Children Food And Identity In Everyday Life

This book explores the significance of food practices for childhood identities, from early babyhood to middle childhood and teenage years. It examines how children and families negotiate food and eating practices; what influence the media has on these; the role institutions play; and how far class and ethnicity shape the food that children eat.

This book brings together recent UK studies into children’s experiences and practices around food in a range of contexts, linking these to current policy and practice perspectives. It reveals that food works not only on a material level as sustenance but also on a symbolic level as something that can stand for thoughts, feelings, and relationships. The three broad contexts of schools, families and care (residential homes and foster care) are explored to show the ways in which both children and adults use food. Food is used as a means by which adults care for children and is also something through which adults manage their own feelings and relationships to each other which in turn impact on children’s experiences. The book examines the power of food in our daily lives and the way in which it can be used as a medium by individuals to exert power and resistance, establish collective identities and notions of the self and to express moralities about notions of 'proper' family routines and 'good' and 'healthy' lifestyle choices. It identifies inter-generational and intra-generational differences and commonalities in regard to the uses of and experiences around food across a range of studies conducted with children and young people. This book was published as a special issue of Children's Geographies.

2018 Morris Rosenberg Award, DC Sociological Society In recent years, questions such as “what are kids eating?” and “who’s feeding our kids?” have sparked a torrent of public and policy debates as we increasingly focus our attention on the issue of childhood obesity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that while 1 in 3 American children are either overweight or obese, that number is higher for children living in concentrated poverty. Enduring inequalities in communities, schools, and homes affect young people’s access to different types of food, with real consequences in life choices and health outcomes. Fast-Food Kids sheds light on the social contexts in which kids eat, and the broader backdrop of social change in American life, demonstrating why attention to food’s social meaning is important to effective public health policy, particularly actions that focus on behavioral change and school food reforms. Through in-depth interviews and observation with high school and college students, Amy L. Best provides rich narratives of the everyday life of youth, highlighting young people’s voices and perspectives and the places where they eat. The book provides a thorough account of the role that food plays in the lives of today’s youth, teasing out the many contradictions of food as a cultural object—fast food portrayed as a necessity for the poor and yet, reviled by upper-middle class parents; fast food restaurants as one of the few spaces that kids can claim and effectively ‘take over’ for several hours each day; food corporations spending millions each year to market their food to kids and to lobby Congress against regulations; schools struggling to deliver healthy food young people will actually eat, and the difficulty of arranging family dinners, which are known to promote family cohesion and stability. A conceptually-driven, ethnographic account of youth and the places where they eat, Fast-Food Kids examines the complex relationship between youth identity and food consumption, offering answers to those straightforward questions that require crucial and comprehensive solutions.

This book brings together recent UK studies into children’s experiences and practices around food in a range of contexts, linking these to current policy and practice perspectives. It reveals that food works not only on a material level as sustenance but also on a symbolic level as something that can stand for thoughts, feelings, and relationships. The three broad contexts of schools, families and care (residential homes and foster care) are explored to show the ways in which both children and adults use food. Food is used as a means by which adults care for children and is also something through which adults manage their own feelings and relationships to each other which in turn impact on children’s experiences. The book examines the power of food in our daily lives and the way in which it can be used as a medium by individuals to exert power and resistance, establish collective identities and notions of the self and to express moralities about notions of 'proper' family routines and 'good' and 'healthy' lifestyle choices. It identifies inter-generational and intra-generational differences and commonalities in regard to the uses of and experiences around food across a range of studies conducted with children and young people. This book was published as a special issue of Children's Geographies.

Based on a participatory ethnographic study, this book explores how immigrant children adjust to life in the U.S. as expressed by representations of several domains: the food they eat; the continuities, changes, and differences between the food they ate in Colombia and what they eat in the U.S.; the concepts, feelings, and values associated to food they eat; the meaningful interactions in their food representations and how participants' agency is expressed in their food and in the research activities. Immigrant children living in the U.S. are agents actively blending elements from their home society with elements they encounter in the U.S. context from which new food patterns closely related to their identities are emerging.

This cross-disciplinary volume brings together diverse perspectives on children’s food occasions inside and outside of the home across different geographical locations. By unpacking mundane food occasions - from school dinners to domestic meals and from breakfast to snacks - Feeding Children Inside and Outside the Home shows the role of food in the everyday lives of children and adults around them. Investigating food occasions at home, schools and in nurseries during weekdays and holidays, this book reveals how children, mothers, fathers, teachers and other adults involved in feeding children, understand, make sense of and navigate ideological discourses of parenting, health imperatives and policy interventions. Revealing the material and symbolic complexity of feeding children, and the role that parenting and healthy discourses play in shaping, perpetuating and transforming both feeding and eating, this volume shows how micro and macro aspects are at play in mundane and everyday practices of family life and education. This volume will be of great interested to a wide range of students and researchers interested in the sociology of family life, education, food studies and everyday consumption.

Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Award 2017. Interest in the anthropology of food has grown significantly in recent years. This is the first handbook to provide a detailed overview of all major areas of the field. 20 original essays by leading figures in the discipline examine traditional areas of research as well as cutting-edge areas of inquiry. Divided into three parts – Food, Self and Others; Food Security, Nutrition and Food Safety; Food as Craft, Industry and Ethics – the book covers topics such as identity, commensality, locality, migration, ethical consumption, artisanal foods, and children's food. Each chapter features rich ethnography alongside wider analysis of the subject. Internationally renowned scholars offer insights into their core areas of specialty. Examples include Michael Herzfeld on culinary stereotypes, David Sutton on how to conduct an anthropology of cooking, Johan Pottier on food insecurity, and Melissa Caldwell on practicing food anthropology. The book also features exceptional geographic and cultural diversity, with chapters on South Asia, South Africa, the United States of America, post-socialist societies, Maoist China, and Muslim and Jewish foodways. Invaluable as a reference as well as for teaching, The Handbook of Food and Anthropology serves to define this increasingly important field. An essential resource for researchers and students in anthropology and food studies.

The papers explored the use of food and cookery to explore the past and the exotic, and food in corporations.

This book investigates co-housing as an alternative housing form in relation to sustainable urban development. Co-housing is often lauded as a more sustainable way of living. The primary aim of this book is to critically explore co-housing in the context of wider social, economic, political and environmental developments. This volume fills a gap in the literature by contextualising co-housing and related housing forms. With focus on Denmark, Sweden, Hamburg and Barcelona, the book presents general analyses of co-housing in these contexts and provides specific discussions of co-housing in relation to local government, urban activism, family life, spatial logics and socio-ecology. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in a broad range of social-scientific fields concerned with housing, urban development and sustainability, as well as to planners, decision-makers and activists.

This book explores contemporary families as sites of consumption, examining the changing contexts of family life, where new forms of family are altering how family life is practised and produced, and addressing key social issues - childhood obesity, alchohol and drug addiction, social networking, viral marketing - that put pressure on families as the social, economic and regulatory environments of consumption change.