Disgust, pleasure, and convenience in fast-food consumption: Perspectives from Danish middle-class parents

Abstract

Family meals are an important topic in food consumption research linked to health, care, morality, etc. Recent consumer surveys show that home cooking and family eating patterns are under pressure due to increasingly busy everyday family lives. Here, fast food meals offer a practical solution. However, several studies in the Danish context (and in other geographical areas) highlight a strong moral ideal among middle-class families to produce healthy and home-cooked meals, which should render fast food illegitimate. This study builds on these studies on food, moralities, and parenting, and the purpose is to explore Danish middle-class parents' attitudes about going to multinational fast-food chains and how they navigate dilemmas around practical and moral issues. Additionally, we explore how new, seemingly more exclusive food products at a multinational fast-food chain in Denmark impact parents’ views.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with n = 17 Danish middle-class parents who had been to a multinational fast-food chain in 2021 as a new series of “quality” burgers designed by Michelin chefs was introduced. Our findings show that all participants demonstrated some degree of moral concern about fast-food consumption. These concerns result in strong, affective narratives of disgust and compensation strategies for the most troubled. More particularly, we argue that the consumption of fast food is (1) closely embedded in family rituals, and (2) it entails a meal negotiation between children's pleasure and adults' disgust (particularly mothers' disgust) for most participants. Finally, (3) we highlight that the availability of ‘novel’ products more closely aligned with Danish middle-class ideals and aspirations around food, like the fine dining chefs, Chefs' Burgers (CB), make those disputes easier for most parents. Others react negatively to the campaign.