Sensibilities of eating inside: emotions and food practices in a time of pandemic

Abstract

In the pandemic situation, where social distancing and confinement were presented as the main tools for its prevention, eating became confined to the inside of the home. For those who have a home to stay in, eating has been reinstated as a practice in the private sphere and as a need to be met while remaining indoors. Eating is a daily practice that produces and reproduces the body, and it is shaped from habits, norms and customs that are expressed in social sensibilities. At the same time, it is directly linked to the configuration of emotions as the body/food/hunger/emotions relationship unfolds in an unbreakable continuum. While the diet is configured as a set of practices that are practices of the politics of sensibilities, food and commensality practices imply and express sociabilities and experiences. In this case, by knowing about diet, food practices and commensality, we will know how people put into practice specific knowledge about food to organize and regulate the planning, preparation and consumption of their daily meals in the context of isolation and of a new organization of time. Thus, knowing about diet and its practices will allow us to know the sensibilities and experiences in the context of a pandemic, where food practices take on a greater importance, since it highlights not only the possibilities of access, variation, diversification and consumption, but specific sensibilities around cooking, eating and the home. The objective of this chapter is to expose the sensibilities of eating in a time of pandemic in Argentina and Spain, based on a comparative study between the two countries. To do this, we conducted an online survey, self-administered during the first five weeks of isolation and confinement, and in-depth interviews with young people from the tenth week, seeking to discover the eating practices of isolation in articulation with the time/space relationship, which are configured from a politics of sensibilities as cognitive-affective practices of feeling in the pandemic world.