You're worth what you eat: Adolescent beliefs about healthy eating, morality and socioeconomic status

Abstract

Amidst growing concern about adolescents' diets and dietary health in the United States, this article asks: what does healthy eating mean to adolescents? Using data from in-depth interviews conducted with 74 adolescents across socioeconomic status (SES) in California in 2015–2016, I show how adolescents view healthy eating as a moral, affluent practice and use discussions of healthy eating to assert their own morality and socioeconomic position. Adolescents associate healthy eating with 1) financial privilege and 2) moral superiority. Adolescents differ, however, in how they view their own families' healthy eating habits, and accordingly, their own moral worth. Most middle- and high-SES adolescents depict their families as healthy eaters. They trace their families' healthy diets to financial privilege while simultaneously framing these diets as morally superior. In the process, middle- and high-SES adolescents distinguish their families – as healthy eaters – from poor, “unhealthy” families. In contrast, few low-SES adolescents describe their families as healthy eaters. On the one hand, these adolescents report that financial constraints limit their families' abilities to eat healthily. But most also subscribe to the same discourses that label healthy eating as morally superior. While a minority of low-SES adolescents push back against these discourses to regain a sense of moral worth, overall, more privileged adolescents' beliefs about healthy eating enable them to assert themselves as good, moral people, while those shared beliefs challenge less privileged adolescents’ abilities to do the same. In this way, beliefs about healthy eating serve as a powerful medium for adolescents to mark and moralize socioeconomic groups, and each other.