Abstract
BackgroundChildhood obesity prevention initiatives emphasize healthy eating within the family. However, family-focused initiatives may not benefit children whose families lack economic and/or social resources for home cooking and shared meals. The aim of this paper is to examine how adults talk about and make sense of childhood memories of food and eating, with particular attention to understandings of family life and socioeconomic conditions.MethodsSemi-structured interviews with 49 adults in 16 families (22 parents and 27 grandparents of young children) were conducted in Oregon, United States. Most participants had experienced socioeconomically disadvantaged childhoods. The interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis, with a focus on the participants’ memories of food provision, preparation, and consumption in their childhood homes.ResultsTwo main themes were developed: (1) “Food and cohesion”, with the subthemes “Care and nurturance” and “Virtue transmission through shared meals”, and (2) “Food and adversity”, with the subthemes “Lack and neglect” and “Restriction and dominance”. The first theme captures idealized notions of food in the family, with participants recounting memories of care, nurturance, and culinary pleasure. The second theme captures how participants’ recollections of neglectful or rigidly restrictive feeding, as well as food discipline tipping over into dominance, upend such idealized images. Notably, the participants alternately identified poverty as a source of lack and as an instigator of creative and caring, if not always nutritionally-ideal, feeding. Thus, they remembered food they deemed unhealthy as a symbol of both neglect and care, depending on the context in which it was provided.ConclusionsChildhood memories of food and eating may express both family cohesion and family adversity, and are deeply affected by experiences of socioeconomic disadvantage. The connection between memories of food the participants deemed unhealthy and memories of care suggests that, in the context of socioeconomic disadvantage, unhealthy feeding and eating may become a form of caregiving, with nutrition considered only one aspect of well-being. This has implications for public health initiatives directed at lower-income families.
Highlights
Childhood obesity prevention initiatives emphasize healthy eating within the family
In a recently published ethnography of low-income mothers in the United States, the “failure” of not having family meals was cited as a source of conflict, guilt, and shame in food insecure families [17]
Family meals and eating at home were cited as foundations of desirable values, food habits and behaviors
Summary
Childhood obesity prevention initiatives emphasize healthy eating within the family. familyfocused initiatives may not benefit children whose families lack economic and/or social resources for home cooking and shared meals. In a recently published ethnography of low-income mothers in the United States, the “failure” of not having family meals was cited as a source of conflict, guilt, and shame in food insecure families [17]. For these mothers, tackling hunger while feeding their children healthily was an ongoing hardship, exacerbated by limited possibilities to provide meals that were nutritious, filling and affordable [18]. Research from Australia has attended to children’s experiences of food insecurity, demonstrating that children felt that hunger “marked” their bodies as vulnerable and “shameful”, and that families’ navigations of food insecurity often led to a co-existence of childhood obesity and hunger [20]
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