In the wake of school lunch reform debates, heated classroom cupcake wars, and worries about childhood obesity, children’s food is a locus of anxiety and “crisis” in the United States. What does the feeding of children—and adults’ often impassioned, worried talk about the foods children eat—say about middle-class parents’ understandings of what it means to parent well, and about the kinds of individuals they feel compelled to create in their children? How are these understandings reflective of a larger political economic moment, and how do they reinforce existing forms of social inequality? Th ... More

In the wake of school lunch reform debates, heated classroom cupcake wars, and worries about childhood obesity, children’s food is a locus of anxiety and “crisis” in the United States. What does the feeding of children—and adults’ often impassioned, worried talk about the foods children eat—say about middle-class parents’ understandings of what it means to parent well, and about the kinds of individuals they feel compelled to create in their children? How are these understandings reflective of a larger political economic moment, and how do they reinforce existing forms of social inequality? This book takes up those questions through in-depth ethnographic research in “Hometown,” an urban Atlanta charter school community. Embedding herself in school events, after-school meetings, school lunchrooms, and private homes, the author observed how children’s food was a locus for fundamental moral tensions about how to live, how to present oneself, and how to be protected from harm in a neoliberal environment. Middle-class parents took responsibility for protecting their children from an industrialized food system and for cultivating children’s self-management in food and other realms; yet they did so in ways that ultimately and unintentionally tended to reinforce class privilege and the effects of social inequality. Listening closely to adults’—and children’s—food concerns and contextualizing them both very locally and vis-à-vis a broader political economy, this book interrogates those unintended effects and asks how the “crisis” of children’s food might be reimagined toward different ends.