Mothers and Food: Negotiating Foodways from Maternal Perspectives

Download or read book Mothers and Food: Negotiating Foodways from Maternal Perspectives written by Pasche Florence Guignard and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From multidisciplinary perspectives, this volume explores the roles mothers play in the producing, purchasing, preparing and serving of food to their own families and to their communities in a variety of contexts. By examining cultural representations of the relationships between feeding and parenting in diverse media and situations, these contributions highlight the tensions in which mothers get entangled. They show mothers’ agency — or lack thereof — in negotiating the environmental, material, and economic reality of their feeding care work while upholding other ideals of taste, nutrition, health and fitness shaped by cultural norms. The contributors to Mothers and Food go beyond the normative discourses of health and nutrition experts and beyond the idealistic images that are part of marketing strategies. They explore what really drives mothers to maintain or change their family’s foodways, for better or for worse, paying a particular attention to how this shapes their maternal identity. Questioning the motto according to which “people are what they eat,” the chapters in this volume show that mothers cannot be categorized simply by how they feed themselves and their family.