Morality Of Consumption Research Articles

The moral economy of ready-made food.

The aim of this paper is to develop and apply a framework to explore how moralities of consumption are constituted in and through markets. Using the case of ready-made foods, this paper argues moral economies are comprised through interactions between micro-, meso- and macro-level processes in the form of instituted systems of provision, state regulation, collective food customs promoted though media, NGOs and lifestyle practitioners, and the everyday reflections of consumers. Building on a theoretical framework developed to understand the moral economy of work and employment (Bolton and Laaser 2013), this paper explores how markets for ready-made food are incessantly negotiated in the context of moral ideas about cooking, femininity and individual responsibility. It focuses on 'new' market innovations of fresh ready-to-cook meal solutions and explores how these products are both a response to moralizing discourses about cooking 'properly', as well as an intervention into the market that offers opportunities for new moral identities to be performed. Using data gathered from interviews with food manufacturers and consumers, I advocate for a multi-layered perspective that captures the dynamic interplay between consumers, markets and moralities of consumption.

Moral economies of consumption

The aim of this article is twofold: first, to bring together debates about enduring normative concerns surrounding the morality of consumption with more recent concerns about the ways specific moralities are constituted in and through markets. The second aim is to develop the concept of ‘moral economy’ and call for an approach to its study, attentive to how moralities of consumption develop through interactions between instituted systems of provision, forms of state regulation, customs within communities and the everyday reflections of consumers about the things that matter to them. As consumers are increasingly asked to factor environmental and fair labour concerns into their purchase and post-purchase habits, there is a real need to understand how moralities of consumption are both formatted through institutional frameworks and shaped everyday by actors from within. After developing a framework for the study of moral economies, this article explores in depth the experiences of one couple in relation to the cessation of a cardboard recycling collection in Shropshire (England) to show why a multilevel perspective is needed to appreciate the place of morality within the market.

Food and the self: consumption, production and material culture

Acknowledgments Introduction: Foodies: Material Culture and the Self in Postindustrial Society 1. Moralities of Productive Leisure and Material Culture 2. Learning Things: Material Media and Gastronomic Education 3. Consuming Things: Material Cultures and Moralities of Consumption 4. Dining Out: Restaurants, Serious Consumption and Molecular Gastronomy 5. Shopping: Slow Food, Ethical Consumption and the Morality of Quality 6. Producing Things: Material Media and Moralities of Production 7. Cooking: Manual Leisure and Material Production 8. Blogging: Digital Leisure and Material Media Production Afterword: Materializing Moral Selves Bibliography Index

Tasting but not Tasting: MasterChef Australia and Vicarious Consumption

This article explores how people “taste” food media in order to develop cultural taste. It examines the vicarious consumption practices of three households of the popular reality television talent quest, MasterChef Australia (MCA). Vicarious consumption is the enjoyment of something, in this case gourmet food, through a third party (Veblen). The paper argues that the audience’s use of vicarious consumption is an empowering practice. As such, the article challenges Veblen’s negative view of vicarious consumption – the sentiment of which continues to underpin contemporary reality television and food media discourse (see Rousseau). Furthermore, this article expands upon Adema’s exploration of the practice in relation to food television in which she highlights that households gain more pleasure from watching food television rather than cooking and eating. Each audience member engaged in vicarious consumption and used MCA in conjunction with other food media for different reasons. For instance, one viewer used vicarious consumption to control her food intake, while another gained nostalgic pleasure from food media. These approaches to vicarious consumption allow the MCA viewers to negotiate conflicting discourses of cultural taste to construct a positive identity for themselves as "everyday foodies." "Everyday foodies" are individuals who embrace and incorporate an appreciation of gourmet food culture into their busy lifestyles, but are limited by time, money, health or confidence.

Food Blogging and Food-related Media Convergence

Food Blogging and Food-related Media Convergence

Making the Self in a Material World: Food and Moralities of Consumption

Food is increasingly central to consumer culture today. From fine dining restaurants to farmers’ markets, stainless steel kitchenware to celebrity chef cookbooks, there is a stylish array of culinary commodities available for fashioning our identities. Yet this occurs at a time when commodity consumption more generally is under greater question as a site of self-making, with the rise of anti-consumerist sentiment. This article examines how people negotiate these issues in their identity formation, by focusing on those for whom food is central to their sense of self: ‘foodies’. I draw on theories of consumption, identity and material culture, in particular the work of Daniel Miller, to examine ethnographic research undertaken with foodies in Melbourne, Australia.

Fields of Obligation

It was not so long ago that mangoes, papaya and snow peas evoked images of tropical climes and exotic peoples. Recently, however, the consumption of so-called luxury fruits and vegetables has elicited a different sort of imagery. Far from the lure of seductive landscapes, today’s consumer is confronted with haunting images of toxic fields, child slavery and the African poor. Such images are part of a new morality of consumption, where consumers, NGOs, trade unions and global supermarkets aspire to ‘save’ the African worker from the downside of globalization. This article explores the ways in which Kenya’s highly valuable vegetable trade has become the field on which notions of justice, economic rights and African development are played out. Based on archival research and consumer interviews, it focusses specifically on how the ethical turn of UK consumers (and the retailers’ branding of this sensibility) is rooted in an older legacy, whereby 19th-century liberal considerations of duty, morality and progress inhabited the agenda of the late colonial state. The article suggests that, in both cases, African labor is an arena in which discourses of justice are played out, as a consuming public (re)constitute the African worker as an object of their duty and obligation.

Designing the Morality of Consumption: “Chamber of Horrors” at the Museum of Ornamental Art, 1852–53

Introduction In Britain, where all sumptuary laws were abolished as early as 1604 (the earliest in the world), the “taste” of everyday things became an issue of great importance by the mid-nineteenth century, enough to give birth to a national institution solely dedicated to the matter. This was the Museum of Ornamental Art, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, whose primary aim was to “improve the public’s taste.” The term “taste” was introduced to Britain from France in the eighteenth century, and was discussed mainly within intellectual, aristocratic, or professional circles. Edmund Burke argued “On Taste” in the preface to his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756); and the title of Thomas Chippendale’s book, Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director: Being a Large Collection of the Most Elegant and Useful Designs of Household Furniture, in the Most Fashionable Taste (1754), was clearly suggestive of its audience. In the following century, however, after Britain had experienced the industrial revolution, “taste” was placed in a much wider context. A.W. Pugin associated taste, society, and morality in his Contrasts: Or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day, Shewing the Present Decay of Taste (1836). Works such as The Hand-Book of Taste: Or, How to Observe Works of Art, especially Cartoons, Pictures, and Statues (1843) by Fabius and periodicals including The Artist and Amateur’s Magazine: A Work Devoted to the Interests of the Arts of Design and the Cultivation of Taste, to which William Etty and John Ruskin contributed, intended for a nonprofessional and middle-class reader, appeared soon after. So far, the focal subjects of these how-to publications were architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and music, which, in general, were either appreciated in public or possessed by a luxuried few. Towards the middle of the century, a different trend emerged. Taste in consumption was discussed for a nonprofessional, more general audience that would spend money on home decoration. Domestic objects became as serious a subject as any work of art, as represented by Charles Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste in

The Morality of Consumption

The Morality of Consumption