| Abstract: | Amid growing concerns over nutrition, food safety, and the relationship between health and environment, anxiety about the general deskilling around food‐related activities has garnered significant public interest and academic inquiry. Mainstream agriculture commodity and retail food chains are failing to meet the concerns citizens are expressing about their food. This has contributed to a relearning of skills of procuring, preparing, and preserving food. This qualitative study looks at the practice of home preserving in a rural Albertan community through a social practice theory framework. I test two premises set out by Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012): First, social practices consist of three elements (materials, competencies, and meanings) that are integrated when practices are enacted; second, that practices emerge, persist, and disappear as links among these defining elements are made and broken. I demonstrate how the integration of the elements enabled canning as a practice to flourish during a certain period. I then explore how the disintegration of the elements contributed to the decline of the same practice in later years. By examining the connections and breakages in the links between materials, meanings, and competencies, I illustrate the essentiality of integration of elements in order for practices to exist. |
