up in a consumers
body and mind.
In this light, the quite recent examination of a practice turn in contemporary
theory (Schatzki et al., 2001; Reckwitz, 2002) seems to perfectly answer the question of how to explicitly keep the previous two issues together in the same framework. Variously nuanced, the notion of practice portrays action as an ongoing
embodied and situated social process, which is inevitably confronted with the
Domaneschi
309
temporality and spatiality of social experience, networks and structures. Moreover,

a model of practice appears to be particularly useful for studying economic processes and especially economic agency not just without relying on the primacy of
individual rational choice (Sassatelli, 2007; Warde, 2005) but mostly because it
manages to highlight the political eects of identity building (Trentmann, 2007).
As Reckwitz put it, since a practice is [. . .] a routinized way in which bodies are
moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world
is understood (2002: 250), the relational link between human and non-human
stands for a crucial concern in a theory such as this (Pickering, 2001). At the same
time, whereas social agents are considered to be carriers of practices the individual being merely the intersection point of many practices him-/herself they are
rather a consequence of the nature of the social organization of practices (Warde,
2005). The question of how agents are positioned within a practice and, in addition,
how the latter is positioned itself across a broad range of practices become a second
crucial issue of the theory. In the present case, then, these two issues will bring us to
consider the cooking practice both inside the kitchen, where the manipulation of
foodstu is crucial, and outside the kitchen, where the representation of foodstu is
equally essential.
Finally, I suggest that food social practices could be a crucial device in order to
sociologically investigate the food sector considering both the human and nonhuman relationality and the governance of dierent mobilization of resources as
two sides of the same empirical phenomenon.
Food quality as a field of social practices

As illustrated above, the recent sociological literature on food issues has tended to
solve the complex transitional character of food recalled by Ferguson and Zukin
(1995) by joining production and consumption matters in the same theoretical
framework. The general idea is that relationships from both these two sides of
the food sector are inextricably intertwined in the process of food valorization
and they simply cant be investigated separately. Now what is signicant is that this
valorization is increasingly taking the shape of a process of qualication, where
quality become a category to evaluate competing systems for the delivery of food as
well as new procedures for guaranteeing food standards and dierent criteria for
selecting and judging foodstu used by consumers (Harvey et al., 2004). Therefore,
quality should be treated as something made, not given, whereby there is a set of
competing forces, emerging from the products themselves and from the social
characteristics of the persons pronouncing judgments, from which a particular
value called quality can be constructed (Harvey et al., 2004).
Such a process of qualication, then, can be investigated according to two
dierent analytical dimensions. First, it should imply a eld of mutual positioning
of human subjects and non-human objects and materials involved in the process.
Second, according to a dynamic perspective of the same eld of positions, it should
imply the competing forces that are at stake in order to rule the process.
310
Hence, food quality as a (battle)eld of social practices consists in a given coordination of human and non-human resources in a particular place and time that is open
to a change according to the mobilization of such resources due to the power relations
that emerge from this coordination.
Food quality is then considered a by-product of particular social practices
as long as it coincides with a particular positionality within a social eld of
institutionalized standards that the practices of food production and consumption themselves contribute to xing, each according to dierent power relations. In this light, the social denition of food quality emerges empirically
from a process of transformation of a bunch of material qualities of food
(biological, organic, etc.) into a unique symbolic value named quality. Of
course, the same process could happen retroactively, when a legitimate denition of quality assigns centrality back to a bunch of material qualities. For
example, the specic case of pizza napoletana verace, which quite recently
became part of a food quality scheme (Traditional Speciality Guaranteed)
translates the exact dimensions of the disc-shaped dough into an essential
feature of quality, in the same way as the quality scheme of the mozzarella
di bufala (Protected Designation of Origin) converts the specic attribute of
the fresh milk into a universal sign of quality itself.
Such a theorization of food quality marks a dierence from most classical sociological approaches to food, interested either in nal consumers (Lupton, 1996;
Gronow, 2004) or dedicated to agro-business (Arce and Mardsen, 1995;
Winter, 2003). In fact, it focus rather on the ways in which dierent subjects or
objects (as suggested by ActorNetwork theory) in dierent elds of practices
compete for the authority (as highlighted by Convention theory) of dening their
actual character. The outcome of this process of institutionalization of a dierentiated eld of practices of production and consumption of food is, then, to
empower and disempower particular sets of resources, considered a mixture of
human and non-human assets.
Now, in order to show how to accomplish such an analysis, I present a case
study on commercial cooking in Italy, as a particular food social practice, taken
from an empirical research project into Italian commercial cuisine and the relative
institutionalization of a territorial version of food quality.1 The purpose of carrying out this research was to particularly examine the eects of the mobilization of
sets of resources from production to consumption and vice versa starting from the
social practice of commercial cooking, in order to interpret how every chef positions themselves in the eld, not only among the others professionals, but especially with regard to non-human assets.
According to many practice theorists (Reckwitz, 2002), cooking is just one of the
so called integrative practices, the more complex practices found in and constitutive of particular domains of social life (Schatzki, 1996: 98). These are distinguished from dispersed practices, including describing, explaining, questioning,
reporting, examining and imagining (1996: 91), that can take place within and
across dierent domains or subelds. In other words, cooking as a professional
Domaneschi
311
practice can only take place inside a professional kitchen of any kind of commercial
activity. Therefore, it is rst necessary to illustrate the structure of this particular
domain inside which commercial cooking takes place. This illustration coincides
indeed with the display of the mutual positioning of human and nonhuman resources highlighted above. Then, it becomes possible to investigate the
dynamic of the same particular domain, looking for the power relations featuring
the eld.
A case-study of a territorial version of food quality in a

northern Italian city
In order to rst give the heuristic dimension to the eld of power where the culinary
practice analysed is situated, I must start from the historical trajectory of the eld
itself. I chose to study the gastronomic eld of a particular northern urban centre in
Italy because it illustrates the empirical pattern of the broader national eld as a
whole (Benporat, 1999; Capatti and Montanari, 2005). The socio-historical analysis of the progressive institutionalization of the Italian gastronomic eld presents,
in fact, a couple of interesting features, especially when compared to the French
and the American contexts.
In the case of French gastronomic eld, many researchers have already shown
how commercial cooking led to a shared denition of food quality later known as
nouvelle cuisine (Rao et al. 2003) on the basis of a national-oriented market and
the hegemony of the pre-revolutionary cuisine resulting from the central political
inuence of the Parisian court (Boudan, 2004; Ferguson, 2004). By contrast, the
lack of a comparable national political situation coupled with the commercial primacy given to the trade between dierent county towns contributed to the Italian
gastronomic eld being structured in a very dierent way, on a regional if not
urban basis (Capatti and Montanari, 2005). Accordingly, the actual structure of
the food supply-side is still mostly based on small businesses with a low rate of
capital-intensive production (ISMEA Report, 2009), where innovation still relies
on highly human-embodied competences.
Such structural features of the eld and the relative orientation they entail
towards investments in local raw materials can be discovered as well in the
character of the professionals who inhabit such a eld. Therefore, following
Fines ethnography of restaurant work (1996) in a US second-tier metropolitan area, the research focused on a similar urban context in northern Italy,2
in order to capture a sample of cooks that are sociologically interesting [just]
because they are not elite artists (Fine, 1996: 16). In this case, they are
supposed to build up quality standards within their job practice and basically
without any given formal tradition from schools or disseminated by authoritative media criticism. Although, unlike the case of the American gastronomic
eld accurately examined by Ferguson and Zukin (1998), where nancial and
symbolic investments in schools and gastronomic criticism indeed played a
312
signicant role in the denition of an American commercial cooking practice,

in the Italian case neither of these institutional resources have actually been
implemented. Until recently, in fact, the majority of schools where cooks are
trained as semi-qualied workers and the national media that only invested in
gastronomic criticism as a marginal part of their editorial mission left a blank
space for the construction of quality standards in commercial cooking that
could only be lled by the domestic memories and the embodied experience
of each individual cook. Accordingly, despite the growth of expenditure on
eating out, the demand-side still presents one of the highest rates of food
consumption at home in the EU area (ISMEA Report, 2009).
From this point of view, the situation of the subjects that I interviewed seemed
not very dierent from their American colleagues, analysed by Gary Fine (1996) or
by Ferguson and Zukin (1998) in the case of New York. However, there is an
important dierence in the case Im discussing: while in the American context the
employment of institutionalized economic and cultural resources (for example, the
opening of schools of cooking, following the French pattern) has made possible
rst of all politically the development of an American culinary practice
(Ferguson and Zukin, 1998), in the Italian case completely dierent means in
terms of resources and constraints have eventually led to a similar process. From
a close examination of my interviews, it is quite clear that it is a specic combination of embodied cultural capital in terms of family origins and social capital
in terms of reciprocal trust with their employees support and stabilize the practices
of quality in the gastronomic eld.
As I am interested in the analysis of the production of food quality through the
lens of culinary practice, I shall focus on the reconstruction of the particular starting point usually described by chefs as crucial in the history of their
careers. The rst of the following extracts3 is taken from the story of a cook
whose family, for more than 20 years, has kept working in a small valley in the
urban hinterland:
The very beginning was twenty years ago . . . [. . .] the choice was perhaps . . . not really
balanced . . . the idea was to do something innovative at that time, but always linked to
that . . . that was a bit of our history . . . [. . .] to be sure, it has remained [a lot] of that
period and of that experience, in us, in some particular way, because our parents
denitely have continued to help us for some years since then . . . So about that experience what remains for sure is a very strong bond with the local agriculture and with our
farmers, right the farmers of our valley . . . (Family Cook 2, Outback)
In cases like this, although the reference to the cooks family as a central starting
point is presented here as a natural part of the local environment, nevertheless the
particular connection between agricultural production and the gastronomic supply
is clearly highlighted, a specic connection that could be provided only by his own
restaurant, properly designed to be the material version of such a symbolic
connection.
Domaneschi
313
In other cases, however, it is just the cooks family and his relative dining
experience that can be regarded as the main reference where the origin and motivation of his career is located:
well . . . to my family, the practice of cooking has always been important . . . in the sense
that eating at home was the moment when you were all together . . . and then, both lunch
and dinner . . . all together . . . we were a family of seven persons with grandparents, and
so it was an important time that one when we sit at the table . . . my aunt was always home
and cooked, my mum had the shop, so . . . I spent so much time with my aunt . . . and its
been just then that it started this passion seeing her cooking every day, and very actual
regional cuisine, most of the time . . . (Restaurateur Cook 3, City Centre)
Finally, it is not only the geographical position between hinterland and city centre,
but also the kind of biographical path accumulated and tied in a particular site,
situation or a group of people, that makes a dierence in the various stories of
those chefs. From the rst point of view, for those who have a personal trajectory
strongly linked to a specic location, the culinary practice is mostly described by
linking the criteria of quality to the characteristics of their own territory, which is
represented, at the same time, as both the instrument and the ultimate goal of the
cooking practice:
the soul of our cuisine is . . . well . . . when I was a kid, I used to go . . . I mean, I didnt
work in a restaurant . . . but I used to go hunting for mushrooms, just like I actually
did this morning . . . I used to go in the wood and all of a sudden a particular smell
came out from a chestnut grove immediately after the rain . . . or the tiny inkling
of . . . undergrowth, or even the mushroom reek that usually came out . . . well . . . such
a sensation, such particular light breeze last since I was a boy . . . or maybe the smell I
felt when I squeezed a grape of vermentino wine, from our soil . . . that I could feel the
fragrance . . . I mean . . . I still do it, 40 years later . . . and I try to let feeling the same
smell and fragrances in my restaurant . . . in my dishes . . . thats what I call the
soul . . . of my territory . . . denitely . . . without that, nothing would make sense to
me [. . .]. (Commercial Cook 1, Male, Outback)
As one can see, at this point in the story a particular emphasis on scents, smells and
the ability to directly manipulate the fruits of the land emerges: in this case, this
kind of cook is in the position of being able to spend these resources, emphasizing
olfactory and tactile component of the food.
Here, the ethnographic eldwork may help to illustrate this very crucial perspective on the manipulation of foodstu. As Fine noted, certainly every kitchen
has its share of distinct smells, touches, sounds and tastes (1996: 239); nevertheless, during my eldwork, I could well understand how there was something more
about smell and touch for the cooks I followed in their work. Two dierent cooks,
working in two dierent kind of kitchens, share, in fact, a specic value assigned,
respectively, to the tactile and olfactory aspect of the cooking practice.
314
Excerpt 1 - (Family Cook 2, Male, Outback)

M, Assistant Cook; L, Head Cook
[Three hours before the dinner, L and M are preparing the line, cutting vegetables and
making sauces and avourings. Im looking around the kitchen, standing between
them while L is explaining the kind of customers they usually serve.] While L is talking
to me, I start looking at his hands involved in what seems to be a very complex job: he
is manipulating some stung he has just prepared in order to make some sh balls. I
follow the process while he goes on telling me some story about a noisy customer; he
starts picking a very small piece of stung from a bowl, putting it in his left hand and
rolling it until he come out with a perfect micro-sphere. After he completed about
thirty sh balls in less than three minutes, I interrupt him asking: How can you be
sure theyre not going to split up when youre frying them? He seems to think about
my (weird?) question, then tells me: They never did, its all about the way you roll
them. I guess I roll them just like my mother used to do, so they never split up or
anything. Then he starts rolling again and tells me: In fact, I mean . . . its always
about raw materials, of course, but this is the only place you can nd this kind of
rolling, my friend . . ..
Excerpt 2 - (Restaurateur Cook 3, Male, City Centre)

A, Head Cook
[Early in the morning, Im with A who let me follow him during his shopping session at a farmers market in the city centre.] When we approach a stand with a
lot of colourful vegetables Im about to stop, thinking he is going to have a look
at such a wonderful collection of veggies; but he keeps walking until he reaches a
very small stand, apparently not at all tempting. He smiles gently at the owner
who immediately suggests three dierent kinds of green salads to him: accordingly
he starts smelling one after another for almost three minutes, eventually picking
one. Once we leave, I cant help but ask him I thought you would have picked
the good-looking vegetables, they would have looked amazing once in the dish,
wouldnt they? He looks at me, quite disappointed, and answers: Well, I only trust
my sense of smell. Thats it. I wonder if a beet will smell like it should, when I pick
it . . . Im not a photographer, Im a cook: my taste and my smell are my whole cooking, eventually.
In this way, they explicitly position themselves on the opposite side to the standardized media discourse focused on the visual component.4 At the same time,
once they move away from the logic of large-scale production with a good distance
between raw materials and manufacturing processes, those cooks bring into play
their ability to present themselves as manipulators of original scents and smells,
Domaneschi
315
a specic skill where food cultivation and food preparation become closer and
closer to each other.
This originality can come from the environment in which the cook develops but,
in dierent ways, it can also be derived from the routines of the cooks domestic
cuisine, as described by this restaurateur-cook from the city centre:
[the decision about how to prepare a dish] also depends on the mood . . . a year ago, for
example, I prepared a ne dessert that I still have on the menu now . . . it was a sweet
rose syrup that helped me to remember my parents one . . . in fact, they ran a very old
grocery store, here in Genoa, a long time ago . . . and I grew up amid drugs and spices
and all of these things, right? . . . also a lot of people used to come to buy from my dad
and my grandfather . . . and my dad personally did the rose syrup . . . [. . .] then
I thought about making a dessert starting from that syrup [. . .]. (Restaurateur
Cook 3, City)
Again, these same scents, smells and tactile memories become the reference and
measurement of the avour to be found in the practice of cooking. The same smells
and tactile memories will be those that the cooks intend as the ultimate ingredient
to bring within their own cookery and the one in which they will eventually look
for conrmation in the judgement of their customers:
so that for whoever happens to taste it [a particular dessert made with a local fruit],
quite often, his judgement goes like this: it reminds me of when I was a
baby . . . because [. . .] these are sensations that take me back and so on . . . and I like
this . . . I mean . . . it sounds nice when a customer tells you he remembers his past
thanks to your dishes . . . mostly because its the exactly same sensation I feel when
I cook . . . often the same memories . . . (Commercial cook, Male, City Centre)
The ethnographic eldwork may help again to illustrate the specic relationship
built between humans actors and artefacts inside such a particular outline of cooking practice. Of course, cooks always prepare the meals through a substantial use
of physical tools the positioning and accessibility of which in the surrounding have
an important inuence on the structure and ongoing organization of the activity
itself (Galatolo and Traverso, 2007). The following excerpt will show the particular perspective those kind of cooks maintain about technological equipment and
the consequences of its participation in the social denition of quality.
Excerpt 3 - (Commercial Cook 1, Male, Outback)

R, Assistant Cook; G, Head Cook
[Im in the kitchen with R and A, 20 minutes after the dinner has been served. We are
drinking some very good red wine, relaxing and talking freely. Im handling a
siphon, playing with it.] R starts looking at me and the siphon, then he turns to
316
G saying: I hate that crap, every time Ive got to deal with it . . . its just annoying . . ..
I smile and wait for G to answer. He looks rst at R, then he looks at me, nally
saying: I dont like either that crap, man . . . its denitely not my idea of cooking to
dope food with air or whatever. I mean, I feel like cheating, you know . . . but its just
like with re or water . . . you need them to transform raw materials . . . you only need
to be able to control all these elements, if you want not to be controlled by them, if you
know what I mean . . ..
Such an accent on both the symbolic and material investment of a class of subjects
(here, commercial cooks in a present urban area) on a set of objects, materials and
technologies (local raw materials, kitchen utensils and procedure seized on domestic competencies) and a relative shared concept of what cooking actually means
(linked to the memories of a person or to a territory) eventually stand for a mutual
positioning within a practice of human and non-human resources, in the sense
illustrated above.
All in all, this explains how the institutional context contributes to situate a
cultural practice such as cooking, precisely in the sense described by the concept of
the eld power (Bourdieu, 1992). The specic structuring of the category of food
quality in the urban context discussed here allows us to nd a sort of reverse path
to the one described, for example, by Ferguson (2004) in his analysis of the eld of
French gastronomy. The culinary practice studied comes from a complete reversal
of the social hierarchies of legitimacy operating in the French case. Instead of
having schools and guides that are able to transform some cooks into chefs
(Ferguson, 2004), it quite the opposite seems to happen in the Italian case. Here,
we are witnessing a rather positive encoding of the rst term at the expense of the
second, so that the very denition of quality is socially constructed symbolically
(in the stories of subjects) and structurally (through institutional agencies), around
the same gure of the cook, considered to be a subject alternative to the logic of
industrial cookery as much as to those of the French high-cuisine tradition.
In conclusion, the social denition of food quality has been fabricated together
with other social forces inside the gastronomic eld mixing the particular professional features of commercial cooks with the relative meaning assigned to some
foods over others, the social representations of restaurants, the particular technologies to be used in food transformation and, last but not least, a particular set of
consumer identities. All of these assets, nally, emerge and, at the same time, come
to be analytically decipherable within the same food social practice (Miller, 1998;
Warde, 2005).
Made in Italy or taste in Italy? A discussion

In the previous discussion based on data from empirical research in a northern
Italian urban area, I tried to show how food quality can be investigated starting
from the same particular social practice of commercial cooking. In that case, a
particular territorial version of food quality emerged not only as a result of a
Domaneschi
317
specic agronomic reference or as a symbolic power exerted by a specic class of

subjects, but rather more as a much more complex mobilization of ecological,
institutional and biographical resources. Weve just seen above, how specic
smells coming from the terroir are presented as a sort of treasure transmitted
from past family life and how they eventually become an institutional standard
for the denition of food quality, for example when embodied in food quality
certication schemes or when embodied in the evaluations of food guidebooks.
Such quality, thus, becomes the object itself of commercial trade as illustrated in
the case of the work of cooks in restaurants. They appear specically involved in
gathering together the dierent parts of the food production process as a guarantee
of quality itself for consumers. The following ethnographic excerpt about the preparation of a very traditional recipe called cappon magro seems to be a good
illustration of such an arrangement in commercial cooking practice.
Excerpt 4 - (Restaurateur Cook 3, Male, City Centre)

A, Head Cook
[Its 6.10 in the morning, Im with A at the underground open-air sh market near the
sea port. Hes waiting for a private sherman who apparently works as a sort of
personal supplier to him arriving with a particular kind of sea bass and some craysh.]
While waiting, A tells me about the trick to choosing the best sh, but when his friend
arrives A seems to just trust his supplier, never looking inside the bag. [Its 8.40 in the
morning, Im with A at a very small kitchen garden near his wifes mother house,
where hes looking for a bunch of vegetables.] While his mother-in-law is picking the
vegetables, he keeps telling me about the features of vegetables freshness, but once
again he doesnt even look at the bag. [Its 11.25, Im inside the kitchen, A is going
back and forth between the cookers and the knife apparently with a sort of rhythm.] A
starts putting together dierent ingredients in a plate, combining the cappon magro.
He is using, almost at the same time, his hands, a couple of dierent knives, a small
pot with vegetables and every once in a while he checks the oven for another recipe he
is preparing. Before I can ask him anything about this sophisticated coordination of
movements and timing, he looks at me, saying: You see . . . the only secret to the
recipe of the cappon magro is about the care of it . . . of course, only professionals
can really care about it . . . giving it the attention, the time and the precision it
deserves . . . I mean only professionals can care for every single ingredient from the
cradle to the grave, if you know what I mean.
In this case, it becomes empirically visible how a specic mobilization of human

resources (choosing and trusting specic suppliers) and non-human assets
(choosing and practicing the cooking instruments) from all the parts of the production activity is addressed towards a process of empowerment of their position
over other subjects in the food system, namely large-scale industry, on the one hand,
and amateur cooks, on the other.
318
The practices and the accounts of commercial cooks show how these subjects tend
to highlight the olfactory and tactile dimensions of their practice over the visual ones
on which the dominant discourse of the media is usually focused (Bell and Valentine,
1997). At the same time, they try to take advantage by staying away from the capitalintensive production where raw materials and nished products are more and more
outdistanced. Rather, they insist on their exclusively individual skill to provide a
cuisine where cultivation and cooking are factored into the same practice.
According to what we can see from the above analysis, the most signicant
social product of culinary quality-oriented practice is to convey to the gure of
the commercial cook and to his/her kitchen, his/her resources, his/her employees,
etc. the greatest number of these dierent processes.5 Along with this, it leads to
repositioning the objects, places, technologies and subjects that are associated with
them. If in the industrial culinary practice, for example, these moments should be
more and more separated, located in dierent places and linked to dierent technologies, some commercial cooks present themselves as capable of governing
symbolically and structurally a number of these processes. In this way, they
have secured themselves with the complicity of various institutional actors that
support the integration of this practice a sort of monopoly over the legitimate
processes of qualifying foodstu.
In other words, the capability to accumulate multiple processes becomes more
and more equivalent to the very social denition of quality itself in fact associated
increasingly with the expression from farm to fork.
Consequently, while the contested notion of food quality is publicly encoded
with a strong attribution to territorial origin and then considered as a given set of
resources that are exclusive possessions of a particular environment with specic
agronomic features, the latter is rather often absent, as in the case examined above.
The local version of the food quality is in fact much more understandable as the
by-product of the acquired system of personal relations of trust built around the
gure of the cook, derived, in turn, from a certain endowment of embodied cultural
capital sustained, again, by an emerging institutional framework.
When we observed or listened to the cooks, from the point of view of their
restaurants, emphasizing the importance of recalibrating the whole production
chain on the culinary moment, as well as the relevance of a thorough knowledge
of how to handle or smell certain foods, clearly there was at the stake the possibility
of building a space for new consumers geometrically calibrated on their capabilities
and skills.
The sociological analysis of food quality starting from commercial cooking as a
food social practice allows us to focus on the ongoing process of opening and
closing of this particular domain to new resources, so that the eld of genres
and styles it produces the eld of quality is intended as a eld of social inclusion
and exclusion: rst, of course, for consumers. Hence, to stay with my empirical
example, many of the distinctions embodied in the subject of the cook can also be
found in the provision policies and the marketing strategies, until they start to be
embedded in job contracts and in food laws or food quality schemes, and become
Domaneschi
319
institutional standards to evaluate cultural investments in public and private

schools and economic investments in particular gastronomic genres. Finally, the
sociological analysis of the practice of commercial cooking bring us to the social
reconstruction of a broader governance of food quality, addressed alongside the
frame of territoriality and, nally, available, once again, as an institutional device
for consumers to get used to the gastronomic social space.
Conclusion: De-humanizing (consumer) theory

The routes by which food reaches many of us imply, as suggested, a meticulously
organized network of human and non-human resources. On its journey from farm
to fork, food changes many hands, it often crosses many countries and it is increasingly subjected to screening to keep it safe during all its journeys. These new
processes are re-shaping the power relations within the food system. This way to
look at the food sector seems then to concern two sides of the same coin: the
human/non-human networks of social agents involved and the shifting balance
in the governance of the food system. Both of these can be factored in the same
theoretical framework of food social practices.
In conclusion, the theory of social practice (Schatzki et al., 2001; Reckwitz,
2002) helps food studies to move beyond such classical perspectives focused on
food as a cultural consumption object oriented for more or less reexive consumers
(Douglas and Isherwood, 1979; Appadurai, 1986; Cook and Crang, 1996) as well as
such theories that consider food as the product of a more or less capital-intensive
system of provision (Fine et al., 1996; Salais and Storper, 1997). Rather, the sociological investigation of food social practices allows us, rst of all, to apply dierent
possible theoretical aspects, from the sociology of science (Latour, 2005) to political sociology (Mardsen, 2000), to consumption studies (Warde, 2005). Second, this
framework would help to de-humanize theory (Pickering, 2001), so to speak, and
particularly (food) consumer theory, moving the focus from the individual to the
social practices responsible for the production of (food) quality. Thats only possible as long as the social agent producer or consumer is never treated as the
only subject of the practices he/she accomplishes (Bourdieu, 1980; Schatzi et al.,
2001); the consumer is rather only one of the multiple human and non-human
components of these practices.
Acknowledgements
With grateful thanks to Enzo Colombo and Roberta Sassatelli for their insightful comments
on earlier versions of this work. I also would like to thank both the referees for their helpful
comments on a previous draft of this paper.
Notes
1. In the case Im about to discuss the interviews are based on my broad PhD research
project carried out in a northern Italian city, drawing mostly on Bourdieus model of field
analysis (1992) in order to triangulate different methodologies. Ultimately, the research
320
2.
3.
4.
5.
comprised a set of ethnographies in six restaurants, an historical reconstruction of the

national gastronomic field, a discourse analysis of media coverage on food issues and,
finally, 42 in-depth interviews with key actors from both the urban and the national scale.
I quote here some passages from a larger body of interviews with a selection of commercial cooks so called because they carry out their activities in the kitchens of restaurants in Genoa city centre, a medium urban centre in the north-west of the state, with
about 600,000 inhabitants. Their selection was justified by taking into account the spatial
variable (near/far from the city centre), the commercial variable (osteria/tavern/restaurant) and, finally, the organizational variable, distinguishing between restaurateur cooks
(property owners or individual managers), employee cooks (bound by an employment
contract with the property) and family cooks (owners or operators along with family
members). The interviews aimed to trace the biographical and the professional trajectory
of the cooks in order to reconstruct the narrative presentation of culinary practice. The
fieldwork was conducted between September 2005 and January 2007, producing a total of
42 interviews, accompanied by some ethnographical sessions, aimed at urban cooks and
experts in the food sector (journalists, writers, critics, celebrity chefs) at national and
regional level (Domaneschi, 2007).
The emphasis on the visual component in media representations of food which some
even describe as gastro-porn (Smart, 1994) is due to the particular interplay between the
media logic of making everything spectacular and the gastronomic logic of artifice (Bell
and Valentine, 1997).
See the analysis of some of the most important Italian food magazines in the research
mentioned above (Domaneschi, 2007).
It is worth noting here how the statistical prevalence of meals still consumed at home
nationally does not in any way contradict the fabrication of quality illustrated above. In
fact, the narrative and practical schemes made up by the cooks interviewed are strategically addressed in order to draw on and work on the same consumer identities that are
empowered by such a statistical tendency.
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Food social practices:

Journal of Consumer Culture

The practice turn in contemporary food studies

Journal of Consumer Culture 12(3)

A rst very much discussed attempt to reconnect production and consumption

temporality and spatiality of social experience, networks and structures. Moreover,

Food quality as a field of social practices

Journal of Consumer Culture 12(3)

A case-study of a territorial version of food quality in a

Journal of Consumer Culture 12(3)

signicant role in the denition of an American commercial cooking practice,

Journal of Consumer Culture 12(3)

Excerpt 1 - (Family Cook 2, Male, Outback)

Excerpt 2 - (Restaurateur Cook 3, Male, City Centre)

Excerpt 3 - (Commercial Cook 1, Male, Outback)

Journal of Consumer Culture 12(3)

Made in Italy or taste in Italy? A discussion

specic agronomic reference or as a symbolic power exerted by a specic class of

Excerpt 4 - (Restaurateur Cook 3, Male, City Centre)

In this case, it becomes empirically visible how a specic mobilization of human

Journal of Consumer Culture 12(3)

institutional standards to evaluate cultural investments in public and private

Conclusion: De-humanizing (consumer) theory

Journal of Consumer Culture 12(3)

comprised a set of ethnographies in six restaurants, an historical reconstruction of the

Journal of Consumer Culture 12(3)

Lorenzo Domaneschi is currently working as research fellow in sociology in the

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