Feeding practices: the concept, types, and functions

Abstract

The paper offers the sociological conceptualization of feeding practices and its interpretation as a system of actions and interactions between persons and groups aimed at satisfying their natural need for food determined by social norms. These practices act as a culture product and are embedded in social collectives’ lifestyle constructing social reality. Dietary culture represents a sustainable standardized model. However, in the context of food abundance, it modifies due to new tastes, changing food attitudes and nutrition technologies. Acculturation processes actualizing national cuisines and feeding practices determine feeding behaviour. On the one hand, the existing stereotypes relating to feeding practices simplify ‘rules of conduct’. On the other, they can serve as barriers that hinder their development. The authors argue that social groups and institutes govern and control feeding practices. The paper singles out the following functions of feeding practices: status, identification, psycho-emotional, regulative, communication and socialization functions. Moreover, the authors stated that in modern social systems there also exist latent functions, one of them being social inequality reproduction. This paper offers a typology of feeding practices: individual and collective, home and out-of-home, everyday and ceremonial, hazard and safe, ethnic/religious and universal, and other feeding practices. The increasingly sophisticated social structure, new global challenges are converting old and shaping new types of dietary behavior, thus transforming social life.