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Doing the shopping is a deceptively banal activity. Food shopping is indispensable because in our society we have to buy in order to eat, and it is usually studied only in terms of consumer statistics, but it says a great deal about our way of life, our social hierarchies, our relationships within couples and families, and even our moral concept of what is good, what is healthy and what is acceptable. Somewhere between a leisure activity and a chore, between the public buying space and the private domestic environment, shopping sets its well-marked itinerary and its own rhythms, dictated as much by special offers as the seasons. From the shelves of hypermarkets to local Sunday markets via the quick fix of mini-markets, Martyne Perrot closely analyses how things are done, the division of jobs between men and women, the attitude to children, and the tone set by cultural tendencies or financial necessity. Cleverly combining witness accounts with thorough research, she shows how, with the mass-market-isation of food products, our shopping choices define us and set us apart from each other. And we see that the much-discussed "weekly shopping basket" (so frequently weighed up by economic experts) can also be measured for its share of love, concerns, small pleasures and frustrations. A researcher for CNRS (a national body for scientific research) as well as a sociologist and ethnologist, Martyne Perrot studied changes in the rural world, how some objects travel thanks to globalisation, and the multiple aspects of Christmas. Her works include Les Mariées de l'île Maurice (Grasset, 1983), Paysage au pluriel (ed. MSH, co-author) and Ethnologie de Noël (Grasset, 2000).