Abstract
This thesis focuses on how food provisioning platforms are understood and appropriated in everyday life. Taking food provisioning as social practice, it explores how platforms help organise everyday food and non-food practices, and whether they have the potential to reconfigure food consumption. This exploration is important for contemporary food-related social and environmental issues because although platforms are claimed to offer opportunities for more sustainable food consumption, they risk entrenching existing patterns of food consumption and exacerbating the problems.This study examined three types of food provisioning platforms in Bristol, UK, namely takeaway delivery, online grocery, and box schemes. Drawing on social practice theory, Science and Technology Studies, and Actor Network Theory, it employs a range of methods, including mapping platforms and their representations, food diaries, 23 semi-structured interviews (with kitchen demonstration) and observations (with digital walkthroughs), to examine the organisation and performance of platform-based food consumption. Attention is paid to the appropriation of platforms in everyday life, mainly from three perspectives: the organisation of everyday food and non-food practices, the material arrangements where food practices transpire, and consumers’ interactions with platform technologies.
Data analysis reveals that although convenience is generally presented as the reason for using food provisioning platforms, people actually use platforms to coordinate food provisioning practices and other food and non-food practices, in temporal and material dimensions. First, consumers use platforms to reallocate, synchronise, sequence and ‘rhythmise’ food practices (food planning, purchasing, storing, cooking, eating and waste managing) and other non-food practices (working, commuting, and childcaring). Second, heterogeneous material elements within and beyond the household (including food, digital devices and infrastructure, kitchen facilities, food boxes, and transportation) are drawn in and arranged in ways that support or constrain the performance of food practices. Third, food provisioning platforms can be considered as market devices, whose affordances and scripts (platform designs and technologies) contribute to the use of platforms in everyday life, and also to practice coordination and potential reconfiguration. In conclusion, it is argued that whether food provisioning platforms offer chances to reconfigure or consolidate existing food practices depends on whether they can change the ways food practices are organised and performed (temporally and materially). Although takeaway platforms and online grocery platforms are more widely used and incorporate more digital technologies, box schemes offer more scope for reconfiguring food consumption.
| Date of Award | 18 Jun 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Dale Southerton (Supervisor) & David M Evans (Supervisor) |