Cooking up change
Food practices and class trajectories across the life course
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3426328 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Vasco Ramos (0000-0003-4379-2354, University of Lisbon, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-12 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Sociological Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00380261251339266 |
| OpenAlex | W4410327731 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 53 |
Food and eating are critical sites for analysing everyday life and social change. Amid growing concerns about health, sustainability and neoliberal pressures for individual responsibility, there is increasing pressure to reshape how individuals relate to food. This study addresses the evolution of food practices across the life course, examining how social class and trajectories shape food-related habits. Drawing on a Bourdieusian relational phenomenology, the research explores how individuals adapt their food practices in response to evolving social contexts. Using life history interviews and ethnographic accounts, the research shows that while early familial socialisation establishes foundational food repertoires, key life transitions and experiences of social mobility often prompt a re-evaluation of food practices. Upwardly mobile individuals often frame dietary changes as projects of self-reinvention, leveraging cultural capital to align with health-conscious or cosmopolitan norms, whereas working-class participants emphasise pragmatic adjustment to constraints and expectations. The findings challenge deterministic readings of Bourdieu, while demonstrating that practices are dynamically reshaped through accumulated knowledge and reflexive engagement. Crucially, narratives of change are themselves classed, reflecting inequalities in symbolic mastery. The study underscores how food practices both reproduce and occasionally contest social inequalities through the enduring influence of class trajectory. It further argues that even though institutional interventions are more effective in promoting socially desirable change, they often carry symbolic violence
Class (philosophy) · Course (navigation) · Epistemology · Life course approach · Sociology · Engineering · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Psychology · Social and Cultural Dynamics · Social Psychology · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics
Feeding the family
Critical social theory
Handbook of the Life Course
Food Waste
The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity
The Sociology of Economic Life
Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique
The emotional management of motherhood
Food neophobia and ‘picky/fussy’ eating in children
Changing eating practices after midlife
Fridge stories and other tales from the kitchen
Foodwork in Newly Married Couples
Things like tinned burgers and tinned macaroni, I ate as a kid - I would not look at it twice!” Understanding changing eating practices across the lifecourse
Eating with children
Food consumption, social class and taste in contemporary Portugal
Cooking with Bimby in a moment of recruitment
Intensive mothering in hard times
Are lifecourse transitions opportunities for moving to more sustainable consumption
How consumption prescriptions affect food practices
Practice-ing behaviour change
School meals as a resource for low-income families in three European countries
Agency, ‘good motherhood’ and ‘a load of mush’
Proper meals in transition
Food choices among newly married couples
Everyday distinction and omnivorous orientation
A downturn or a window of opportunity? How Danish and French parents perceive changes in healthy eating in the transition to parenthood
The Hysteresis Effect
Bourdieu, Practice and Change
People Moving with Food from and to Northern Europe
Consumption and Theories of Practice
Habits and orders of everyday life
How (not) to feed young children
Beyond Bourdieu
Cultural Knowledge and Social Inequality
From the habitus to an individual heritage of dispositions. Towards a sociology at the level of the individual
Habitus Clivé and the Emotional Imprint of Social Mobility
The Framing of Social Class Distinctions through Family Food and Eating Practices
A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus
Toward a Theory of Social Practices
Pierre Bourdieu and the Reproduction of Determinism
Do Omnivores Perform Class Distinction? A Qualitative Inspection of Culinary Tastes, Boundaries and Cultural Tolerance
Cuisine, Health and Table Manners
Positioning Food Cultures
Hysteresis and the sociological perspective in a time of crisis
Phenomenological Additions to the Bourdieusian Toolbox
Pierre Bourdieu on social transformation, with particular reference to political and symbolic revolutions
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |