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Book Review: Families and Kinship in Contemporary Europe: Rules and Practices of Relatedness

priating’ and ‘distancing’. The second case study looks at how food consumers are responding to a perceived rise in the health risks of eating contaminated food. This time there were six focus groups with a total of 31 parents of children under age five. The following chapter considers a more diffuse set of pressures on people to do more cooking ‘from scratch’ rather than using highly processed or pre-cooked food. Eight women who read a particular women’s magazine were interviewed and participated in an auto-photography project. Three of the women also took part in focus groups with their friends. The final study addresses the way a sample of 19 ‘Pakistani Danes’ respond to public health information about improving nutrition, using individual and family interviews and auto-photography. This sample is particularly problematic, given that Pakistan is a large and highly diverse country, and the author ignores a host of issues relating to the politics of immigrant ethnicity. In each case study, Halkier identifies a number of different ‘doings and sayings’ which respondents adopt in handling challenges to their existing practices. In his terms, some of these qualify as new practices, while others do not. Sometimes people wholeheartedly change their consumption and ‘buy in’ to new ways of shopping, cooking and serving, but others are more ambivalent and resistant, and some find that despite their desires they cannot fit new food practices into their budgets or routines. Or at least this is what they say, since the study tells us nothing about what they actually do in their kitchens. Overall, this study has the advantage of being explicit about its theoretical and practical goals. Those who are interested in practice theory and consumption will find the author’s exposition useful, particularly because he shows that constructs like the ‘green consumer’ or the ‘foodie’ are not particularly useful in understanding how people actually deal with the daily tasks of choosing, preparing and serving food. Instead, the book argues that changing food consumption is a product of social negotiation within the context of many complex ideological and structural constraints. Another important contribution of the book is that it includes many useful summaries of the findings of other research in a rapidly growing literature on changing food consumption. More general readers, however, will find the book tough-going because it is dense and jargon-laden, and very short on the kind of context that would make the interview data more engaging and informative. It is more a demonstration of how a theory works, than a substantive contribution to our understanding of how peoples’ food behaviour is affected by their engagement with mass media; in fact the book hardly mentions how people engage with specific kinds of media in everyday life. More seriously, it never addresses the differences in class, wealth or culture that have direct and obvious effects on peoples’ understanding of food, their relationships with mass media and their ability to change their diets.