What's Cooking, Mom?

Book excerpt: "What's Cooking, Mom? offers original and inventive narratives, including auto-ethnographic discussions, of representations, discourses and practices about and by mothers regarding food and families. When it comes to "food choices" (or lack thereof), mothers stand at the intersection of several strong and sometimes conflicting forces and interests, for instance those in the food industry and public health policies. Daily decisions about food are usually thought of, in a Western context, as a matter of personal choice and private matter, but as the chapters in this volume show, there are important cross-cultural variations associated with these issues. With diverse global and comparative cross-cultural narratives, this volume is posed to offer important literary and ethnographic perspectives. These narratives discuss the multiple strategies through which mothers manage feeding themselves and others, and how these are shaped by international and regional food politics, by global and local food cultures and by their own ethical values and preference, as well as by those of the ones they feed. Many of these mothers ask themselves (and others) "How will I feed my child?" but often also have to consider the question "What should we eat or avoid consuming?" The answers to these questions make for fascinating and sometimes sad stories that anyone interested in maternal considerations about consumption and family will find invaluable."--