Everyday Family Food Practices

Abstract

This chapter considers the debates around childhood obesity and focuses on UK public health campaigns, such as Change4Life, aimed at children and their parents. It aims to broaden the childhood obesity debate commonly discussed in the UK public health literature by using Childhood Studies to critique everyday assumptions that seem to be made about children in public health policy. The chapter consider views and perspectives of children, thereby challenging assumptions suggesting instead that children play an active part in everyday family feeding practices. The family as a context for the negotiation of everyday food practices is explored and the dichotomous relationship of parent and child considered. Reflections are also offered on the fluidity and complexity of family structures and the importance that food plays within the context of everyday family life and how food provisioning impacts on intergenerational relationships within the family. The chapter finishes by exploring perceptions of While the health literature assumes that children are simply recipients of parental feeding, this chapter highlights research that shows that children also construct their own understandings about the healthiness of food and that they are active participants in negotiating family food practices. Through exploring studies situated within contemporary childhood and families research, the chapter affords a much more nuanced picture of childhood obesity discourses.

Geographies of food beyond food: transfiguring nexus-thinking through encounters with young people in Brazil

“…A wide range of studies have explored how food is an important nodal point in maintaining, negotiating and 'doing' family-lives (Jackson, 2009;Punch et al, 2010). Across diverse contexts, these highlight the routine food practices that constitute senses of familial identities (Wills et al, 2008), care and belonging (Kohli et al, 2010), gendered domestic labour (Bell & Valentine, 1997), and classed inequalities (Fairbrother & Ellis, 2016;Wills et al, 2008).…”

“…For example, an important seam of literature explores the prevalence of normative, panic-laden media/ political discourses about children's obesogenic diets and lifestyles in many European and North American contexts (Fairbrother & Ellis, 2016;James et al, 2009), and critiques the resulting interventions that target children's bodies and food practices via dining halls (Pike, 2008), lunchboxes (Metcalfe et al, 2008), mealtime supervisors (Dotson et al, 2015), curricula (Pike & Leahy, 2012), and pedagogies (Cairns, 2017;Welch et al, 2012). Allied work has also explored the perpetuation of anti-obesity anxieties, and individualized, gendered, classed norms of blame, shame and responsibility (Evans, 2010;Gibson & Dempsey, 2015) within intimate domestic and family spaces (Fairbrother & Ellis, 2016). These examples are significant in revealing the pervasive operation of normative discourses and biopolitical governance that are infrastructural in many W-E-F nexus contexts, despite this language and mode of analysis seeming entirely alien to most existing models of nexus-thinking.…”