We’ve created a series of 10-12 archetypal Birmingham households to illustrate food and drink purchasing and consumption behaviours across different demographic groups.
The first stage was a survey of relevant data sets:
- Birmingham City Council demographic census data which is here. In addition, Birmingham Public Health Intelligence were kind enough to give us (limited!) access to some of their data.
- The National Diet and Nutrition Survey
And because there’s evidence the Millennial generation, in the States at least, are making different choices than earlier generations:
- The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service report Food purchase decisions of Millennial households compared to other generations (Dec 2017)
- in the context of this blogpost by NatCen, about the NDNS and teenager diet: http://natcen.ac.uk/blog/
discovering-diet-and- exploring-eating-with-uk- teenagers
note: Re the US data, there is also:
- Eve Turow Paul’s presentation on the topic at the Oxford Farming Conference 2018:
https://www.ofc.org.uk/sites/ofc/files/papers/Eve%20Turow% 20Paul.pdf - And this blogpost by her: Generation Yum
The second stage was to create 10-12 households. Think of them like the sketches of different households you see in the media after the Chancellor’s budget, there to illustrate the effects of it on different demographic and social groups, completed in the summer of 2019.
Pre-Covid, we were into detailed planning of the third stage, the ‘Narrativium‘ element of the project to be ‘A Day in the Life’ of real households reflecting 12 different demographics in the city. Partnering with Ort Gallery, an oral historian, a a visual-media artist and our own brill arts curator, Ian Sergeant, we were in the process of applying for funding for this work, all of which had to be abandoned because of the pandemic.
It will be back!