Mothers and food : negotiating foodways from maternal perspectives / edited by Florence Pasche Guignard and Tanya M. Cassidy.

Includes bibliographical references.

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.

Print version record.

Feeding without apology : maternal navigations of distal discourses in family meal labour / Amber E. Kinser and Katherine J. Denker -- Feeding the squeezed middle-class family : maternal stress, dilemmas, contradictions, and the third shift / Neri de Kramer -- The critical kitchen : public kitchen discourses and private New Zealand families / Rachel Lamdin Hunter and Kahurangi Dey -- Nurturing the sustainable family : natural parenting and environmentalist foodways in francophone contexts / Florence Pasche Guignard -- Mothering discourse and the marketing of dairy as a cancer-fighting food / Alissa Overend -- Vigilance and valour in the kitchen : feeding, eating, and the intellectual work of motherhood in food-allergic families / Heather Hewett -- Feeding the family when the mother is sick / Catherine Morley -- Pumpmoms : technology, stigma, and support / Tanya M. Cassidy -- Maternal fruit and vegetable consumption in Canada : differences between anglophones and francophones / Davod Amhadi Gheidari, Gale E. West, and Simon Langlois -- Cooking to win the war : Canadian mothers in the Second World War / Tracey Leigh Dowdeswell -- Secrets of a food storage mom : Mormonism, motherhood, and the mainstreaming of emergency preparedness / Deborah Whitehead -- Mothers as managers of scarcity : poverty and food security in Brazil / Simone Bohn and Luciana Veiga -- Feeding the family in the face of climate change : mothers of rural southwestern Uganda / Florence Kyomugisha, Bernardine Atugabirwe, and Caroline Nshemerirwe -- When mothering does not "measure up" : breastfeeding in the context of obesity and income-related food insecurity / S. Meaghan Sim, Megan Aston, and Sara F.L. Kirk -- Mothers as trickster figures who hide vegetables in kids' food / Vivian Halloran -- What are we feeding our children when we read them a book? : depictions of mothers and food in contemporary Australian picture books / Laurel Cohn -- Gluten-free casein-free : food, autism, and challenges to scientific motherhood and neoliberalism / Emilie Zaslow -- I feed therefore I am : mothers, pasta, and advertisements / Simona Stano -- Mothering and food work in the nuclear family home : a spatial analysis of feeding children / Jennifer L. Johnson -- Yamatji mothers negotiating economic and social capital / Melanie Dembinsky -- (Re)defining femivorism : connections between food, motherhood, and spirituality / Audrey Lundahl -- Becoming mother, becoming matter : the agential and affective capacity of food in performances of the good mother / Emilie Dionne.

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