Domestic Money Seminar – ‘Food and budgets’

The ‘Domestic Money’ seminar is organised by Hélène Ducourant, Jeanne Lazarus and Ana Perrin-Heredia. There will be six sessions in 2026, with two presentations per session, featuring two sociologists and a variety of topics… but always centred on money.

Food and budgets

• Erwan Le Méner – The middle classes’ empty fridge: a case study
  This presentation is based on field research into ‘food insecurity’ and the household budgets of middle-class families living on the outskirts of the Paris metropolitan area. How can we describe the empty fridge of a family that wants for nothing? Should we see this as a sudden preference for frugality? The effect of a budgetary shock? Or perhaps the hallmark of poor household planning? What does such an observation tell us about the budgetary pressures facing the middle classes? We will examine these questions by exploring the family’s accounts from an ethno-accounting perspective.
• Blandine Mortain – Eating well on a tight budget: food practices and norms among working-class households in an urban area facing economic insecurity
  This presentation is based on ongoing research into the food consumption practices of the working classes, drawing on a qualitative study involving interviews and observations conducted in Roubaix (Nord) since spring 2024. The aim is to document the socially and spatially situated practices through which certain people in situations of severe economic precariousness attempt to regain budgetary leeway to resist food insecurity, and the moral values underpinning the importance these people attach to the nutritional, dietary and ecological standards of a ‘good’ diet.

You can use this link to join the Zoom discussion. (passcode 123456)