The Contested Politics of Food: Public Moral Evaluation of Everyday Practice

Social Practice Theory (SPT) has become an influential framework for analysing everyday food practices, explaining how routines are organised through materials, competences and shared meanings. However, practice-based accounts provide a less explicit explanation of the moral-emotional processes through which practices become publicly evaluated. This article addresses this limitation by bringing SPT into dialogue with Eliasian sociology. Drawing on a comparative qualitative analysis of three high-engagement Twitter/X debates generated by Turkish food writer Vedat Milor’s online polls, we examine how apparently mundane disagreements over preparation, eating etiquette and regional production become struggles over authenticity, competence, belonging and symbolic authority. Using the Eliasian concepts of the We–I balance and civilising offensives, we conceptualise these struggles as the public moral evaluation of practice, a process through which tacit routines become visible, personal preferences are translated into general standards, and those standards are authorised, sanctioned and resisted. The article extends practice-based approaches by showing that the reproduction of practices can involve not only routine performance but also public struggles over legitimate performance and the competence of those who enact them.