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This paper aims to explore consumers’ experienced life and studies how practices interconnect and are organized on a daily basis. The objective is to contribute to a better understanding of how (or whether) it is possible to interfere with daily practices, as public policies pretend to do, to address several societal challenges (food waste, healthy eating, greenhouse gas reduction, social equity, etc.).

Using the concepts of routine, ritual and practice to understand the dynamics of daily life from a practice theories perspective, this study is based on a qualitative methodology combining a projective method of collage coupled with semi-structured interviews with 23 participants and, participant observation of shopping, cooking and mealtimes at home with 11 of the 23 participants.

Results show that the degree of systematization of practices defines different types of routine according to various systematization factors (time, commitment, social relations, material), suggesting a distinction between systematized, hybrid and partially systematized routines. Beyond the question of the degree of systematization of practices composing routines, results show that some practices are embedded in daily routines due to their ritualization.

This work takes part of the debates on how to study households’ daily life, and challenges the understanding of daily life activity more globally than just by the prism of isolated actions. For that, this study uses the concepts of routines and rituals. They are relevant to describe and to capture the tangle of practices composing food activities. The study shows that the material dimensions, the pressure of time, the commitments and the social relations condition the global arrangement of the food practices in a variable way.

Such results offer new perspectives for intervening on households’ daily consumption by understanding the global dynamics of food routines.

This work contributes to a better understanding of consumers’ food practices and routines and to a practice-change perspective considering constrained and routinely constructed lives.

Preventative public health policies often rely on objective criteria to identify people in vulnerable situations. Age is one of the criteria when investigating the risk of malnutrition associated with ageing. By looking at changes in the food practices of individuals as they age, this study aims to seek to contribute to more precise targeting of older adults in view of the dynamic nature of ageing.

From a theoretical perspective, this research is based on the life course paradigm. Data were collected from 42 semi-structured interviews with retirees aged 60 and over.

The results show that some ageing events lead to immense reconfigurations of individuals’ lives, implying changes as prior food practices are extensively replaced by new ones (“rebuilding after a tsunami”). Other more diffuse and gradual effects of ageing lead to adaptations of previous food practices and, in a more localised way, areas that can be targeted by healthy eating campaigns (“plugging the gaps”). Lastly, this study shows that a normative perspective can help endorse a new social role (“getting into character”), and that relying on their human capital (“it’s a matter of perspective”) can help people cope with new age-related mindsets.

The sample did not include individuals with serious physical or mental health problems at the time of the interviews.

The study identifies social, biological and psychological events related to ageing that have an impact on food practices, as well as moments and milestones for developing public policy campaigns to promote healthy eating.

The study gives insights into the place of food in the process of coping with ageing, showing that food can be either a problem to solve or a resource to help cope with social or psychological imbalances. The holistic view adopted contributes to identifying other events that impact food practices (and consequently health) during the ageing process.