Exploring everyday food provisioning: the teleoaffectivity of meal sharing

Abstract

Abstract Sharing platforms gained importance in recent years. Little is known about whether and why novel means to digitally share meals are incorporated into people’s everyday portfolios of everyday food provisioning. The objective of this paper is accordingly to explore why digitally mediated meal sharing is incorporated (or not) into an array of everyday food provisioning practices. We use observations of and interviews with users of the Dutch platform Thuisgekookt, on which home cooks offer meals to be picked up by neighbors. Our practice theoretically inspired analysis starts with the concept of teleoaffective structures. These consist of a teleological dimension which points to objects (such as food) motivating action. The second, affective dimension indicates motivational engagement and emotional states. Three teleoaffective episodes - anticipating, actualizing and assessing - assist in explaining why meal sharing recruits practitioners (or not). We find that while meal sharing has advantages over other food provisioning practices, the generated affect is often not sufficient to recruit the new means of digitally mediated meal sharing in daily life, especially because of meal sharing’s relative inconvenience. Temporal conditions as well as a limited array of food provisioning practices, however, afford coordination of meal sharing with other everyday practices. The three episodes of teleoaffectivity enabled the understanding that meal sharing is not only evaluated on its own terms, but also anticipated and assessed in relation to other options and the recruitment of practitioners proofed difficult.