Jad
Food Diaries as Method: Exploring Foodways of Care
What’s for Dinner?
“What do Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong eat on a day-to-day basis?” This was one of the questions I came up with when developing my research proposal. Ethnographies of domestic workers in Hong Kong (Constable 2007, Tillu 2011, Law 2001) have described the varied and colorful meals workers share on their days off, but what of the rest of the week?
I was curious to know just how different their weekday meals were to these special Sunday spreads, as domestic workers in Hong Kong are required to live with their employer. This undoubtedly affects what meals they are able to eat during the week. Food diaries, a creative research method used in food studies, provided a way for me to document these meals without being physically present in my informants’ homes.
For my first blog entry, I will be discussing how I developed these food diaries for my dissertation fieldwork. Despite my initial aim of documenting individual meal patterns, the diaries have become a way in which I have been able to witness what I am beginning to call “foodways of care” among my participants, highlighting the ability of food not only to nourish bodies but also social ties and community relations.
A Sunday spread from one of my interlocutors' weekend gatherings - a veritable feast!
Diets and Diaries
Nutritional anthropologists have made use of food diaries to record of people’s daily meals (Jerome 1980; Pelto 1989; Bergman et al. 1990; Hubert 2004). Food diaries can either be a strictly objective and empirical record of one’s meals, which involves weighing meals before eating to obtain accurate measurements of nutritional intake. However, food diaries can also have more reflexive and subjective, if the goal is to understand eating patterns and habits. My food diary falls more in the latter category.
My initial design for the food diary was intended to be done over the course of the week, as I wanted to see just how different the rest of the week was compared to the meals eaten during their day off. However, as I discuss below, I eventually decided to extend it to two weeks, in order to see how prevalent these patterns were over longer periods of time.
Collaborative Development of Food Diaries
Version 1
Figure 1. The first version of the food diary.
Just like a recipe, my food diaries undergo multiple stages of development, with changes proposed by interlocutors (my “tasters”, so to speak) after they had finished the activity. I took inspiration with this approach from Doreen Fernandez’ (1988) observation of Filipino cuisine which, unlike its European counterparts wherein to ask for seasoning is to insult the chef’s skill, feature collaborative improvements on the dish through the use of individually-made seasonings (sawsawan in Filipino). Each succeeding version of the food diary taught me something new about my participants and my research.
Feedback from the first diary was mixed. Participants said that while the diary was easy enough to understand and accomplish, the layout was somewhat confusing. The way the pages were designed didn’t make it clear that each meal had to be logged horizontally. However, after they had gotten the hang of it, it became much easier.
One of my initial concerns was that writing the journal in English would make people think that they had to write their answers in English, so I made sure to tell them that they could write in English or in Filipino. All of them used English in answering the food diary, though some did tell me that they felt that they could have written more in Filipino or their mother tongue[1]. Some voiced concerns that the selection of phrases to describe the meals were somewhat limiting, but that they liked the sections at the bottom where they could reflect on the day. Some of them said that doing the diary made them more aware of how much they spend on food in a week. With these comments in mind, I began to develop the second version of the food diary.
Version 2
Figure 2. The second version of the food diary.
The second version of the food diary essentially asked the same information as the first one but differed in its approach. For starters, the original horizontal grouping of the meal entries was changed to boxes, in order to have a clearer distinction between meals, reflecting the comments of the participants of the first batch. The question asking when the meal was planned was removed, after some participants had expressed confusion about the question – this question would instead be asked in follow-up interviews after the food diary was completed. Instead of having a selection of English words for emotions, I made the choice to just go with a visual sliding scale of positive to negative emotions in order to have a more culturally neutral way to elicit responses of emotions. However, I decided to add a space asking “Why?” in this section so that participants could better explain why they felt that way for that particular meal. In the same way, instead of asking participants to choose from a set of words, I asked them to describe their meals using 3 to 5 words.
I still kept the reflective questions at the bottom of the page, but added another question that asked, “What was bad about today’s meals?” to serve as a contrast to the earlier question that asked what participants liked about the meals. Similar to the first batch, this set of food diaries were also carried out over the course of the week. The first batch had shown that there were indeed significant differences in what people ate in the weekend and in the weekday, and so I wanted to capture this more in the experiences of other people. While the first set of food diaries were accomplished by workers who all lived with their employers, this second set of food diaries also included workers who were able to rent boarding spaces outside of their employers’ homes where they could go and stay at night and during the holidays.
Version 3
Figure 3. Third version of food diary - current version as of writing.
The current version of the food diary only differs from the second version in that it is written primarily in Filipino. This was done to address concerns that participants felt that they had to only answer in English and as such this limited their responses to the prompts of the food diaries. To make the design more legible, labels were also affixed on top of the meal entry boxes, to indicate “Meal 1” up to “Meal 4”. Another change that was implemented in this version of the food diary is that the duration of the activity was extended from one week to two weeks.
This was done after consulting with previous participants who felt that one week was too short and that they wanted to continue the activity further. Adding another week of meal data would also provide more patterns and see how meals differ from week to week. As this is the current format as of writing this blog, it remains to be seen how the results from this activity will differ from the previous versions.
Conclusion: Exploring Foodways of Care
While the main goal of the food diaries was to have a means to document my informant’s meals for my dissertation, the development process of the diaries has also provided me with valuable insights on the everyday lives of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong. But beyond its main purpose of being a record of meals, I’m also excited about its potential to demonstrate a concept I am developing: foodways of care.
Because the diaries go beyond asking what my participants ate every day, aspects of social relationships can be gleaned from their entries. Some entries include Filipino meals shared with employers, or foods that were labelled as “my ward’s favorite”. Some entries, especially those on Sundays and Mondays, include food that was served through gatherings and foods that were packed after the gatherings and eaten for breakfast the following day. These illustrate how care and community-building go beyond the Sunday gatherings and follow workers back to their homes. Finally, care materializes the culinary infrastructure in how some workers would have access to meals that they would normally not be able to cook because of the limits of their kitchen. Some workers write that they don’t have ovens, but because of friends who do have ovens, they are able to have baked goods.
Of course, these are just preliminary insights gathered through a cursory reading of the first versions of food diaries. But these show strong promise in the concept of foodways of care as a framework in understanding how food and eating can be used to understand the human practice of care and how it is manifested in the Hong Kong context, with its significant migrant population, reliance on foreign domestic labor, and urban food infrastructure.
Would you be interested in documenting your meals as well? What insights do you think you’ll be able to get from recording even just a week of what you eat?
Version 2
Photo by Jad from the field
[1] Depending on the linguistic definitions, there are as much as 195 different languages in the Philippines with Filipino being the national language which everyone is taught to speak in school. However, most Filipinos who grew up outside of Metro Manila also know how to speak one or more additional languages, which is the case for most of my interlocutors.
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