Ontological pleasure: Exploring eating as enjoyment among people with experience of homelessness

Abstract

Amidst globally escalating housing and cost of living crises, more and more people face the double challenge of securing shelter and food in their day-to-day lives. Yet, what meanings people with experience of homelessness attribute to eating is not well understood. We analyse eating as embedded in social relations between individual actors, social institutions, and organisations. We draw on a study conducted in Australia between March and October 2022 combining narrative interviews and participant-produced photography with 48 participants to focus on the role of pleasure derived from eating. Including participants who had exited homelessness and were now securely housed alongside participants who continued to experience homelessness offered analytical leverage to tease out nuances across different settings of housing and homelessness. Constraints on eating, how the task of eating is accomplished, and how people partake in civil rituals via food (re)produce the allocation of a position within a moral and social order. Attending to eating as a source of enjoyment in addition to nutrition and a means to quell hunger, we develop the notion of 'ontological pleasure' as a conceptual tool to make sense of these complexities.