Nordic meals: methodological notes on a comparative survey

This article discusses some methodological aspects of the project "Eating and Modern Everyday Life. A Comparative Survey of Nordic Countries". Data were collected in April 1997 with computer assisted telephone interviews in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Questionnaires included a record of the informant's eating on the day before the interview, attitudes related to current food discourses, socio-demographic information and a few open-ended questions. The emphasis was on social and cultural aspects of eating. One aim of this study is to investigate whether regular meals are substituted by irregular eating patterns. In order to avoid any predefined meal concepts the questionnaire therefore focused on eating events. The reconstruction of data is based on a model called the eating system. The model has three dimensions: the eating pattern (the rhythm and the number of eating events, the alternations of hot and cold eating events), the meal format (the composition of the main course, the sequence of the whole meal) and the social organization of eating (where and with whom people are eating, who did the cooking). Some preliminary results are presented suggesting that the questionnaire and the analytical model suit the purpose of studying modernization through the field of food.