Convenience food: space and timing

Abstract

This paper argues that the emergence of convenience food reflects the re‐ordering of the time‐space relations of everyday life in contemporary society. It is suggested that the notion of convenience food is highly contested. Britons are ambivalent about serving and eating convenience food. However, many people are constrained to eat what they call convenience foods as a provisional response to intransigent problems of scheduling everyday life. A distinction is drawn between modern and hypermodern forms of convenience, the first directed towards labour‐saving or time compression, the second to time‐shifting. It is maintained that convenience food is as much a hypermodern response to de‐routinisation as it is a modern search for the reduction of toil. Convenience food is required because people are too often in the wrong place; the impulse to time‐shifting arises from the compulsion to plan ever more complex time‐space paths in everyday life. The problem of timing supersedes the problem of shortage of time. Some of the more general social implications of such a claim are explored.