Dinner in France : An Enduring Dietary Synchronism

In this paper we study the place dinner occupies in the evening inFrance and in particular its scheduling with respect to other activities. Theanalysis uses data from time-use surveys conducted by the French Institutefor Statistics (Insee) in 1986 (N=9975) and 1998 (N=8251). In order to takeadvantage of the sequential nature of time-use data, we apply OptimalMatching Analysis, a method borrowed from molecular biology by AndrewAbbott. In conjunction with cluster analysis, this method allows us todistinguish between ten types of organization of evenings and to analyse howdinner is fitted in with other activities in the evening schedule. Thesedifferent types are highly correlated with gender, age and social class. Incontrast to arguments suggesting the end of traditional organization ofmealtimes, the comparison between the results of 1986 and 1998demonstrates a great stability of the dinner sequence and a continuingimportance of mealtimes whatever the social group we consider incontemporary France.

Social Problem Construction and National Context: News Reporting on "Overweight" and "Obesity" in the United States and France

Drawing on analyses of American and French news reports on "overweight" and "obesity," this article examines how national context—including position in a global field of nation states, as well as different national politics and culture—shapes the framing of social problems. As has been shown in previous research, news reports from France—the economically dominated but culturally dominant nation of the two—discuss the United States more often than vice versa, typically in a negative way. Our contribution is to highlight the flexibility of anti-American rhetoric, which provides powerful ammunition for a variety of social problem frames. Specifically, depending on elite interests, French news reports may invoke anti-American rhetoric to reject a given phenomenon as a veritable public problem, or they may use such rhetoric to drum up concern over an issue. We further show how diverse cultural factors shape news reporting. Despite earlier work showing that a group-based discrimination frame is more common in the United States than in France, we find that the U.S. news sample is no more likely to discuss weight-based discrimination than the French news sample. We attribute this to specific barriers to this particular framing, namely the widespread view that body size is a behavior, akin to smoking, rather than an ascribed characteristic, like race. This discussion points, more generally, to some of the mechanisms limiting the diffusion of frames across social problems