Everyday food provisioning is increasingly embedded in a complex landscape of alternative modes of distribution of produce. The variety is ranging on the one hand from digital supported to purely analog routes as well as from consumer- to business-driven routes. These new modes create not only digital market-places and platforms, they also have the potential to cultivate socio-technical networks of sharing and caring and thus, facilitate alternative food economies in which consumers are allowed to choose and practice food differently. Though it has yet to be analyzed in which way these alternative modes of food provisioning actually do foster other ways of food consumption in the domestic sphere. Thus it is necessary to open the black box of the household in order to facilitate knowledge about consumer’s food related practices in and around the kitchen as well as in order to analyze how those practices are linked to certain ways of food provisioning.
Based on experiences from different research projects we, first, want to discuss how food practices can be investigated methodologically. Secondly we will focus on methods that are feasible to analyzing the link between food provisioning and food consumption, while giving respect to the divers and complex landscape of different modes of distribution of produce. We will present and discuss methodological conclusions as well as preliminary research results from a case study in Berlin where quantitative data regarding different types of food provisioning has been gathered and complemented with qualitative interviews conducted in households