Reframing Convenience Food

Professor Bente Halkier has contributed to the book ‘Reframing Convenience Food’.

The book questions the simplistic view that convenience food is unhealthy and environmentally unsustainable. By exploring how various types of convenience food have become embedded in consumers’ lives, it considers what lessons can be learnt from the commercial success of convenience food for those who seek to promote healthier and more sustainable diets. The book draws on findings from comparative research in Denmark, Germany, Sweden and the UK on four different types of convenient ways of providing meals in regular households, namely ready meals, baby food, canteen food, and meal box schemes. The main analytical contribution of the book is to reframe the category of convenience food into convenient ways of providing meals. This enables sociological studies of contemporary food provisioning, cooking, and eating to see convenience as an integral part of food practices in everyday life and not as a morally problematic phenomenon in contrast with the idealized notions of cooking from scratch.

Peter Jackson, Helene Brembeck, Jonathan Everts, Maria Fuentes, Bente Halkier, Frej Hertz, Angela Meah, Valerie Viehoff, & Christine Wenzl, Reframing Convenience Food, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.