home : hartbeat : what-for-dinner-understanding-meal-fragmentation-as-a-cultural-phenomenon

11.11.2004

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

What Matters is How We Eat...

Our ongoing qualitative and ethnographic research with the American consumer is revealing that eating has become more and more a lonely activity, yet we still hang onto two extreme eating ideals:

Individual Self-Control
How we eat connects more and more to our broader notions of self-control, self-discipline and the moraility that is associated with our cultural imperative of constant self-improvement. This is the focus of the entire weight management industry.
Traditional Family Dinner
In America, however, the family dinner always seems to be tied to nostalgic notions of yesteryear, when life wasn't so fast-paced, and when people seemed to agree more on what to eat. This ideal celebrates a mode of eating that isn't lonely at all, where food is shared in a daily ritual with the family. This ideal, however, is just that...an ideal. Consumers are not experiencing a nostalgic longing for the past that they wish to regain, but rather a guilty obligation they feel beholden to.

America's Dinner Culture

The Ideal Dinner...
For a while after the end of WWII, this was a bedrock daily event for the middle class American home. It certainly was for most Americans when we were a primarily agrarian society (i.e., roughly the period before 1900).
This traditional dinner involves what anthropologist call "commensality" or "the sharing of food within a coherent, culturally recognized kin group of some kind. Sharing the same food, throughout history, has been a key marker of social intimacy in and beyond family units.
...and the Real Dinner...
But today, we rarely meet consumers who can claim, honestly, to serve a family meal seven nights a week where everyone in the household attends and where everyone eats the same food together. This is true even for those with stay-at-home parents. Increasingly, we are finding that some pople who claim to have six to seven family dinners a week make this claim only because their definition of "family dinner" has expanded beyond the "traditional" notion of commensality to include:
Occasions when everyone eats the same thing but not at the same time
Occasions when everyone eats together but when some members receive individually tailored meals (i.e., everyone failed to share the same food).

Archives »
Click here for an archive of past HartBeat articles

digg
del.icio.us

reddit
twitter

friendfeed

StumbleUpon

What's For Dinner? understanding Meal Fragmentation As A Cultural Phenomenon

Consumer Demand for Variety: the Fragmentation of Eating Preferences

Every night at your local grocery store, there is a steady stream of consumers wandering in after work. Many are burdened by a question that seems awfully basic, "What are we going to have for dinner?" Although many other consumers have already planned their dinner that night, even these lucky ones have experienced, on a regular basis, this banal terror of the contemporary American household.

The reality is that very few homes simply cycle through a set of fixed dishes every week and remain satisfied. Regardless of income, most everyone we meet shares a burning need to "mix it up." Thanks to the food and restaurant industry, the ways to do this are ever growing (e.g., fast casual, fast food, pizza delivery, ethnic takeout, full-service restaurant, frozen food, fresh prepared foods from the grocery store, cooking at home from groceries on hand, eating leftovers). And, in most cases, simply switching the way dinner gets made allows an easy switch of cuisine as well.

There are two primary sources for this cultural fragmentation of our dietary preferences:

Increased individualization of culinary preferences (especially among pre-teen children)
Increased presence of dietary restrictions (due to food sensitivities, allergies and forms of vegetarianism)

In other words, cultural forces beyond the household are increasingly potent in fragmenting any united dietary patterns within it. We increasingly meet ordinary families who look something like this:

Mom is on a low cholesterol diet and avoids dairy
Dad hates veggie meat substitutes and most Asian foods
Daughter (15) is a vegetarian and loves Thai and Chinese stir fry
Son (9) loves fried meats (nuggets, chicken breasts) and only eats tomatoes and green beans for veggies.

Grocery shopping is no longer about getting food for family meals. Rather it's primarily about accommodating the dietary preferences of individual household members.

Individualized Daily Schedules: the Fragmentation of the Eating Occasion

Because of the enormous time constraints facing most American families, sitting around the dinner table at the same time every night is increasingly an anachronistic reality, in our opinion. Instead, "family dinner" is less defined by eating together than it is by making sure each individual gets fed in a way that doesn't disrupt their schedule (and their dietary preferences). Increasingly, it affects all manner of homes, regardless of their level of affluence or education.

Our in-depth qualitative research methods encourage consumers to relax enough to 'confess' when their family doesn't meet the morally loaded ideal of the "traditional family dinner" outlined earlier.

Once this confession is made, consumers often reveal fascinating modalities of family dining that marketers and business people might easily overlook if they were to market to an idealized family dinner experience...that happens less and less frequently. Here are some counterintuitive examples from recent research which reveal how consumer products may be marketed/designed to an ideal but used very differently.

Although marketed as an easy way to meet the ideal of the "traditional family dinner," family-sized frozen meals are just as likely to be used when the household's non-cooking parent is the only parent around that evening (i.e. when everyone won't be eating together).
Convenience-oriented dinner mixes may be used not to reach toward the ideal of the home-cooked meal but rather as a badly needed respite from the demands of that ideal...by 'cheating' in a rebellious sort of way. Sometimes, teen-agers are given these mixes to use, when Mom doesn't want to cook that evening.

What if marketers created messaging around this rebel Mom rather than pretend that the frozen meal somehow allows her to fulfill the ideal of the home-cooked traditional dinner...which most mothers don't buy into, since little cooking is involved.

Comment »