Investigating York’s changing eating habits
Transcript of Dr Emma Uprichard discussing research into the history of food in York since 1945
The study is about the history of food in York and we’re looking at the history of food in York through people’s lives in the post-war period. So we’re interested in talking to people, ordinary residents in York and we’re also interested in talking to people who have had any connection with food production or industry or shops or even sold food in York and just to get a feel of the way that food in York has changed York and also how people’s lives have also been changed by the food that they eat in York.
We are going to do several things in terms of talking to people. We are going to be doing some focus groups with people that have actually been working in the food industry and so on. We are going to be doing individual interviews as well with key gatekeepers and people who have been working in the food industry in various ways. And we are also going to be doing focus groups intergenerationally so that’s two focus groups with a group of young children, two focus groups with adolescents right through different age cohorts, right through to over 75s, so we’re going to do focus groups at each of those generational stages.
We are using existing data, national food surveys so to get a national picture of some of the eating trends to understand as a kind of pattern what kinds of foods British residents have been eating. And we are going to use millennium birth cohort and that allows us to do several things that are really quite nice. We can actually then see if key events in the life course have changed the way people eat so whether you’ve had your first child, when you get married, when you maybe lose your job or you retire, all those key life events may or may not have an impact on how you eat or what you eat or the reasons why you eat what you eat and we can explore that a little bit through the various surveys. We are also going to use a lovely data resource which is the mass observation archive. It allows us to actually collect diaries and read through diaries through the post-war period right through.
We don’t want to sort of make big promises about prediction or being able to know what people are going to be eating but we do want to understand in a better way than we do currently how potentially policy affects the individual. Because it trickles down and we don’t really know how those dynamics work we just know that the Government says this, people do that. And in some ways it would be nice to understand at a very individual biographical level the effects your parents might have had in terms of what you’ve eaten. It’s also good to know how the city itself, because obviously you can only eat what you can buy and you have to choose what you can buy so that’s done on a very individual basis. But we’re hoping to get, because we’re looking at all those different layers, to get an understanding of how those different things work together.
Contact details
Further information