Feeding in context: Eating occasions as domestic socialized practice

This chapter looks at the role of the family meal in children’s food socialization and their understanding of complex family dynamics around food choice. In soliciting views from children, rather than parents, it adds to a small but growing body of research that recognises the need to give children a consumer ‘voice’ (Ekström 2007; Kerrane et al., 2015; Lawlor and Prothero, 2011; Marshall, 2010a). Drawing on primary qualitative research into children’s ideas about meals and eating as part of the family unit it explores the everyday food practice of the meal and how children are socialised into eating through their participation in this consumption activity. It reveals the ways in which children both accept and challenge this practice in establishing their own ideas about food. Informed by ideas around ‘becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984; Johansson, 2014) it considers how children’s food practices allow them to engage simultaneously in both collective and individual consumption identity and offers a framework for meals and identity practice. For parents, practitioners and policy makers it raises questions about the lack of attention paid to the eating environment and questions the claim that the family meal is dead.