With industrialisation’s different phases and its consequences of mass production and consumption, food provisioning modes changed dramatically throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as researchers from both sides of the Atlantic have shown (Bromer 1986; Herpin and Verger 1986/2008; Cohen 2004; Heilbrunn 2005). Concentrating on the latter part of the twentieth century and focusing on food consumption in France, we can see that post-war reconstruction prioritised the modernisation of agriculture, which led to mechanisation and the development of the agrofood industry. Thus, for example, according to INSEE and CREDOC surveys (Herpin and Verger 1986/2008), the average national share of production for one’s own consumption shrank from 6.6% in 1956 (24% for farmers) to 0.6% in 1985. The distance from farms to consumers’ plates grew, and they now almost exclusively receive processed and standardised products (Grignon and Grignon 1999), for which Fischler (1990) coined the term “Unidentified Edible Objects”. Furthermore, the multiple health scares at the end of the century along with the actions taken by organisations promoting ethical consumption have called attention to production conditions and chemical additives, compelling consumers to consider their practices more closely. In addition, for eaters, complex decisions are called for between seeking a low price, production quality and distribution traceability, and accommodations among the restrictions they face are many. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau (1984) emphasised the fact that consumers are not passive agents, but in day-to-day activities such as food practices, they must try and juggle the many and contradictory restrictions they are faced with.

Nevertheless, whether looking for a better price or for satisfactory production or distribution conditions in terms of health, ethics or politics, French eaters are multiplying their food provisioning sources. On the one hand, with 806 in 2016 (CCNC 2017), France has the greatest number of shopping centres in Europe, while on the other hand, consumers continue to patronise local markets (and some make a point of waiting until the market is closing to be able to negotiate the price), purchase fruit and vegetables from vans by the side of the road in the summer, go directly to producers, produce their own food, or for certain categories, buy from organic food shops or join AMAPs (Association de Maintien de l’Agriculture Paysanne, the French equivalent of North American Community Supported Agriculture). Eaters benefit from the globalisation of the food trade on a macroeconomic scale, providing them with a cheap and diversified food supply whatever the season, while at the same time, they continue to try to make local integration a factor in their consumption to varying degrees in order to address issues that may be economic, health-related, political or ethical.

This special issue of the Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies sets out to describe the social logics that enable consumers to manage their restrictions and resources, leading them to this multimodal provisioning. Although it has become common to make use of multiple suppliers for food provisioning, these places of commodification differ depending on each person’s restrictions. The five articles in this issue make important contributions on this point, which we can underscore in this introduction. In the first section, we examine the way in which consumers mobilise these different suppliers, integrating different practices to authenticate foods. In the second section, we look at the complementarity of the disciplines and methods of this issue’s authors, who share the same comprehensive approach. They pay special attention not only to the meaning consumers give to their provisioning but also to its material aspects, which we analyse in the third section. Lastly, we return to the way in which all these studies incorporate politics, economics and social aspects when analysing the commodification and decommodification occurring in today’s food provisioning.

Multimodality—the development of several types of food authentication

To counter the standardisation of foods in supermarkets, the 1980s saw the emergence of a widespread movement promoting heritage (“patrimonialisation”) (Poulot 1998; Jeudy 2001; Tornatore 2012), mobilising both historical depth and naturalness (Dupré 2006). It gave legitimacy to the revival of traditional products (Bromberger et al. 2004) within a legal framework and a modern economy (Bérard and Marchenay 2004). However, this movement had begun in the interwar period with the growth of tourism (Laferté 2002), with products such as chestnut flour (Dupré 2004), Mortagne black pudding (Gilbert 1994), Noirmoutier salt (Potterie 1994), Morteau sausage and Morbier cheese being used as elements of regional identity (Menant et al. 1996). The task of the Patrimoine Ethnologique (French Ethnological Heritage, working under the Ministry for Culture) was to analyse motivations (Bromberger et al. 2004; Chevallier 1991). The dual nature of households’ consumption has been qualified as paradoxical (Warnier 1994) because “merchandise” signifies goods that are tradable, usually for money, with a “value for use”. Thus, through monetary means, all merchandise can be compared. Authenticity, on the contrary, is a particularity that cannot, ostensibly, be commodified, but one that has nevertheless become the driver of an economy (Esquerre and Boltanski 2017) that some have called “terroir-caisse” (local-tradition cash cow) (Bessière 2012), hence the observation of a paradox, namely the growth of market demand for identifier goods in reference to inalienable historical or geographical roots.

To resolve this paradox, eater consumers mobilise three types of identifying authorities and procedures (Warnier 1994). (1) Sourcing their supplies from a known producer, artisan or seller whose products are respected, well-priced, tasty or healthy, whose production mode is considered sustainable and good for the environment, or to support local employment. Warnier calls this la marchandisation singularisante in reference to Kopytoff’s “resingulariz[ation of] what has been commoditized” (1986). (2) In more anonymous premises for provisioning, certifying authorities guarantees a product’s origin and production mode when the consumer does not personally know its source. This is the primary role of brands, which guarantee the stable taste and value for money upon which consumer confidence is built. Protected Origin (AOC, AOP) and organic farming certification (e.g. AB, Ecocert, Bio Europe and Bio Cohérence in France) rely on specific terms of reference, compliance with which is monitored regularly. (3) Lastly, if we make this analysis by examining practices, we should also take into account the way in which an industrially manufactured product is appropriated by its recurrent use, entering into a family’s gustatory history by reminding young adults of their childhood, for example. This may be a particular brand of spaghetti or a specific chocolate spread. These foods, obtained in a supermarket, will be domesticated through repeated or even daily use, contributing to the construction of a family or age-group food history. We can call this “domestication” (Warnier 1994).

These three authentication modes can be found in the articles, presented from a contemporary perspective. We put forward the hypothesis that the food and health scandals of the last 30 years have strengthened consumers’ demand for traceability to help them authenticate the foods they buy and to manage the risks (Lamine 2008, 2015; Raude 2008). Although eaters do not all patronise the same suppliers for financial, social, cultural or political reasons, the multiplication of types of provisioning and the authentication modes described by this issue’s authors converge with those illustrated by Warnier in the 1990s. However, the aim of contemporary forms of authentication is no longer only to give meaning to mass consumption by means of “singularised” and identified products but to inform the consumer of the economic, social and political conditions of the goods’ production and distribution.

These authentication processes are particularly significant if observed from the perspective of households’ provisioning practices. In 2011, 72% of food purchases were made in supermarkets (Kranklader 2014), and this figure has remained stable since 2011. However, the diversification of provisioning in the remaining 28% has evolved because of the diversification of production and therefore of supply (organic shops, AMAPs, producer cooperatives, internet access, local markets, etc.). As for the differences in economic or social restrictions that exist among consumers, Ferrant and Plessz (2015) note that “the proportion [of income spent on food] has become less divisive in the sense that working class expenditure has been catching up with that of middle class consumers (Bigot and Langlois 2011; Larochette and Sanchez-Gonzalez 2015)” with a variation of 5% from one category to the other for food’s share in households’ consumption expenditure. This can be explained by the fact that in the second half of the twentieth century, the middle class expanded in France (Insee 2014), although categorisations other than income, such as age, gender or domestic situation (couples, divorce with joint custody of children, etc.) make it possible to introduce differences in consumption. Furthermore, in order to understand this provisioning from suppliers other than supermarkets, it is important to take into consideration place of residence, age and household composition. More qualitative studies, such as those by Dubuisson-Quellier (2013); Jung et al. (2014); or Adamiec (2016), have examined the counterculture that these modes of provisioning champion, although they often remain combined with provisioning from supermarkets, as described by Lamine (2008) who studied “occasional organic shoppers”. The interest in understanding this multimodality is not new. In 1991, surveys of the multiplicity of provisioning were already being conducted. For example, the INSEE “consumption and places of food purchase” survey showed that, on average, 35% of French households (39% in the south west of the country: Aquitaine, Midi-Pyrénées, Limousin) tended a vegetable garden, almost 17% kept poultry and 10% raised rabbits (Dubeau 1994), although this represented only 5% of food consumed. Nevertheless, the motivations for this home production were not identical depending on the consumer: Some were motivated by the low cost of production while others saw it as a way of singularising their consumption. However, the non-negligible presence of home production encourages us to consider the question of the decision-making operated by actors between different forms of provisioning. In this respect, with regard to the consumption of vegetables, Caillavet and Nichele (1999) also demonstrated the interdependence of commercial provisioning and home production practices. The research presented in this special issue expands on these studies by shedding light on the dual aspect of contemporary food consumption. On the one hand, eaters benefit from the globalisation of the food trade on a macroeconomic scale, which allows them either diversified provisions whatever the season, or low prices, which, in the current political, moral and health/food hygiene climate, raises questions of traceability and ethics. On the other hand, they continue to make local integration a greater or lesser part of their consumption in order to have power over its authentication.

To understand the articulation of consumers’ approaches as complementary (Lallement 2010), the authors of this special issue describe the logics of action articulating eaters’ social, economic, moral and political restrictions and means and leading them to this multimodality of provisioning practices. While food makes it possible to address the question of (economic, social and cultural) choices and restrictions, how, during these provisionings, are shopping baskets filled? How are notions of balance, health and diet articulated with the economic dimension, social engagement and consideration for different family members’ tastes? How are these unstable elements put forward as motives for decisions depending on the situation? The authors of this issue’s articles have used various methods to shed light on these logics of action.

Different methodological approaches to grasp contemporary provisioning modes

The studies presented here are from three distinct and complementary disciplines: history, comprehensive sociology and anthropology. They are all based on comprehensive qualitative surveys. The historical approach developed by Franck Cochoy contributes to an archaeology of contemporary consumption (Cohen 1996; Ascher 2005; Mermier and Peraldi 2011; Assaf and Camelin 2014). As a socio-historian of marketing, in his work, he retraces the history of supermarket consumption and the emergence of self service (Cochoy 2007, 2015). In this special issue, using a classic historical method of sifting through archives, Cochoy examines the trade magazines of American grocers, mainly and systematically issues of the Progressive Grocer between 1922 and 1959. Using this methodology, he records the transformation of grocers’ selling methods and their consequences on the dual emergence of both a new diet (sold in tins and packets) and an alternative social model for transactions between grocers and their customers. He analyses the transformation of commercial exchange in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century and invites us to take a critical look at the links between commodification and modernity. In today’s climate of distrust of the agrofood industry, these historical studies raise the question: What type of modernity does this type of provisioning give rise to? The author shows how the stability of taste offered to and then sought by consumers, the new forms of food packaging and the new sociabilities between customers and sellers that emerged with self-service have transformed food production conditions (e.g. hygiene standards). This modernity of mass production, distribution and consumption is now being challenged by consumers themselves who seek to authenticate, identify and trace the foods they buy.

In his article, Christophe Serra Mallol seizes on the question of the articulation of tradition and modernity—in this case, provisioning practices—that is classic in anthropology (Kilani 2009) and suggests addressing it by means of a detour—a familiar method in this discipline (ibid.). His investigative work spanning several years compares the practices of eater consumers in two French Polynesian islands, one urban (Papeete) and the other rural (Rapa), on the social, cultural, political and economic fringes of the French state. The nineteenth century colonisation, public transfers due to the implantation of French nuclear infrastructure at the end of the twentieth century and the spread of salaried employment have eroded the pre-colonial model of eating, which was based on home production and social exchanges based on the gift/counter-gift of foods. However, the ethnographic survey conducted on the island of Rapa shows that in a post-colonial context, citizen consumers removed the island’s lands from private ownership laws and re-established a sharing economy for farming and food gifts, promoting self-sufficiency once again. This detour via the island of Rapa and the comparison with Papeete shows how, in a post-colonial context, commercial modernity is not experienced as progress but instead as regression that has contributed to the destruction of local social commensality relations. In a typically anthropological approach, from the fringes, the author sheds light on French majority practices, in what they bring to bear on political and moral critiques of the agrofood industry, and illustrates the articulation of different commercial and non-commercial provisioning practices.

Louis Mathiot also uses the comparative approach, but from the angle of comprehensive sociology, to demonstrate the diversity of significations of the notion of natural, depending on provisioning contexts, and the articulation of middle-class consumers’ different provisioning modes in France (26 families) and Israel (15 families). Qualitative analysis enables him to describe the broad spectrum of significations in each of the two societies. While in both countries, we find the same critical distance with regard to the agrofood industry (accused of disconnecting the eater from production methods), the “edible” and “inedible” classification systems are radically different. This cultural comparison enables Mathiot to highlight the links between naturalness and commodification. He thus shifts the issue of modernity towards an examination of the cultural processes of commodification and decommodification.

Séverine Gojard and Bérangère Véron also use the comparative method (to a different scale of analysis) to understand the restrictions and resources that structure the long-term food practices of non-militant middle-class consumers living in French metropolitan districts defined as mixed. They compare the practices of approximately 30 families from two urban districts, one in the north of Paris that enjoys a varied supply of foods and the other, a small town in the north of France with a less diversified market context. The comprehensive analysis of the interviews they conducted enable them to show four ideal types that take into consideration age (30 to 87 years old) and family structure (children living at home or who have left home), individuals’ resources and restrictions (time, skills, domestic habits) and the material—principally commercial—environment. They stress the importance of taking into account the inequalities created by this context to understand the variability of eating practices qualified as long term by consumers, which cannot be analysed merely by social class and habitus.

In her analysis, Camille Adamiec also accords considerable importance to the contexts of the offer of provisioning and shows the complexity of consumers’ relationships with commodification, which she studied for several years. Unlike the two previous authors, she does not use comparison. Her study examines the proportionally minority consumers in French society who seek to improve their health through their diet. Her analysis is interesting for the light it sheds on the co-construction of a moral framework (the quest for health outside purely medical terms), practices (healthy eating) and the task of justification this involves. This approach demonstrates the links between food and health, increasingly present in a landscape in which public authorities and health professionals are pointing them out with growing regularity.

The qualitative studies presented here use different, complementary methods to address related fields that all provide information, more or less directly, about contemporary forms of food provisioning in France. For a long time, the semiology (Barthes 1972) and sociology of social categorisations (Elias 2012; Bourdieu 1984), taking up the studies by Veblen (1899), confined food provisioning to the sense it has in games of social distinction. However, Marx emphasised the importance of the material dimension in his analysis of commodification’s three phases: production, distribution and consumption. Using different methods, the authors of this special issue analyse the ways in which material dimensions influence or limit the choices made by eaters: methods to organise distribution, a greater or lesser variety of provisioning modes, the articulation of commercial availability and consumers’ time availability, physical techniques and object-techniques mastered for provisioning, artefacts, etc. Despite their different methods, these research scientists examine the ways in which the materiality of foods and of their provisioning need to be taken into consideration to understand the social construction of consumption.

A close examination of provisionings’ materiality

To summarise with regrettable over-simplification (which readers should render more subtle), over the last 30 years, the materialities of objects, techniques and bodies have been the focus of both sociological and anthropological debates. French sociology addressed the issue by analysing uses and technique simultaneously at the Ecole des Mines (Akrich et al. 2006) with the work of Michel Callon (1980, 1998), Bruno Latour (1992) and Madeleine Akrich (1995, 1998) on the one hand, and at Paris 1 University with Alain Gras, Caroline Moricot (Gras et al. 1995) and Gérard Dubey (Gras and Dubey 2009) on the other. Sociology in Britain examined consumption practices as an indication of social structures (Schatzki et al. 2001; Warde 2005; Shove and Pantzar 2010) in reaction to Anglo-Saxon anthropology that studied consumption as a form of cultural appropriation (Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987; Pocius 1993; Glassie 1993). In France, anthropology chose to enter the debate either through techniques (Digard 1979; Cresswell 1983; Jamard 1993; Geslin 1995; Guille-Escuret 2003), sometimes engaging a dialogue with sociology (Latour 1996; Lemonnier 1996), or through heritage promotion (Bromberger et al. 2004; Warnier 1994; Warnier and Rosselin 1996) or through material culture (Segalen and Bromberger 1996; Warnier 1999; Diasio 2004, 2010; Julien and Rosselin 2005, 2009). This issue’s authors conduct their studies within the context of these different perspectives without necessarily having room to make their filiations clear, so we would like to make the most of this introduction to situate them in the debates that have preoccupied the scientific community since the 1980s.

By examining provisioning’s techniques and uses, Franck Cochoy’s study follows Michel Callon’s (Callon et al. 2007) approach, underlining the fact that material resources are not only passive, driven by human beings, but also that they transform those who use them and for whom they are the framework for action. His article analyses how, seeking a Taylorist improvement in business, American grocers’ changes in material organisation from the 1920s to the 1950s eventually exceeded even marketing professionals’ intentions. Self-service led not only to new forms of social relations between grocers and their customers but also to a new diet through the widespread development of tins and packaging for food to enable customers to serve themselves.

Entering the debate by way of provisioning practices, Christophe Serra Mallol joins Cochoy in the historical section of his article, analysing how European colonisation in French Polynesia introduced new foods and the objects socially and technically required to consume them (tables, cutlery and tablecloths). This introduction transformed social relations between individuals, subjectificationsFootnote 1 and the islands’ overall economy as surely as the relations of colonial domination. To access these new goods, it was not only necessary to grow new agricultural crops but also to have the money to buy them. The author analyses how promoting this new diet, along with the paid employment that enabled people to earn the money required for commercial exchange, transformed Polynesian subjects who gradually became reluctant to work the land, preferring instead to buy food. As with Cochoy’s approach, materiality is not only a framework for action but also one of its building blocks. His demonstration shows how the material transformations of food practices (objects, foods, commercial/non-commercial economic framework, etc.) radically change the political subject, in a non-deterministic conception.

Camille Adamiec also approaches the topic via practices, indirectly addressing the question of the subject’s transformation driven by material culture, in this case, the foods eaten and the places where provisioning occurs (Diasio 2010). The “picky” consumers she studies continually describe the physical qualities of healthy and unhealthy foods and the consequences of their ingestion on their physiological bodies. She thus takes Serra Mallol’s reflections further, shrewdly analysing the link between eaters and the foods they consume that transform them physiologically and symbolically. Within this framework, she shows the extent to which the space and time of provisioning is important: It makes it possible to authenticate the health-related characteristics of the products procured.

Séverine Gojard and Bérangère Véron also take this practical perspective and their study echoes the Anglo-Saxon theory of practices developed by Schatzki et al.(2001), Warde (2005) and Shove and Pantzar (2010). These sociologists became known for their discussions of psychosocial behaviourist approaches and cultural studies that address consumption through largely autonomous consumers anxious to construct their identity by means of their consumption practices. To do so, they used the theory of Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 2005) on one hand and Anthony Giddens (1984) on the other to highlight the existence of mechanisms to stabilise practices in social structures. It is not so much materiality as what consumption reveals about social structures—as opposed to the cultural structures of structuralism—that constitutes the core of their studies. Gojard and Véron complete this approach by stressing the importance of the material context in understanding what hinders or facilitates long-term provisioning: Does the residential area offer a variety of provisioning modes? What types of provisioning are possible in light of parents’ and particularly mothers’ time restrictions? They examine three aspects of practices: the significations of different provisioning, material restrictions and the actors’ skills. Thus, in contrast to the approaches developed in the other articles in this special issue, they perceive materiality exclusively as a framework for action that facilitates or hinders varied provisionings.

In a complementary way, Louis Mathiot’s research focuses on significations, one of the building blocks of practices, as Gojard and Véron point out. He refers to Mary Douglas’ and Baron Isherwood’s structuralist analytical framework (ibid.) to show that the eater is not only a rational consomm’acteurFootnote 2 (or proactive consumer). By comparing two semantic cultural ranges of naturalness, the author underscores consumption’s place in the visibility and stability of categories of culture. He thus emphasises that the social actor cannot be reduced to the rational needs of material, psychic and conspicuous wellbeing. To do this, in his interviews, he picks out the role of the material context of provisioning in qualifying a food product as more or less “natural”. For example, for some Israeli consumers, shopping in the souk endows the purchased product with this characteristic. The place where it is sold and the time needed for its purchase and discussions with the trader are therefore just as important as the place of production in defining the product’s natural qualities. The souk is a singularising commercial site that authenticates the purchased goods. Mathiot then describes the different phases of the biography of objects.

The process of commodification and decommodification at the heart of contemporary provisioning

Following on from Hegel, Marx set out the significance of dialectic thinking. From the 1950s onwards, anthropology drew inspiration from this to discuss the opposition between tradition and modernity (Balandier 1955; Mitchell 1956; Gluckman 1965), local and global (Appadurai 1996; Abélès 2006) and identity and alterity (Todorov 2001). In this intellectual stance, Kopytoff (1986) showed that although the notion of merchandise appears simple economically, it is, in fact, relatively complex, mobilising cultural and social processes of the traded object’s qualification and disqualification, and it is important to analyse this to understand how it is set into economic, political and social contexts. Based on his work on slavery in Africa (Miers and Kopytoff 1977) in which he discusses the modern dichotomy of commodifiable goods and inalienable human beings, 10 years later, Kopytoff showed that the state of merchandise is not a definitive characteristic but a process, and that, during its nonlinear existence, the artefact (like the human being in his earlier thesis) goes through different phases situated between two poles: commodity on one side and inalienability on the other. In France, Bonnot (2002) took up this approach in the footsteps of Warnier (1994). In this issue, the authors have not created object biographies but, at the moment of provisioning, like Kopytoff, they show that even in a general system of commodification, the succession of commercial and non-commercial phases lies at the heart of contemporary provisioning.

By revealing the commodification processes in establishing self-service, Cochoy sheds light on the selection and transformations undergone by food products entering into the commercial circuit. In doing so, he analyses the changes in the working conditions of grocers for whom, for example, it becomes more difficult to invite customers to taste a product that is now packaged and whose standardisation had been tested by consumers with whom they do not have a relationship. His article echoes Serra Mallol’s paper, illustrating the way in which commodification subjectivates individuals in a specific way.

Moving beyond the dichotomy established by Polanyi between traditional society and modern society, Serra Mallol shows the articulation of two parallel food systems, setting out the way in which the same consumers use two provisioning modes conjointly. The first, traditional in the Polynesian Islands, schematically combines four forms of exchange: the pooling of resources, exchanges between households, individual hospitality and lodging a friend or family member. Through gifts, exchanges, reciprocity and redistribution, this system incorporates individuals into a social hierarchy and separates them by means of a very hierarchised access to foods (gender, status in relation to the closeness of lineage with the chief). The second, commercial, fuelled by both paid employment and public money transfers that are sources of great inequality, enables families, even those of modest means, to acquire food from supermarkets and thus become part of globalised trade. More frequent purchases of smaller quantities in local shops make it possible both to benefit from local credit and to prove that one has cash. These two models engage very different social relations linked to political subjectivations. In rural areas, therefore, home consumption obviously makes it possible to be less dependent on commercial food supplies, which may be far away or unpredictable (due to living on small islands), to improve on basic provisioning of subsidised staple foods for people with low incomes, to strengthen family or neighbourly ties through gifts and exchanges and thus appease tensions due to the family landowning system with family members who have moved. The author puts particular emphasis on the articulation of these two provisioning systems that in Tahiti and Rapa, give rise to two very different farming policy organisations, one based on the commercial trade of fruits and vegetables and the other on sharing and the decommodification of such products. He then shows the political consequences of the commodification/decommodification process.

This overlapping between commercial and non-commercial systems is also analysed by Camille Adamiec and Louis Mathiot. Adamiec reveals the way in which health-conscious consumers from the Alsace navigate between engagements with AMAPs, which avoid monetary exchange and, to a certain extent, decommodify products, and purchases from markets and organic and health food shops where they feel they have more freedom in their market choices. The interpersonal acquaintance with sellers or producers appears to mitigate the disadvantages of commercialisation whose aims they feel are incompatible with their quest for health. Based on another example—natural products—Mathiot’s article stresses the fact that individuals are not the passive receptacles of politico-economic subjectivations. He shows how consumers interpret the dual movement of commodification/decommodification to which sold foods are subject, depending on where they are sold through, for example, the relations they establish with salespeople, to attribute them with the quality of “natural”.

Lastly, addressing the establishing of long-term provisioning practices by non-activist consumers, Séverine Gojard and Bérangère Véron emphasise the fact that the interlocking of economics and politics is also and perhaps primarily due to elements such as domestic configurations, financial restrictions, the choices offered by the economic environment between commercial or cooperative chains, place of residence and the organisational and culinary skills of household members, especially, even today, of women. Their sociological analysis, the aim of which is to assist stakeholding public authorities (Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME) and the Ministry of Industry and Employment) to define their sustainable development policies, shows us that social, economic and political spheres cannot be conceived of separately, but that nonetheless, an economic context does not imply a single social model.

Conclusion

This introduction has attempted to highlight four interdisciplinary themes in the articles presented in this special issue and to situate them in the sociological and anthropological debate of the last 30 years: the multiplicity of provisioning modes mobilised by eaters in connection with their seeking authentication for consumed products, the complementarity of survey methods, questions of materialities in consumption practices and the political and social consequences of the commodification process. By integrating the importance of social restrictions, the comprehensive approach of all the contributors makes it possible to highlight eaters’ logics of action as well as their different levels of reflexivity in analysing the restricting situations they must manage on a daily basis.

Using the everyday nature of restriction practices and eaters’ reflexivity as a starting point cannot be done without paying tribute to the pioneering work of Henri Lefebvre (1961) and Michel de Certeau and Lucie Girard in the 1980s. De Certeau showed that, alongside a set of fixed rules, social norms, which he calls “strategies”, are established, depending on situations, practices that he calls “tactics”. The texts presented here examine the logics of action in restriction situations, and therefore what De Certeau calls tactics to articulate often contradictory eating norms (Depecker et al. 2013). While all the authors here have looked at the sociabilities produced by the various provisioning practices, Gojard and Véron or Mathiot have above all emphasised the economic, social, cultural and ethical restrictions that frame them, while Cochoy, Serra Mallol and Adamiec have made the connection with the construction of the social subjects they help produce. This perspective leads us to conclude with a quotation from Sylvie Fainzang (2001): “Individuals are Subjects as the subject of the verb is, they are the author and sometimes the master of their acts; but they are also subjects as a subject of the king might be, meaning partly subservient or subjugated to a power beyond their own, in this case the social determinants, the political context and the cultural influences—in other words, to laws and rules other than their own”. This special issue therefore invites readers to consider both the constitution of tactics to articulate contradictory social, cultural, political and ethical norms and the way in which provisioning practices participate in the construction of specific eaters.