Christmas

Changing Families, Changing Food
Working Paper Series

Christmas feasting and social class

Martin Pitts, Danny Dorling and Charles Pattie The University of Sheffield

Nothing in this paper may be cited, quoted or summarised or reproduced without the express permission of the author(s). © Martin Pitts, Danny Dorling and Charles Pattie

‘Changing Families, Changing Food’ Programme 4thFloor, ICoSS, 219 Portobello, Sheffield S1 4DP Tel: 0114 222 6283 Fax: 0114 222 8341 www.sheffield.ac.uk/familiesandfood

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Christmas feasting and social class
Martin Pitts (Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Exeter), Danny Dorling and Charles Pattie (both Department of Geography, University of Sheffield). Martin Pitts is an RCUK research fellow in the Department ofClassics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. Although primarily a Roman archaeologist, his interest in food as a social indicator led to his involvement in the Leverhulme funded ‘Changing Families, Changing Food’ project on contemporary food and social trends at the University of Sheffield. His main research is based on the statistical analysis of artefactual assemblages to investigatefood consumption practices and identity in Iron Age to Roman Europe. Danny Dorling went to university in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and lived there for ten years before moving to work in Bristol, Leeds and then Sheffield; again all in England. To try to counter his myopic world view, in 2006, Danny started working with a group of researchers on a project to remap the world ( www.worldmapper.com). He is currently Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield working with the social and spatial inequalities group. His research tries to show how far understanding the patterns to people's lives can be enhanced using cartography and statistics about the population. Charles Pattie is Professor of Geography at the University of Sheffield. He is a political geographer whose mainresearch is into electoral behaviour, political campaigning and political participation.

Christmas feasting and social class
Abstract This paper examines the role of Christmas meals in Britain, with particular focus on the construction of social class identities through feasting and the consumption of food and drink. Analysis is based on quantitative data from the National Food Survey in theperiod 1975 – 2000, sampled at 5-year intervals, comparing food shopping data from the month of December with that for the rest of the year. Whilst expenditure on food in December is shown to be consistently higher than for the rest of the year in all social groups, significant social class differences remain, not least in the consumption of healthy food and alcohol. At the same time, as expenditureon the constituents of the traditional Victorian-style Christmas declined rapidly in the festive season over recent decades, there was increased emphasis among all social classes on modern convenience food and ready meals.

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Christmas feasting and social class
Christmas feasting and everyday consumption The aim of this paper is to explore issues of modern social class through the medium offood and eating. Food has long been an indicator of social differentiation. From prehistory to the present, groups at the top of the social ladder have distinguished themselves from those at the bottom through the food they eat (Goody 1982; Bourdieu 1984). In earliest times this was a matter of quantity, but as civilisations developed, styles of consumption, table manners and now the selection ofhealthy foods have become reliable gauges of class difference. The book Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite brings the issue of class and healthy food in Britain to public attention, with the message that in recent years the country has been more divided over the food people eat than ever before (Blythman 2006). The notion of class distinctions in expenditure on different food...