Food is one of the most common and intimate ways of expressing care, which is particularly evident in how adults relate to children. Feeding children is a biological act filled with cultural meanings and expectations, an expression of love and care. But do we, perhaps, care too much about children’s food?
During my ethnographic research on the politics of children’s food in Poland, one of the participating fathers told me: “When I was at the food market the other day, I saw a mother with her 2-year-old child in a stroller, and that child was holding in her hand a huge Snickers bar and eating it. A 2-year-old child! It’s sometimes outrageous what people give their children to eat, how they feed them.” He expressed shock at what he saw and the feeding and eating practices of others. I have encountered similar situations and stories of moral outrage countless times during my fieldwork and afterwards. We are surrounded by highly moralizing discourses about children’s food. Everyone seems to have an opinion about children’s eating, judging how it happens, declaring how, what and where they should and should not eat – and blaming families, especially mothers, for doing it “wrong”. A dietician pointed out to me, “Parents and grandparents are the problem, families are the problem!” But what exactly , and why, is considered such a problem?
Drawing made by 11-year-old Zuzia. Published with permission.
The widespread interest in what children eat shows that feeding children is a political issue. It produces various kinds of concerns and fears, about such tangible threats as dental caries, excess weight or polluted food, but also the intangible threat of developing “unhealthy food habits”. These matters trigger both population related fears on a national scale, for instance when state officials discuss rising childhood obesity rates and point to parents as the main culprit, and individualized anxieties about particular children acquiring an insatiable taste for sweetness. The focus on children’s food masks many deeper issues, such as idealized beauty norms; classed and racialized ideas of what constitutes “proper” food; fears of being harshly judged; economic costs; and issues of control and responsibility. Above all, feeding children is political because it is about power over who children grow up to be, it is about controlling the future generation. And the family takes centre stage in all of these politics.
I have come to understand the politics of children’s food through the concept of feeding anxieties. While anxiety is often understood as a psychological notion, I treat it as a social concept. Building on Sarah Ahmed’s work on how collective emotions emerge and impact people, I analyse how feeding anxieties proliferate and what they do to people and institutions. In my book, Feeding Anxieties: The Politics of Children’s Food in Poland, I show how feeding anxieties are experienced by families, schools, the state and the food industry, and how these anxieties feed off and exacerbate each other. I describe how different social actors have become obsessed with what children eat and with feeding them “in the right way”. At the same time, their ideas about what is “right” and “proper” are usually very different and keep changing. I analyse these processes by showing how, since the 1980s, post-socialist and neoliberal shifts have altered notions of what it means to be a citizen and consumer, ideas about collective and individual responsibility, as well as concepts of mothering, childhood and family life. Feeding anxieties create power struggles, tensions and negotiations that involve various actors and happen at multiple scales: from the kitchen table, the school canteen or the shopping aisle to food companies’ international offices and parliamentary chambers. But they affect family life and mothers most intensely.
Mothers are at the centre stage of feeding anxieties. Care work and foodwork remain highly gendered, with women usually perceived as “natural feeders”. They are continuously judged by others as well as dealing with their own doubt and guilt when it comes to feeding their children. They are blamed for caring too much, when they are perceived as becoming too controlling or obsessed about health; and for caring too little, when they supposedly do not put enough effort into feeding their children “in the right way”, for instance giving them Snickers bars. These moralizing judgements are most often taken out of context. On the one hand, they do not necessarily recognize the difficult socio-economic situation many working class families and mothers live in and how much energy, time and care they actually put into feeding their children. Middle-class mothers, on the other hand – often the first ones to pass judgment on others – are mercilessly ridiculed as health-obsessed control freaks while they try to perform “good mothering” and “proper feeding”.
It really seems that whatever mothers do, they would still be blamed for feeding children “badly”. In the book, I conceptualize anxiety as a socializing emotion, showing how women in Poland are socialized through feeding anxieties into being “proper” mothers. Magda, one of my interlocutors, talked to me about feeling indoctrinated and pushed into being a “cooking and feeding mother”, when in fact she hated food-related work. Natalia explained how she is trying to feed her children “well”, but this requires controlling the whole world around them – their grandparents, friends, school – which is not possible, so she constantly feels that she is failing. Experiencing feeding anxieties seems to be a prerequisite of being a “good” mother in Poland.
And then there is a sense of collective responsibility and collective blame placed on mothers in regard to feeding children. As I argue in the book, feeding anxieties have become a new form of sociality, that is, paradoxically, deeply individualizing and alienating at the same time. Everyone seems to experience it, but rather than supporting and being understanding of each other, mothers are trapped in the vicious circle of being judged, suffering self-doubt and judging others, as they are placed at the centre of feeding anxieties.
Although my ethnographic case focuses on Poland, similar processes can be found across the globe, including in China, the United States and northern Europe. In different places and in different forms, feeding anxieties escalate the spiral of aspirations, expectations and self-doubts, and unattainable ideals about young people’s bodies and habits that many parents, and children, experience. Children do not live in a social vacuum. They are affected by public and private feeding anxieties, which shape their approaches to food and their own bodies. Increased numbers of eating disorders and disordered eating among young people are a response to that. The intense societal concern about children’s food, which places most of the blame on mothers, is more about moral judgments, various ambitions and having power over the shape of the future generation, than it is about actually caring for young people’s wellbeing.
