Linking socioeconomic disadvantage to healthiness of food practices

Professor Bente Halkier has contributed to the journal ‘Sociology of Health and Illness’ with the article ‘Linking socioeconomic disadvantage to healthiness of food practices: Can a practice-theoretical perspective sharpen everyday life analysis?’

The article is co-written with Lotte Holm.

Food is one of the key themes in public health policy and debates over inequalities in health. In the article, the authors argue that more research is needed to understand how socioeconomic disadvantage is translated into low degrees of healthiness. The article also suggests that everyday life analysis may be sharpened by way of drawing upon a practice‐theoretical perspective on the mundane processes involved in this translation.

The authors base their suggestion on a small review of three strands in the literature on social inequality, food and health, namely public health research, lifestyle analysis and everyday life studies, and they take their analytical starting point in the latter.

In the article, they argue that a practice‐theoretical perspective may enable research in social disadvantage and healthiness of food that describes and interprets variants in the conditioned agency, which cuts cross the multiplicity of different practices that make‐up people's daily lives. Finally, they suggest that a stronger focus on social interaction and social hierarchy would adapt a practice‐theoretical perspective further to empirical analysis in the field of food, health and socioeconomic disadvantage.

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