ABSTRACT
If we conceptualize a social practice as an ensemble of relationships, emotional states and material artifacts constrained by structures of power and reproduced as a familiar routine, we can see that practices combine to form a way of life, a structure of activity and attitudes akin to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (Bourdieu 1977). But practices are contingent and open to disruption, questioning, challenge, and reform. The structures that both shape, and are shaped by, the habits of mind that enact habitus are capable of being re-interpreted and transformed. For example, the practice of factory production not only patterns the behavior and disposition of labor and capital but it also carries in it, as Marx noted, the possibility for transformation. “Structures, then, are sets of mutually sustaining schemes and resources that empower and constrain social action. But their reproduction is never automatic” (Sewell 1992: 19). The social practice of food consumption is the subject of the present chapter.
