In this article, we examine the gendering of ethical food discourse by focusing on the ideal of the 'organic child'. Drawing from qualitative focus groups and interviews with Canadian mothers of various class backgrounds, we find that the organic child reflects the intersecting ideals of motherhood and ethical food discourse, whereby 'good' mothers are those who preserve their children's purity and protect the environment through conscientious food purchases. Women in our study express the desire to nurture the organic child, and feel responsible for protecting their children's purity. At the same time the organic child represents a gendered burden for women, our participants negotiate the ideal in complex ways that involve managing emotions and balancing the normative expectations of motherhood with pragmatic demands. The idealized figure of the organic child not only works ideologically to reinforce gendered notions of care-work, but also works to set a classed standard for good mothering that demands significant investments of economic and cultural capital. We argue that the organic child ideal reflects neoliberal expectations about childhood and maternal social and environmental responsibility by emphasizing mothers' individual responsibility for securing children's futures.

The corporatization of organics has been critiqued for the concentration of ownership, as well as the ecological consequences of the long distances commodities travel between field and table. These critiques suggest a competing vision of food democracy which strives to organize the production and consumption of food at a proximate geographic scale while increasing opportunities for democratically managed cooperation between producers and consumers. This paper examines how the corporate‐organic foodscape has interacted and evolved alongside competing counter movements of food democracy. Using discourse and content analysis, we examine how corporate organics incorporate messages of locally scaled food production, humble origins, and a commitment to family farms and employees, and explore some of the complexity of the corporate‐organic foodscape. This paper contributes to the understanding of commodity fetishism in the corporate‐organic foodscape, and speaks more generally to the need for sophisticated understandings of the complex relationship between social movement innovation and market adaptation.

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How do individuals form new health beliefs and act in the context of unprecedented uncertainty? Drawing on a unique data set of registered California voters collected a month into stay-at-home orders that allows for an individual-level analysis, we examine the impact of political worldviews on trust in public health institutions and beliefs about the threat of COVID-19, effective methods for preventing the disease, and leaving home during the pandemic. Although all measures of political worldviews are strongly associated with trust in public health institutions and perceptions of threat, beliefs about effective prevention measures, and behavior, we find that Trump approval is particularly associated with COVID-19 risk perception and beliefs, beyond political party affiliation or life circumstances that shape exposure to COVID-19. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for understanding how political worldviews bear on embodied practices and shape the relationship between beliefs and action in unsettled times.

The accumulation of chemicals in human bodies and ecosystems represents a universal environmental and technological risk. As yet, little attention has been paid to media coverage of “body burdens,” the internal contaminant load carried by most organisms in the industrialized world. Using a sociology of risk perspective, this article analyzes the framing of chemical bioaccumulation in Canadian newspaper articles from 1986 to 2006. In later years, articles employ frames that reinforce an individualization of risk, where individuals are encouraged to avoid contaminants through “precautionary consumption” of green consumer goods. This shift in media discourse suggests that self‐protection is emerging as a key frame in the discourse of risk, one that provides a sense of individual control over chemical exposure and shifts the focus away from collective forms of protection from universal risks.