This paper examines how US parents and grandparents describe their provision of food to preschool-age children. Drawing on forty-nine interviews with sixteen families, most of which were socioeconomically disadvantaged, it is argued that gender and generation intersect in everyday efforts to care for children's eating. The analysis explores gendered divisions of foodwork, highlights the struggles of single mothers, and examines fathers' redefinitions of the paternal role to include feeding and caring for children. At the core of the analysis, however, is the participants' emphasis on grandmothers as sources of knowledge and support, with both fathers and mothers citing grandmothers and other women of earlier generations as culinary influences and as role models for good parenting. The article thus discusses "feeding the extended family," and concludes with a discussion about moving beyond the couple-focused paradigm of parenting in research on food and the gendered division of foodwork.
This article explores how 31 Swedish men (22–88 years old) talk about the sociality of domestic cooking in everyday life. We demonstrate how domestic cooking – for oneself, for others and with others – is part of the understanding of contemporary Swedish men and how the expressed sociality of cooking is intertwined with accomplishments of masculinity. The sociality of cooking is not only about homosocial leisure but also a way for men to maintain heterosocial relationships and assume domestic responsibility. We discuss a potential cultural transition in men’s domestic-meal sociality and suggest the need for studies of gendered divisions of domestic work and the sociology of food to analyse how cooking shares similar properties to those of commensality, and the implications of this regarding gender relations.
Commensality (the act of eating together) is studied in a range of disciplines and often considered important for social communion, order, health and well-being, while simultaneously being understood as in decline (especially the family meal). However, such claims are also contested in various ways. In this paper, we discuss the expanding field of commensality research and critically reflect on the debates surrounding its social functions, including its role in public health. We illuminate the deep social and cultural significance of commensality, through time and space, and conclude that whether or not commensality is the preferred social form of eating for any given individual, it is difficult to escape its sociocultural desirability and idealization. As a cross-cultural phenomenon in both past, present, and future, we suggest that commensality deserves further research. This includes commensality as a research topic in itself and as an entry point to unveil different dimensions of social relations between people, as well as interactions between humans and material objects.
Research on healthy aging commonly concerns problems related to loneliness and food intake. These are not independent aspects of health since eating, beyond its biological necessity, is a central part of social life. This scoping review aimed to map scientific articles on eating alone or together among community-living older people, and to identify relevant research gaps. Four databases were searched, 989 articles were identified and 98 fulfilled the inclusion criteria. In the first theme, eating alone or together are treated as central topics of interest, isolated from adjoining, broader concepts such as social participation. In the second, eating alone or together are one aspect of the findings, e.g., one of several risk factors for malnutrition. Findings confirm the significance of commensality in older peoples’ life. We recommend future research designs allowing identification of causal relationships, using refined ways of measuring meals alone or together, and qualitative methods adding complexity.
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