ABSTRACT

Rural food provisioning practices offer a focus through which to analyse the impact of modernisation on the rural world. The beginning of the 20th century saw the decrease of auto-consumption in rural France, in favour of more and more purchases in small shops such as specialists or groceries. The data used here come from Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE) surveys on food consumption, conducted in 1978 and 1991. Between 1978 and 1991, two provisioning places saw their market shares grow significantly in rural areas: hypermarkets and supermarkets. In urban areas, hypermarkets and supermarkets developed, but so did bakeries, while butchers, groceries and small stores decreased in number. In the rural population, the relative differentiation has decreased in growing provisioning places, and has increased in the declining ones, because standard deviations have moved more slowly than the means in both cases.