The supermarket revisited: Families and food shopping

Bringing children to the supermarket is stereotyped as being a ‘nightmare’. As Holden notes, the supermarket visit with a child means dealing with marketing stimuli in a public place while at the same time having to buy necessities for one’s everyday life (Holden, 1983). Pettersson, Olsson, and Fjellstrom (2004) found that some parents avoid shopping for food with their children as they experience this as stressful and exhausting. However, when actually looking at studies on parent/child supermarket shopping, very few signs of coercive and pestering behaviour are found, and other types of relational interaction seem to be much more important in family supermarket practice (Gram, 2014; Marshall, 2014; Commuri & Gentry, 2000). This chapter shows that shopping with children can also be a pleasant experience and is an opportunity for both doing and displaying family (Finch, 2007; DeVault, 1991) in an everyday life that is relatively segregated between work, school, spare time activities and electronic devices. As noted by Phoenix (2005: 88) declining birthrates have meant that children have taken the central role in parents’ lives and ‘are seen to reflect on their parents’ identities and affluence’, and family food consumption is not just about product choice but also about social interaction and identity (Jackson, 2009). This chapter is about families shopping for food together. Going to the supermarket has become, if not an everyday routine, then at least a very frequent part of our food practices in the Western world. The arenas of food (Halkier, 2010), childhood and motherhood (Eyer, 1996; Zelizer, 1985) are loaded with values, norms and ideology, which parents and children need to navigate (see Marshall, Chapter 13). In the following account family supermarket visits are seen as collective processes with high levels of routinised behaviour intertwined with ideals and social norms about which food ought to be eaten, how parent/child interaction should take place, parents’ and children’s positions when interacting in the supermarkets, while at the same time being tempted by the food products on offer, and parents and children possibly having different ideas about what the family should eat. Practices of buying food involve at the same time pleasant intergenerational togethernessand anxiety and tension. The study is based on 50 observations of adults and children shopping for food together in the northern part of Denmark.