Food, convenience and sustainability (FOCAS)
PROJECT IS COMPLETED
Project period: 2014-2017
The FOCAS project was a comparative research project across Denmark, Germany, Sweden and UK.
The FOCAS project aimed to answer four research questions: how ‘convenience food’ is understood by consumers and how its use relates to understandings of ‘healthy eating’ and environmental sustainability; with what specific practices (shopping, cooking, eating, disposing) convenience food is associated; how such foods are incorporated within different household contexts and domestic routines; and to what extent current practices are subject to change (towards more sustainable and healthier practices).
The four work packages in the research focused on processed baby-food and everyday feeding practices; the healthiness and sustainability of supermarket ready-meals; canteen food and work-place food geographies; and the convenience and sustainability of meal-box schemes.
Brembeck, H. and Fuentes, M. 2017. Convenient food for baby: a study of weaning as social practice, Food, Culture and Society, 20, 569-86.
Fuentes, M. and Brembeck, H. 2017. Best for baby? Framing weaning practice and motherhood in web-mediated marketing, Consumption Markets and Culture, 20, 2, 153-175.
Halkier, B. 2017. Normalising convenience food? The expectable and acceptable places of convenient food in everyday life among young Danes, Food, Culture and Society, 20, 133-51.
Halkier, B. If cooking skills are dead, why won’t they lay down? Competent convenient cooking in everyday life, under review for Appetite.
Hertz, F. and Halkier, B. 2017. Meal box schemes as a convenient way to avoid convenience food? Uses and understandings of meal box schemes among Danish consumers, Appetite, 114, 232-39.
Jackson, P. 2015. Anxious Appetites: food and consumer culture. London: Bloomsbury.
Jackson, P. 2016. Go home Jamie: reframing consumer choice, Social and Cultural Geography 17, 753-757.
Jackson, P. and Viehoff, V. 2016. Reframing convenience food, Appetite 98, 1-11.
Jackson, P., H. Brembeck, J. Everts, M. Fuentes, B. Halkier, F. D. Hertz, A. Meah, V. Viehoff & C. Wenzl (2018). Reframing convenience food. London, Palgrave Macmillan.
Meah, A. and Jackson, P. 2017. Convenience as care: culinary antinomies in practice, Environment and Planning A, 49, 2065-81.
Bente Halkier
Department of Sociology
Mail: beh@soc.ku.dk
Phone: +45 35 33 50 44
The project was funded by:
FOCAS has received a three year funding from ERA-Net SUSFOOD (European Commission)
Project: Food, convenience and sustainability (FOCAS)
PI for the Danish part of the project: Bente Halkier
Start: 2014
End: 2017