Conclusion
This paper has explored the relationship between families and food, arguing that changing domestic practices associated with food and eating are a valuable lens on contemporary family life, while changes in family life underpin the commercial challenges of food marketing and retail. The paper began by reviewing a series of recent TV adverts, which provide insight into the dynamics and diversity of contemporary family life. The “audiencing” of these adverts was then discussed, including the way they might be read in different social contexts where, for example, divorced or separated families provide a particular set of circumstances that may have emotional resonance for other kinds of families and household contexts.
Having probed the relationship between families and food in terms of the “discourse of decline” and the gendered assumptions that attach to “feeding the family”, the paper then explored the particular context of convenience food, whose use is commonly subject to negative moralisation. On the basis of ethnographically-informed research, the paper challenged the conventional opposition between convenience and care, arguing that in some circumstances and on some occasions, the use of convenience food can be justified as an expression of care rather than as evidence of a dereliction of familial duty. The paper also explored the potential for analysing humour as an index of the tensions that arise when cooking and eating in such a highly moralised context. In each case, the paper argues, familial fictions (as depicted in TV advertising for food) are of more than passing interest. Besides their commercial and entertainment value, they are a rich and relatively neglected resource for researching the links between food and family, convenience and care.
