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Elizabeth Murphy: Senior Lecturer, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Susan Parker: Research Fellow, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Christine Phipps: Former Research Fellow, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: We are grateful for the co- operation of the families and health professionals who took part in this study and to Anne Murcott for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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I just give him a packet of crisps, just to keep him quiet while you're concentrating on what you've got to get ... if I don't distract him you find you've come away with half the stuff you don't want."
The science of nutrition has cast a long shadow over the study of food choice. Nutritional scientists' legitimate preoccupation with the links between food and physical functioning has served to distract social scientists from the broader context within which decisions about food are made. A focus upon the question of why people engage in healthy or unhealthy dietary behaviours has tended to obscure the twin realities that:
- many so-called food choices are only tangentially about food per se;
- even where food choices are more centrally about food they are not always made in terms of the nutritional functions of food.
In this paper we draw upon data from our study of the choices which mothers make about infant feeding, to illustrate the potential pitfalls associated with the assumptions that food choices are primarily about food and that nutrition is the primary framework within which people decide how to eat. The importance of the non-nutritional aspects of food choice has emerged as an important theme in a number of other projects within The Nation's Diet Programme (Murcott, 1997). Early results from these others studies demonstrate that, whether one is concerned with what is eaten at home or away from home, nutritional aspects of food consumption are continuously interwoven with a range of other considerations and constraints, many of which ostensibly are unrelated to food. In this paper we argue that, in relation to infants as to other population groups, food has both symbolic and practical functions and that the practical functions are more...