Eat What’s Good for You

This chapter focuses on Washington High School and its cafeteria, examining the different types of food found there and the role of parents in shaping the cafeteria and students, with specific attention to social class and its consequence for a public food provisioning system. The first part of the chapter sketches the changing set of arrangements in food consumption toward a focus on health that Dan, the food director, labored to bring into being and the role of parental pressure in driving such change. The second part of the chapter shifts attention toward youth, highlighting the way class dispositions shape what kids consume and how they consume, and examining how this same ambivalence finds expression in the types of play students engage in this space.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter considers how we might think about youth food consumption, as a sphere of social meaning constituted in the everyday spaces of school, home, and commercial realms, and its relationship to our democratic future. It suggests that schools should move beyond conventional nutritional education and focus on critical food literacy. This entails a broader curricular project that enables students to engage the wide range of concerns relating to health and diet, environment and sustainability, industrial food production and food origins, well-being, community empowerment, and public space. A critical food literacy program is expansive in scope; builds on school, nonprofits, and community partnerships; and advances a critical pedagogy where learning is student centered. Since young people's struggles for autonomy and claims of cultural authority are often sought in the consumer sphere, critical food literacy is especially important.

I’m Lovin’ It

This chapter explores youth food consumption in commercial food settings as youth leave school at the end of the day. It focuses in particular on McDonald's and Chipotle as popular after-school destinations. It considers two core elements of youth food consumption in the commercial realm—play and gift exchange—examining the extent to which youth food consumption fulfills youth cultural ends alongside and against commercial market ends. It suggests that commercial food settings functioned as youth cultural scenes where loose and ever-evolving networks of friendship and group boundaries were displayed, tested, and fortified. In the context of relationships, food became especially meaningful since it served as a tie sign, publicly linking two people together in some way.

The Cafeteria as Youth Space

This chapter returns to the lunchroom at Thurgood High School to explore food as an object through which youth forge relationships to the institution of school and each other. It examines the social uses of the cafeteria, the geography of groups, and the symbolic role of food for the cafeteria as a youth cultural space where group boundaries relevant to youth materialize. Attention is paid to the means by which social categories that are central to understanding what anthropologist Jennifer Tilton has called “the divided landscape of childhood” are formed in the interactions that unfold around lunch. The students' engagement with the space of the cafeteria at Thurgood was visibly structured by a set of relations and ties forged to the school, as a public institution that sorts by race, gender, and class, while at the same time leveraging its resources to intervene in and reshape the reproduction of inequalities arising from them.

The Cafeteria as Great Equalizer

This chapter examines the lunch menu at Thurgood High School, focusing on the work of food director Brenda, with the aim to deepen our understanding of the complexity of school lunch as a high-stakes public good. Brenda had a no-nonsense style about her; she rarely minced words, but was warm in her demeanor, knowledgeable, and accessible. She made the best of what she was given but hoped for a better food future and in this sense was both pragmatic and aspirational. She held her ground in the face of outside scrutiny, and acknowledged the social value in her work and its link to a public system of care. She recognized that a larger number of students she fed each day were part of the growing number of those who are food insecure in the United States, and her efforts to prepare food that kids wanted to eat expressed a deep commitment to addressing both health and hunger.

The Family Meal

This chapter explores food and family life, focusing on changes to modern families as expressed in the interviews and narratives about family meals as a form of private food provisioning that is increasingly shaped by tensions between commodified social relations on the one hand, and food as object of care, tied to a gift exchange between parents and children, on the other. Drawing on 260 written narratives about family and food by young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, collected between 2007 and 2012, the chapter reveals a marked tension between the precariousness of family life, arising in large part from the economic imperatives of work, and the symbolic work of family members, old and young, to maintain family bonds through family food rituals.

Introduction

This introductory chapter begins with an overview of the book's main themes. This book is an ethnography about food in the lives of American youth and the places where they eat. It hopes to show how the entanglements of class, social context, and cultural meaning shape the ways in which youth relate to food as both symbol and material object, as both public and private good, while also accounting for the set of broader economic and political forces that have reshaped the current food landscape where young people eat. Looking at contemporary food practices, it provides an opportunity to see the different types of relationships youth forge with food and food markets. The remainder of the chapter discusses what kids eat and why, health food vs. junk food, and where kids eat. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.