The moral labour of food purchase decision-making – an ethnographic study among families in Denmark

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.