Introduction

This chapter introduces the argument of the book: that tensions in the way middle-class parents treat children’s food reflect the influence of an underlying ethic that is linked with neoliberal capitalism and that shapes social inequality in the United States. Several literatures and subthemes are introduced, including the politics of parenting in the United States; middle-class aesthetics and anxieties, particularly as these relate to parenting and food; and theories of neoliberalism and its impacts on selfhood and everyday life. In addition, this chapter describes the research setting of the book: “Hometown,” a K–8 charter school and the urban, gentrifying area of Atlanta in which it is located. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of the ethnographic methods used to collect materials for this book, including reflexive discussion of the ethnographer’s positioning.

Helicopters and Nazis

Chapter 2 moves beyond nutritional discourse to consider the more social and emotional content of parents’ food talk. Much of this talk was oriented toward the concern to socialize and to train but not to overly limit children, project a negative adult persona, or come across as judgmental of others’ choices. The popular concept of the overprotective “helicopter parent” was an expression of these ambivalences, visible in national media and parenting blogs as well as in the ongoing commentaries of Atlanta parents; overattentiveness and food anxiety were seen as potentially negative influences on children. This chapter explores how food and feeding are wrapped up with models of personhood, that is, with conceptions of the kind of person one should be in order to be a good parent or a healthy child and socially attractive to others. In particular, it examines how power struggles around children’s food reflect ideas about individuality, relationships, and the fuzzy boundaries of the self.

“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.

Discerning the “Real” from the “Junk”

Chapter 1 draws upon ethnographic data to examine concretely the primary food concerns of parents in the Hometown community, contextualizing these against historical trends in nutritional recommendations in the United States. This chapter homes in to consider parents’ experiences of what Ulrich Beck has described as “risk society,” where people confront and manage the uncertainties and dangers inadvertently created through industrial production. The Hometown milieu is best described as postindustrial in that it is both of and deeply resistant to the highly commodified economy of children’s food. By trusting or rejecting certain foods and brands, adults worked to understand and to address fears and challenges they experienced with and for their children.

Honoring the Cheese Puffs

Chapter 4 considers how concerns about children’s food are part and parcel of people’s participation in and recognition of their urban, gentrifying community: a means of creating their urban, middle-class civic identities. As a general rule, parents held inclusivity and diversity (understood primarily but not only in terms of class and race) as explicitly valuable and beneficial to their school community. At the same time, after-school childcare programs and other school events could become cause for consternation to food-aware parents: bags of snack chips, cupcakes with bright blue frosting, or Rice Krispie treats sometimes circulated through classroom birthday parties, illicit lunchroom trades, and impromptu cooking classes. Food comparisons across families and observed differences between school and home were often fraught by concern for children’s physical well-being, but these concerns and their expression were also constrained by the preference for nonjudgmental, politically circumspect, and socially aware attitudes. These sensibilities themselves index socioeconomic status and reflect class cultures, but explicit talk of status or prestige was submerged in this urban child-rearing vision, where the language of whole foods and wholesomeness coexisted carefully with that of progressivism and social inclusivity.

Conclusion

The book’s concluding chapter considers further how Hometown conceptualizations of parental care and engagement bespeak the neoliberal labor burdens middle-class parents take upon themselves as individuals, and how these practices can work at cross-purposes with their politics of inclusivity. Parents’ choices, the problems they perceive, and the resources they bring to bear are embedded within larger structures of inequality that are sometimes acknowledged but appear less salient when individualized motivations are foregrounded. This reinforces a neoliberal situation in which responsibility for well-being and advancement rests on individual actors and how much they “care.” Meanwhile, middle-class parents also strive not to come across as caring too much, in effect depoliticizing and obscuring their own protective labor. How else could this labor be directed, and the relationships among childhood, food, and community well-being reconceptualized?This final chapter draws comparisons between contemporary U.S. discourses and postsocialist European perspectives to raise questions about how the burdens and challenges of children’s nutrition might be differently imagined.