Evolution of Social Ties around New Food Practices. Группа авторов

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      Foreword

       Thibaut NGUYEN

       Trends & Prospective Department, Ipsos, Paris, France

      As becomes clearer every day, we are living in a period of unprecedented changes and challenges. For the last 50 years, we have been witnessing the progressive erosion of all the major collective reference points, together with an extraordinary opening of the field of scientific and technological possibilities.

      This double movement of collapse and innovation is generating a groundswell that is disrupting our lifestyles, redefining daily life in its most essential acts: working, moving, communicating, eating.

      The work carried out by Gilles Séré de Lanauze and the group he coordinates clearly and rigorously reveals the extent to which our conception of meals and food is being profoundly modified, echoing a way of living together that is fragmenting and recomposing itself into small real and virtual ideological circles.

      The traditional meal that sealed the nuclear family and synchronized the home with neighboring households is gradually disintegrating as individualization of rhythms and digital nomadism become more powerful. We are seeing a similar pattern in many areas: the shift away from TV to targeted and personalized digital media, the erosion of the mainstream and the rise of more niche propositions in health, hygiene and beauty.

It seems that, in this period, what divides becomes more valued than what brings people together, even in the last bastion of living together: the meal.

      Division, because today there is no more consensus about the direction of progress since this remains unresolved in the face of the ecological and economic crisis that had plagued our future even before Covid-19. From then on, several ideological currents have been fighting for the reins of progress to correct its trajectory. Degrowth and alternative thinking, affirmation and identity-based withdrawal, or belief in all-powerful technology, it is now necessary to choose our camp, our society, our future, our values; otherwise, a competing future might arise.

      As this collective work demonstrates, such confrontation extends to our plates: eating is becoming an increasingly ideological and identity-based act, perhaps like all consumption. Qualified as vegetarian, vegan, religious, spiritual, hygienist, performist, meals and ways of eating increasingly divide the usual collectives and recompose networks that follow the divergent forces of today’s ideologies.

      This is an important statement with far-reaching consequences: first, because it announces the ambivalence of the role of the meal, which becomes as much an act of secession as of gathering. Tell me what you eat, I will tell you who you are not. Or tell me what you refuse to eat, and I will tell you who you are fighting. Then, of course, because it is changing the entire food universe, opening up new offers in new ecosystems for a total food experience: political, communal, but also esthetically pleasing, i.e. Instagrammable.

      Finally, it makes you think beyond food, by reflecting one of the great paradoxes of our time in a stressful and isolating world: the contradictory need to join AND escape the collective.

      In a recent survey for the World Economic Forum (September 2020), Ipsos notes that 72% of citizens in 15 countries clearly want the post-Covid-19 world to be decidedly different from the one before. But will we be able to all agree on this difference when our capacity to accept and manage otherness has probably never been so low? Or are we heading for competing microworlds?

      Will the next generations be able to resolve this paradox, starting with the subject of food, which we know is a cultural pillar of Generation Y? How will the Covid-19 crisis influence these food mutations? Will it accelerate our food identity by reducing opportunities to eat together? Or will it, on the contrary, encourage a resurgence of the need to be together when the lockdowns are over?

So many questions that make this book essential for those who want to understand and anticipate the current evolution of social phenomena around food.

      July 2021