A good example of this is provided by the emergence of convenience food. The widespread use of partially and totally prepared food reflects the desire to save time, as those with most money and least time buy more of it. Such consumer products are widely seen as solutions to the problem of cooking and eating in the context of a busy, time-pressured lifestyle. However, Alan Warde argues that they are as much a response to the reordering of the time-space relations of everyday life as a modern search for the reduction of toil.40 While family meals retain their symbolic significance as important forms of sociality, they now pose considerable scheduling problems in getting people together in the same place at the same time. The cook has to be in the right place for long enough, but so do those for whom she cooks. The erosion of institutionally fixed routines and the fragmentation of daily activities mean that more negotiations, more decisions, and more efort are required to perform the necessities of daily life. For a significant proportion of people, planning to meet people becomes a major preoccupation.
According to these arguments, underpinning much of the feeling of haste is the dificulty of synchronizing time-space paths: “the problem of timing supersedes the problem of shortage of time.”41 People may have more time, but more important than the hours worked is their dispersal through the week. While acknowledging that the increase in women working does contribute to time pressure, the emphasis here is on the intransigent problems of scheduling in a deroutinized society. Discussions of harriedness have not paid suficient attention to the aspect of space and the need for interpersonal conjunction.
Chapter three
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