Food as Methodological Infrastructure: Interview Design, Power, and Ethical Responsibility in Qualitative Research

Qualitative interviews are often treated as neutral tools for eliciting information, with methodological attention focused on question design, rapport, and researcher reflexivity. This article advances a methodological intervention by theorizing food as methodological infrastructure—a design arrangement that shapes power, temporality, consent, and disclosure within research encounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2024 with adults living in rural communities of Michoacán, Mexico, the analysis examines how food-mediated interviews reconfigure the social relations through which knowledge about intimate partner violence and everyday harm is produced. Shared meals and flexible pacing redistribute authority over narrative control, enabling participants to manage exposure through silence, delay, redirection, and selective narration. Rather than functioning as a rapport-building technique, commensality operates as an infrastructural condition governing when, how, and whether disclosure occurs. By centering methodological infrastructure, the article reframes interview design as a site of ethical responsibility and epistemic consequence.