Feeding the ‘organic child’: Mothering through ethical consumption

Abstract

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.

A Taste of Inequality: Food's Symbolic Value across the Socioeconomic Spectrum

“…I highlight these shifting meanings as well as inter-and intrafamily nuances in the Findings section on middle-SES families. Another important point of variation was between mothers and fathers, consistent with scholarship underscoring the importance of food work to motherhood and a core part of maternal labor and identity (DeVault 1991;Cairns et al 2013). I attend to this varation in the Findings section examining high-SES families.…”

“…Scholarship examining the origins of these disparities highlights important structural determinants of diet, including differential access to healthy that mothers should spend extensive time and energy cultivating children and tending to their needs (Hayes 1998). As the stakes around feeding have been raised, mothers have come to be largely viewed as personally responsible for feeding their children "healthy" food and protecting them against "unhealthy" influences (Cook 2009;Zivkovic et al 2010;Cairns et al 2013). Research shows that many mothers feel that they fall short of such ideals, with some even seeing the flaws inherent in these discourses.…”

“…Yet Heather interpreted these complaints as evidence of responsible parenting. Whereas for Nyah, denying her adolescents the foods they wanted would have put their well-being at risk, the opposite rang true in many high-SES parents' minds: succumbing to adolescents' desires would jeopardize their health and their development (Cairns et al 2013).…”

Alternative food networks and food provisioning as a gendered act

“…Women often feel guilty when they are unable to meet normative food provisioning ideals (DeVault 1991;Avakian and Haber, 2005;Blake et al 2009;Cairns et al 2013). AFN participants often aim to engage in more from scratch food provisioning, rather than utilizing processed or convenience foods (Murdoch and Miele 2004;Little et al 2009).…”

“Eating isn’t just swallowing food”: Food practices in the context of social class trajectory

“…Ethical eating is another means of marking class distinctions through food: fair trade, sustainable, locally produced, humane, organic (Cairns et al, 2013;Elliott, 2013;Guthman, 2003;Johnston et al, 2011;Sassatelli & Davolio, 2010). Not only are such products more costly, they also often require more effort and travel time to obtain (Kriwy & Mecking, 2012).…”