The visible and invisible occupations of food provisioning in low income families

Food-related occupations connect people with family, community, tradition, ritual, and culture. They are a means of producing and conveying social identities, as they are rife with symbolic meaning. Food provisioning occupations require complex knowledges and skills, particularly for those living on low income. This qualitative analysis explores the occupations of food provisioning for 31 low-income families in Canada. Participants displayed substantial planning, strategy and skill to circumvent the barriers imposed by transportation, financial limitations, and competing priorities. Providing food was a highly meaningful component of parenting for most adults, yet their actual experiences of grocery shopping on low income were often quite unpleasant. In contemporary neoliberal societies in which responsible, disciplined consuming is a hallmark of good citizenship, food provisioning is subject to intense judgement and stigma. Attending to the way low income shoppers describe their own food provisioning occupations reveals resistance to dominant discourses that position them as lazy, uneducated and irresponsible. Instead they draw on alternative discourses to position themselves as frugal, knowledgeable, skilled consumers, and good parents by oppositional standards.