Overview

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 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.

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9781772580020

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This collection explores the ways that a mother's role in food procurement, food preparation, and meal serving becomes a crucible for gendered, class, and racial dynamics that reflect public and private agendas. Mothers are shown to be agentive actors whose mothering work repurposes, repackages and rewrites dominant ideologies through everyday activity. The authors creatively demonstrate important ways that mainstream discourse and the dynamics of the neoliberal project articulate with mothers? lives and identities in their kitchens and at their dinner tables. ?Janet Page-Reeve, Research Assistant Professor, University of New Mexico This manuscript effectively brings together the multifaceted and socially/culturally complex topic of mothering and food. Taking a global perspective that includes recognition for the constraints of social expectations and economics, the collection highlights the relationship between mothers and food while also critiquing the naturalization of this association. It is a powerful contribution to maternal studies, sociology and the anthropology of food. ?Melinda Vandenbeld Giles, University of Toronto, Editor of Mothering in the Age of Neoliberalism

Author Information

Florence Pasche Guignard completed her Ph.D. in the study of religions at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). In 2012, she joined the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto to complete her postdoctoral research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and entitled “Natural Parenting in the Digital Age. At the Confluence of Mothering, Religion, Environmentalism, and Technology.” Her interdisciplinary research engages issues at the intersection of religion, ritual, gender, embodiment, media and material culture.Tanya M. Cassidy is a Canadian sociologist who received her doctorate from the University of Chicago. Recently she won an EU Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship housed at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) in the United Kingdom. She continues to be an Affiliated Researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the Maynooth University (Ireland), where she held her Cochrane Fellowship, as well as an adjunct Professor with the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Criminology at the University of Windsor, Ontario (Canada).

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