Constellations of children’s everyday worlds: exploring interconnections between food practices and other everyday practices

Purpose To explore how children’s food practices (i.e. planning, acquiring, preparing, consuming and tidying-up) and other everyday practices (e.g. play, socialising) interconnect and influence each other to create constellations of practices. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative participatory research using draw-and-tell interviews and Photovoice methods to garner the views of 42 eight-to twelve-year-old Australian children. Abductive thematic analyses and matrix coding queries were employed to examine the interrelated nature of everyday practices. Findings Connections between food and other everyday practices were formed through materials (e.g. lunchboxes), meanings (e.g. commensality) and competence (e.g. knowledge). Examining these connections and the practice bundles subsequently created, provided insight into how and why practices were performed. Whether children performed food practices was contingent on practices being situated in harmonious or conflicting bundles with other everyday practices. For conflicting bundles, dominating practices tended to have prioritised meanings (e.g. enjoyment). Further, the co-dependent nature of food practices was revealed, emphasising a need to consider preceding “upstream” food practices (e.g. acquisition) when attempting to shape “downstream” performances (e.g. consumption). Research limitations/implications May deepen current understandings of how food practices emerge, are performed by children and why some practices dominate in spaces while others disappear. This research may inform targeted reinforcement or interruption of connections between food and other everyday practices, building upon current literature of maintaining or transforming children’s food practice performances. Originality/value Examining children’s perceptions of their food through a social practice theory lens may add to current knowledge of how food fits within the context of their everyday lives.