Kitchen Tours

The added dimension of watching and listening extended beyond conversations about participant photos to include actively witnessing the ways participants negotiate and engage with food-related spaces. I saw these observational encounters as necessary to provide a rich understanding of how my participants perceive and experience the research context itself and therefore, provide a richer understanding of their food practices in the home. Not only did this enable me to listen to, experience, and observe participant judgements and knowledge about food, but it also enabled better engagement with the material and sensory contexts where their everyday lives are lived (Pink 2004; Pink et al 2015). By actually ‘being there’, I was able to observe how feeding and eating are so entangled with other practices. As with all ethnographic kinds of research, some of these observations were opportunistic. For instance, my interview with Layla was intercut with interruptions from her two young children, who she was helping cut out magazine pictures for a collage. In what Mannay and Morgan (2015) refer to as the ‘waiting field’, rather than intruding on the generation of data, these times when I waited for her to return to our conversation offered opportunities to engage deeper with her experience. Layla often spoke of the difficulties of preparing food while caring for her young children. The actual experience of having our conversation

4 _{Throughout the analysis, interview extracts are dealt with as follows: three dots (...) denote a pause; six dots}

with a space in the middle (... ...) represent the removal of words; brackets indicate non-verbal communication (for instance, laughter), or my observations of participant action (for instance, participant folds the washing).

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interrupted acted to situate and enrich her narrative in these everyday moments of competing responsibilities. Asides from this, most of these observational research

interactions were intentional. They took the form of quasi-domestic ‘go-along’ interviews (Kusenbach 2003), where I accompanied my participants around the home and kitchen as they cooked or carried out other domestic work. For instance, Grace was preparing crème caramels for a dinner party later that evening; Peter, having just returned from work, was cooking dinner for himself and his partner; and Harriet spent most of our second interview ironing. This added dimension of sensory observation ‘thickened’ the interview data by ‘allowing for a focus on talk as part of situated action’ (Evans 2012: 44).

In addition, I invited my participants to show me around their kitchens and food-related spaces. This provided a number of observational foci to enrich the verbal data. For instance, it was during these tours when I noted that many kitchens displayed items such as meal planners and shopping lists attached to fridges and notice boards. The observation of these visual markers of organisation strategies, together with participant-led tours through spaces where food is stored, prepared, and eaten, delineated the ways in which food practices are constrained and enabled by time and space. This in itself stimulated further discussions about the multi-linear processes of feeding, bringing to the fore aspects of participants’ lived experience of food, which may otherwise not have been immediately visible.

Following Hurdley’s point that ‘domestic material cultural displays’ (2006: 721) can be used as objects around which to narrate identities, I invited participants to share stories about food-related ‘talking points’. This allowed me to garner a deep understanding about participants’ relationship to the process of consumption and the complexities of

domestication. For example, by making cookbooks, the contents of spice racks, or coffee machines the subject of stories, these stories then became illustrative of how objects are symbolically and physically integrated into everyday domesticity. This contextual focus on materiality highlighted the ways in which participants draw on embodied knowledge to enhance the materiality of food and food-related objects with symbolic meaning. In

addition, I invited participants to show and talk me through food storage areas. Motivated to stay close to the materiality of food, these fridge, freezer, and ‘cupboard rummages’ (Evans 2012: 44) were another important means of identifying the embodied relations we have with food. For instance, when talking about expiry dates, it was through the process of looking through food storage areas that participants showed me how they discerned a

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food’s edibility. I was invited to smell an out-of-date yoghurt or take a closer look at packets of herbs which were years past their sell-by-date. Through this process of looking and finding, participants demonstrated the ways in which their practical logic operates via visceral and corporeal assessments of a food’s edibility.

Finally, I invited participants to narrate their life stories via the contents of food cupboards. Most participants’ cupboards contained no foods which were reminiscent of their

childhoods. This is an important finding as the chapters to come will demonstrate because it highlights how participant food tastes can be disconnected from those of their childhood, regardless of their individual class histories. Aside from that, the act of looking often jogged participant memories and became a starting point for the recollection of childhood food practices. These life histories, spoken in situ and narrated with the props of food spaces, generated rich data to compliment the food biographies of our first research interaction. For instance, Linda discovered a bottle of vinegar in her cupboard:

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Linda: Oh and the vinegar. We always had one of those. I use that for cleaning the windows more than anything else (laughs).

KG: Oh do you? Can I take a photo of that?

Linda: That’s kind of reminiscent of childhood. There was always salt and vinegar. What else is there? Oh and Bird’s custard of course. Again, I mean that’s right at the back which shows how often it gets used. But that reminds me of childhood and I think it’s even the same picture.

Finally, many of my own observations were photographed using my phone. While my observations are used to inform analysis, they are not always present in the form of a tangible image. The images I do use are not intended to objectify or to generalise. Rather, they represent my experience of these particular interactions and the ‘context, negotiations and intersubjectivities through which knowledge was produced’ (Pink 2001: 18). I discuss above how participant photographs act to visually produce and represent knowledge and experiences. These images are significant in terms of what they reveal about what the participants chose to represent, and what they identified as important for the research. As such, they act as a different sort of data to images produced by me, since my photographs are my interpretation of their world. While participants are excluded from the process of interpreting my photographs, there were a number of occasions when we engaged in interpreting aspects of food-related observations to share knowledge. The following section will elaborate on this further by accounting for reflexivity, positionality, and reciprocity in the production of the data which informs the analysis.