“He Doesn’t Like Anything Healthy!”

Chapter 3 listens not only to parents’ discourses but also to children themselves and the ways that they engaged with adults’ food meanings. Participant observation in the elementary school cafeteria yielded examples of questions children ask about food and nutrition, how they monitor one another’s engagements with food, and how they perform their own healthiness or lack thereof in a collective setting. Students were quite aware of “junk” foods such as chips and candy as transgressions; by the same token, they understood these transgressions as expected and normal for children in ways they were not for adults. Likewise, adults spoke of children as naturally enjoying sugars, simple foods such as macaroni and cheese, and other less explicitly healthful foods. In this way, the qualities attributed to foods also provided means for children and adults to recognize childhood and adulthood; “healthy” food was associated with the knowledge, discernment, and self-control of maturity, while childhood was associated with pleasure and with lack of moderation. This immoderate space of childhood was under scrutiny, yet also valued and defended in ways that invite consideration of how adults ambivalently relate to “neoliberal” prescriptions for consumer self-discipline.