UK University Students' Discourse about Family Food Practices

Abstract

This paper investigates university students' discourse about their food practices at home to address two technical issues in the existing literature about family and food: first, the lack of scholarly attention to adult children's accounts about family food practices, and second, that existing studies about family food too often treat what is reported by respondents as what actually happens. The paper is based on an analysis of twenty-nine semi-structured interviews conducted with university students. Two types of images constructed in the students' discourse are noted: the institutional image and the individual image. This paper finds that students' discourse about family food practices tends to focus on highlighting the institutional image of the student's family rather than on constructing the individual image of the respective student. This paper suggests that adult children's accounts about family food practices can provide a different perspective to the accounts of women, and that the interaction between the researched and the researcher has been overlooked in the current studies about family food practices.

Keywords:

• family food
• feeding work
• food choices

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yin-Ling Lin

Yin-Ling Lin is a lecturer at the Food and Tourism Management Department at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests lie in science and technology studies as applied to food. She is also interested in the debates in research methods and the ways in which some of the symbolic interactionists' worldview can contribute to qualitative data analysis and the application of these analytical methods. Food and Tourism Management Department, Hollings Faculty, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M15 6BG, United Kingdom ([email protected]).