“You are What You Eat”: Nutritional Norms, Maternal Deviance, and Neutralization of Women's Prenatal Diets

Abstract

This article uses neutralization theory to examine women's responses to prenatal nutritional norms. Based on 55 qualitative interviews with pregnant women, I explore women's prenatal nutritional narratives, their talk about food and nutrition. Women link healthful eating in pregnancy with the good mother ideal and construct identities as mothers through monitoring prenatal diets. When they violate nutritional norms, they are subject to charges of maternal deviance and use techniques of neutralization to protect their self-concept. I explore the excuses and justifications women offer for violations of prenatal nutritional norms and demonstrate how mundane behaviors are endowed with moral meaning in pregnancy.

Special thanks to Joan Spade, Marybeth Stalp, Gayle Sulik, and Beth Tracton-Bishop for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to Craig Forsyth and the several anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback.

Notes

¹Recorded in ranges of $10,000.

¹Four women also read the companion book, What to Eat When You're Expecting (Eisenberg, Murkoff, and Hathaway 1986), but because the discussion of diet and nutrition contained in What to Expect focused on the same issues and advocated the same general diet, these women rarely distinguished between the two books.