Peer-reviewed article
The moral labour of food purchase decision-making – an ethnographic study among families in Denmark
Duus KS, Tjørnhøj-Thomsen T, Krølner RF ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This ethnographic study explores how parents in Denmark make food purchase decisions for their families by examining the moral dilemmas they face in supermarkets. Researchers conducted 37 interviews with parents from 15 families with children aged 0-19 years between September 2022 and January 2023, using shop-along observations and photo-elicited discussions. Parents balanced their values around animal welfare, climate impact, and healthy eating against practical pressures like price, product availability, and their children's preferences. The study found that parents used various coping strategies to manage guilt when their purchases conflicted with their values, and recommends that future interventions should focus on changing food environments rather than individual behaviour.
Key points
- Parents experienced moral dilemmas balancing values (animal welfare, climate, healthy food) against practical constraints (price, availability, child preferences)
- Moral labour was performed to reconcile guilt or guilty conscience arising from conflicting values in food purchase decisions
- Contextual and situational circumstances such as family situation could challenge parents' values and trigger moral labour
- Product availability, presentation, price, and parent-child interactions significantly influenced food purchase decisions
- Future interventions should focus on supportive food environments rather than individual behaviour change
Limitations
This is a qualitative ethnographic study focused on understanding parental decision-making processes rather than evaluating an intervention or measuring child health outcomes. The findings are based on a small sample of Danish families and may not be generalizable to other populations or cultural contexts.
Abstract
Understanding families' food purchase decision-making is essential to developing successful interventions to promote healthier behaviours. Several factors can influence the foods people purchase. However, knowledge about how parents handle dilemmas in food purchase decisions and how these decisions affect families' food purchases is scarce. This study explores families' food purchase decisions in supermarkets and illustrates how parents navigate the tension between their values and contextual and situational circumstances (e.g. family situation). We conducted 37 semi-structured, shop-along, and photo-elicited interviews with parents from fifteen families with children ranging from 0 to 19 years of age (September 2022–January 2023). We used an abductive analytical approach to investigate the role of conscience and morality in our empirical findings. We applied the theoretical concept of moral labour to examine how individuals navigate the discomfort associated with guilt or a guilty conscience, which arises from conflicts or dissonance of their values when making food purchases in supermarkets. Food purchase decisions were influenced by moral considerations related to animal welfare, climate, parental responsibility, and good and healthy food. However, product availability and presentation, price, and the parent-child interaction, as well as contextual and situational circumstances, could challenge parents’ values, triggering moral labour. The study illustrates how parents performed moral labour, e.g., minimising the health impact, to reconcile with negative feelings of conflicting values. Future intervention studies should consider focusing on supportive food environments over individual behaviour changes to minimise the potential moral labour among parents from such initiatives.