Between careful and crazy: the emotion work of feeding the family in an industrialized food system

ABSTRACT

Mothers are under tremendous pressure to feed children wholesome meals – a job that requires careful attention to every ingredient on a child’s plate. They are also urged to restrain how much they control what children eat as part of modeling ease and detachment toward food and eating. In this paper, we explore how mothers navigate this contradictory advice to determine an appropriately careful and relaxed approach to feeding children. Drawing from interviews with a diverse sample of thirty mothers, we find that women distance themselves from two extreme food femininities: the “fast food mother” and the “crazy organic mother.” The latter extreme is most relevant to the middle-class mothers in our study. These mothers employ specific emotional and communicative strategies to maintain careful control over their children’s diet without evoking too much anxiety, or alienating friends, fellow parents, and relatives who are part of their everyday food routines. We argue that mothers are caught in an impossible bind: circumvent the industrial food system without becoming too obsessive. Our study contributes to the literature on calibration, motherhood, and feeding the family by revealing the substantial emotion work required to meet the cultural expectations of healthy eating and “perfect balance.”

KEYWORDS:

• Cooking
• children
• family
• femininity
• foodwork
• gender
• interviews
• organic food

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Miranda Waggoner and Susan Markens for providing valuable feedback on drafts of this manuscript; to Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston, and Sarah Bowen for conversations that helped inform this work; and to three anonymous reviewers, as well Amy Bentley and Katherine Magruder for guidance in improving the manuscript. This work was first presented at the 2014 Association for the Study of Food and Society annual meeting in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. Financial support from a Rutgers University Research Council grant facilitated data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Goop is a privately held company founded by Gwyneth Paltrow in 2008. It describes itself as a “lifestyle brand,” offers “wellness” articles and sells health and beauty products. See: www.goop.com.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Research Council Grant provided by Rutgers University [202045].

Notes on contributors

Norah MacKendrick

Norah MacKendrick is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. Her research and teaching cut across environmental health, gender, food studies, and consumption She is the author of Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics, and she has published in Gender & Society, Journal of Consumer Culture, and Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

Teja Pristavec

Teja Pristavec is a sociologist and postdoctoral researcher in the Social and Decision Analytics Division (SDAD) of the Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative at the University of Virginia. She obtained her PhD from Rutgers University. Her research interests include quantitative methods and the sociology of health, families, and the life course. At SDAD, she collaborates with an interdisciplinary research group in developing data tools for government and industry projects improving local infrastructure and the quality of life in the Washington DC area. Her work appears in The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, The Gerontologist, and Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics.