Food Consumption, Space and Beliefs in Everyday Life: A Geographical Study in Rural and Urban India.

This paper will focus on socio-cultural aspects and beliefs associated with food consumption in everyday life. Food consumption is an important activity in our everyday life as well as it has strong connection with socio-cultural practices all over the world. The space, which we use to consume food in everyday life, is an important matter and associated with belief systems in our society. The existing literatures related to food consumption are much more focused on health, nutrition level, consumption patterns and economical aspects rather than the study of space for food consumption. This paper will explore the variation in use of dining space and sharing the dining space with whom as well as associated belief systems in everyday life. It will also focus on how this variation differs from rural to urban context. This empirical research is conducted on representative villages and cities from different cultural zones of India. Both the qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed for the present study. The data collected through interviews, group discussions, observations and layout mapping. Visual methodology is also applied for this study to accentuate the visual aspect of using space for food consumption. The result of the present study indicates that the use of space for food consumption are varied with physical and socio-cultural aspects of a region and rural-urban context whereas sharing the space of food consumption are associated with social relation and belief systems.