Young girls’ experiences of ‘good’ food imperatives in a working class school community: rethinking food desire?

Abstract

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Sweets are ‘my best friend’: belonging, bargains and body-shaming in working class girls’ food and health relationships

“…The primary school's work included the implementation of cognitive, emotional and relationship skills programmes, as well as the engagement of a nutritionist to teach about healthy food and food consumption. While the school requested that we use a survey to examine some of the aspects of girls' health (Fernández, Kitching, and Horgan 2021), the data analysed here is from our Participatory Photomapping (PPM) activities, which included walking interviews and photo elicitation focus groups.…”

“…At school, the assemblage of healthy food rhythms and rules is institutionally timetabled and enforced, and a sense of shared belonging to the space with adults was less apparent for many girls in comparison to family context (Rich 2010;Leahy 2014). Echoing Pike's (2010) study, some of the girls voiced how unappealing the lunches provided to the DEIS school were, and they supplemented them with their own lunches brought from home (Fernández, Kitching, and Horgan 2021). These practices reflect how the complex affective relations of food environments play a critical role in shaping children's food and health desires: the quality and 'feel' of food and eating spaces and opportunities plays an important role in what children consume, where and why (Rawlins 2009;Wills et al 2018;Fernández, Kitching, and Horgan 2021).…”

“…Echoing Pike's (2010) study, some of the girls voiced how unappealing the lunches provided to the DEIS school were, and they supplemented them with their own lunches brought from home (Fernández, Kitching, and Horgan 2021). These practices reflect how the complex affective relations of food environments play a critical role in shaping children's food and health desires: the quality and 'feel' of food and eating spaces and opportunities plays an important role in what children consume, where and why (Rawlins 2009;Wills et al 2018;Fernández, Kitching, and Horgan 2021). The girls below demonstrated how their various relations to sugary foods, cucumber sandwiches and crisps at school reflected various realities such as their lack of freedom to choose, and lack of time to prepare at home.…”

“…In this paper, we theorise children's food and health relationships and desires not as the presence or lack of individual tastes or preferences for certain foods or states: rather we think of desire ethicopolitically as a set of force-relationshipsof pushes and pullsthat enable certain, complex forms of dis/connection and dis/identification with human and non-human Others, which, ethico-politically speaking, enhance their lives or make them more challenging (Deleuze and Guattari 1987;Fernández, Kitching, and Horgan 2021). Our reference to 'pushes and pulls' of food desire is inspired by Renold and Ringrose's (2011) analysis of girls' experiences of the consumer capitalist channelling of desire, where their performances of innocence and sexuality have become 'inextricably connected' (Renold and Ringrose 2011, 390).…”

“…Colls and Evans (2011) demonstrate how responsibility for enabling/enacting 'healthy eating' is passed in a linear way from government, to supermarkets, to parents in ways that define children as ruled by their senses, and incapable of rational, responsible consumption. Yet children and young people are highly aware ofand may subtly resistreductive moralising about 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' foods and bodies (Evans et al 2008;Burrows, Wright, and McCormack 2009;Browne et al 2020;Fernández, Kitching, and Horgan 2021). For example, Goodyear, Kerner, and Quennerstadt (2019) found 13-14-year-olds monitoring their step count and calories burned equated 'health' with 'fitness', reaching a standardised 10,000 daily steps target, burning calories, and in turn, 'not being fat'.…”