Mothers and Food

Book excerpt: "This collection adds to scholarship on gender and food by replacing ignored or silenced maternal voices at the center of the inquiry. 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 diverse issues addressed in this volume include breastfeeding and infant feeding as food work, the monitoring of restrictive diets, the religious, cultural, and economic politics of food, and the gender, class and race bias in current media, as well as authoritative discourses about mothers' often "powerless responsibility" of their own and their family's health. Maternal strategies deployed to cope with some of the local consequences of global food systems, such as food insecurity arising from situations of war, climate change, and poverty, both in the economic North and in the global South, are also analyzed in the volume. 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."--