Exploring our relationship with mealtime leftovers tells us a lot about not only our relationships with waste, but with one another, in the home. In our study of British mealtimes we explore how leftovers are transformed and reused as meals. We refer to theories of disposal in exploring the skills involved in transforming leftovers. We also explore the motivations behind these transformations. Drawing on the work of Miller (1998) we examine how the reuse of leftovers involves sacrifice by individual family members for the greater good of the whole family. We also find that reusing and eating up leftovers involves a collective sacrifice by family members which marks out their membership to the family unit.

This paper focuses on food divestment practices surrounding the consumption of food leftovers in a domestic context. It argues that divestment practices of consuming food leftovers are not the last and disconnected point of a linear consumption process; rather they influence previous and subsequent consumption practices. Drawing on research among middle class British families it shows that consuming leftovers implies a set of practices, (classifying, selecting, storing and re-using) which transform leftovers from polluted to clean food re-admissible to the table. Leftovers' consumption has analogies with the process of sacrifice. It is an everyday thrift practice through which consumers produce excess value to be designated for extraordinary food consumption wherein the family as a whole entity is celebrated. Consuming leftovers requires a high degree of admission to the family and thus only family members, and some of them more than others, are called to such a sacrifice. Therefore it is not only during extraordinary food consumption that familial bonds are reinforced, rather is also during the everyday practice of consuming leftovers that familial bonds are sustained and perpetuated.

This paper investigates the acculturation process of a group of Chinese students living in the UK. It emerges from a longitudinal study looking at how participants' social ties affect their food consumption. Drafting from an interpretive study using focus groups discussions, it shows that participants' food consumption patterns change over time in relation to participants' social ties. Three acculturation phases have been individuated. They show that ethnic and non-ethnic ties influence participants' acculturation process. Students with strong ethnic ties consume Chinese food for maintaining their ethnic identity and resisting host food culture. Students with weak ethnic ties consume Chinese food to maintain their ethnic identity and global consumer culture food to resist host food culture. Participants with strong nonethnic ties have a wider knowledge of host food culture, but they do not consume it more than students with weak non-ethnic ties.

Discourses of intensive mothering now seem to dominate European and American parenting cultures. This is a problem for those mothers who do not currently possess the resources to match up. In a study of Italian and British mothers who are experiencing low or reduced incomes, we observe the ways in which they internalize intensive mothering discourses through a process of ethical self-formation. This mode of self-formation involves detailed self-surveillance and self-discipline and abnegation of their own needs in place of other individual family members, and the family as a whole. We find a series of contradictory emotional effects which generate both pride and self-worth but also stress and anxiety. We advance the theory that mothers operate within an optimistic affective regime to make sense of these contradictory effects and retain a sense of agency and control over their lives and those of their families. However, drawing on Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, we argue that such affective regimes may be very pernicious in their effects, only serving to hold mothers in a relation that is ultimately impassable and often unfulfilling.

This article explores middle class mothers' narratives on their daily routines of preparing lunchboxes for their children. In this study lunchboxes are understood as an artefact linking together discourses and practices of doing and displaying mothering, media and government discourses of feeding children and broader issues of care and surveillance in private and public settings. Drawing on semi-structured, photo elicitation interviews and a focus group discussion, this article illuminates how mothers feel on display through the contents of their children's lunchboxes.

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This article explores the coping strategies of women in 10 middle-class Italian families facing economic crisis. We investigate food provision revealing the ceaseless extra work that goes into meal preparation. Adopting anthropological theories of thrift and sacrifice, we unpack participants' micro-coping strategies, observing their tendency to redirect resources towards their loved ones and abnegating their own needs for the greater good of the family. This sacrifice is done out of necessity, reinforcing traditional gender inequalities in the home. However, there is also evidence that women take pride in their coping, developing new competencies and maintaining control over meal provision and thus the wider patterning of family life. We explore the significance of recessionary times for the constitution of female subjectivities at home.