Families, Relationships and Societies • vol 3 • no 2 • 303-18 • © Policy Press 2014 • #FRS

ISSN 2046 7435 • ISSN 2046 7466 • http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/204674313X669720

article
The temporality of food practices:
intergenerational relations, childhood memories
and mothers’ food practices in
working families with young children
Abigail Knight, a.knight@ioe.ac.uk
Rebecca O’Connell, r.oconnell@ioe.ac.uk
Julia Brannen, j.brannen@ioe.ac.uk
Institute of Education, University of London, UK

Drawing on the findings of a qualitative study of 48 families with young children (aged 1.5–10
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years), which investigated the influence of employment on children’s diets, this article focuses
on the place of childhood memories and intergenerational relations in the transmission of family
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food practices. The article highlights the temporal nature of family food practices. First, it examines
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the intergenerational transmission of food practices in relation to present time as mothers and
grandmothers negotiate what and how children eat in their everyday lives. Second, it analyses the
ways in which memories of childhood influence mothers’ food practices in their current families,
showing how present-day family food practices are embedded in the relations between parents,
grandparents and children and in the experiences of food and eating from the past. The article
thereby demonstrates the importance of the interplay between food, memories of childhood
experiences and intergenerational familial relations.

key words food • intergenerational • mothers • memories • families 

Introduction
Behavioural psychological theories are often used to explain why individuals make
choices about their food practices. However, these do not take into account other
influences such as enculturation processes, which shape everyday food practices,
including influences from childhood and across generations and the intergenerational
transmission of culture and values. Drawing largely on the interview material from
mothers who took part in a qualitative study of 48 families with young children and
which investigated the influence of parental employment on children’s diets,1 this
article focuses on the place of mothers’ childhood memories and intergenerational
relations in the transmission of family food practices, issues that were not explicitly
foregrounded in the study proposal but which emerged as an important topic in
interviews and analysis. The article shows how present-day family food practices
are embedded in the experiences of food and eating from the past and how past
and present practices are inextricably intertwined and give meaning to each other
(Smart, 2011).

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The article contributes to the body of research about food and family relations and
extends the debate pertaining to the temporality of food practices2 in the following
ways: first, the process of the intergenerational transmission of food practices is
analysed in relation to present time as parents and grandparents negotiate children’s
eating in their everyday lives.This is explored in cases where grandparents either lived
with the families or where the grandparents were providing childcare while parents
worked. Second, it examines the ways in which the past is seen influence mothers’
food practices in feeding their current families. Here the past may be understood as
an influence on current practice and a resource in accounting for it. By exploring
these issues, the article demonstrates the importance of the interplay between food,
memories of childhood experiences and current intergenerational familial relations.
The article first sets out some concepts with relevance to the article’s foci, including
‘practices and mothering’,‘intergenerational relations and the transmission of culture’,
‘power and responsibility’ and ‘families, food and temporality’.

Family practices and mothering

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We draw on the concept of ‘everyday family practices’, which Morgan (1996, 2011)
suggests emphasises action and ‘doing’, a sense of the everyday and the regular, a
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sense of fluidity and an attempt to link the perspectives of observers and social actors.
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We also take a relational approach, which views generations as social relations and
emphasises the role of child–adult power (Alanen and Mayall, 2001). This relational
approach therefore acknowledges the grandparent role in regard to food as one part of
a dynamic network of family relationships (Arber and Timonen, 2012). Furthermore,
in the same way that families are defined more about ‘doing’ than ‘being’ (Morgan,
1996: 158), food is one way of seeing how children, parents and their parents ‘do’
generation.
Despite increases in women’s employment, a process of lagged adaptation (Gershuny
et al, 1994) in the redistribution of domestic labour means that mothers remain
responsible for social reproduction even when they are in paid employment. Mothers
remain overwhelmingly responsible for food work and childcare although men do
more than they did in the past. Nonetheless, children’s and family food is a key
medium through which mothers care physically and symbolically for their children
(O’Connell, 2010). Studies about mothers’ food provisioning in diverse situations such
as during children’s hospitalisation (Pill, 1983) and mothers feeding children through
school gates in Rotherham (Fox and Smith, 2011) demonstrate this.

Intergenerational relations and the transmission of culture

Intergenerational transmission within families has been conceptualised as the
cultivation of ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1977), referring to the passing down of attitudes,
values and practices, and a ‘system of dispositions acquired by implicit or explicit
learning which functions as a system of generative schemes, [which] generates
strategies’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 76). People are influenced by dispositions developed early
in their lives, thereby reproducing cultural life (Bourdieu, 1973), as this article shows.
Bertaux and Thompson (1993: 1) suggest that ‘transmission between generations
is as old as humanity itself ’. Thompson (1993), in his research on social mobility
and the passing down of strong family occupational and social traditions, has shown

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how memories contained within life stories are illustrative of intergenerational

transmission. Food provokes, indeed embodies, memory (Proust, 1982) and hence is
an important vehicle for transmitting heritage and cultural meaning, ranging from
the ‘proper’ family meal to Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner (Muir and Mason,
2012). Traditionally, women have been viewed as custodians and transmitters of
culinary knowledge (meats may be an exception) and mothers especially are seen as
responsible for the transmission of food practices within families. Mothers transmit
wider sociocultural ideas about the meanings of food, from ‘what is a snack’ to ideas
about what is healthy or moral or appropriate, as Cook’s (2009) account of ‘semantic
provisioning’ makes clear.
Interest in intergenerational relations and cultures of transmission has grown
over the last decade or so, in the context of increased longevity and the greater
role of grandparents in work and caregiving (Gray, 2005; Brannen, 2006; Arber and
Timonen, 2012). Studies have focused on how structural and historical changes
related to occupation and geographical mobility have shaped intergenerational
family relations (Brannen, 2003, 2006), on the transfer of material and care resources
across the lifecourse and on how families do or do not support each other across the
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generations (Finch and Mason, 1993; Brannen et al, 2004; Izuhara, 2010; Arber and
Timonen, 2012). Previous research has also focused on grandparents, for example as
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‘supporters’ and ‘rescuers’ of younger generations (Timonen and Arber, 2012), and
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the ways in which the parent generation acts as gatekeepers and facilitators, mediating
grandparents’ relations with their grandchildren (Mahne and Huxhold, 2012).

Power and responsibility

Power is implicated in the transmission of practices and cultural values.Transmission
processes create ambivalences (Luescher, 2005), which can work differently according
to the practice or resource transmitted. For example, intergenerational ambivalences
may be stronger on disciplining children but weaker in promoting educational
success (Brannen, 2012). For mothers in particular, expectations about their role
and carework are in part based on transmission from previous generations, which in
turn may create burdens and tensions for them as they live out their lives in different
realties.With respect to food practices, a younger generation may seek to perpetuate
those experienced in childhood or may choose to disregard practices of the older
generation, although what appears to be discontinuity may not appear so to the actors
concerned. Cultural transmission creates, reproduces and transmits family identities.
However, identities change over the lifecourse and in relation to historical context.
Each generation seeks to differentiate itself from another and to make its own mark
on that which is passed to it (Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame, 1997). In this process,
ambivalences are created as a new generation aims to make a better life or do things
differently from the previous generation, creating new class positions, dispositions
and habits that may distance them from older generations.

Families, food and temporality

Several studies have focused on intergenerational influences on food practices. Blaxter
and Paterson (1983), for example, studied 58 three-generation families living in a
Scottish city.The study aimed to investigate the healthcare of children. Inevitably, food

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was a topic that women of each generation mentioned. For both the grandmothers
and the mothers, ‘good’ food was equated with cooked, ‘proper’ meals. Although
the generations differed in what each considered the most nutritious food (meat for
the older generation, milk for the parental one), continuity of practices between the
generations suggested the transmission of cultures between them.
Intergenerational influences on family food practices has also been illustrated by
Curtis et al’s (2009, 2010; James et al, 2009) study of over 100 children and their
parents, which showed, through food, how generational identities are negotiated on
a day-to-day basis between the different positioned actors within a family – children,
parents and grandparents. Childhood obesity has also been viewed through an
intergenerational lens, showing how family food practices are not totally controlled
and directed by parents but are multidirectional in nature (Curtis et al, 2011).
Moisio et al (2004) took a multigenerational approach to understanding the meaning
of ‘homemade’ and ‘market’-made foods, examining the ways in which meanings and
moralities are understood and negotiated by senior, middle and younger generations
of adults.The study suggests how mothers and markets intersect, how meanings alter
and how family identities change, including in the context of women’s increased
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labour market participation.

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The study
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This article draws on the qualitative element of a recently completed study entitled
‘Food Practices and Employed Families with Younger Children’ carried out by the
authors between 2009 and 2011.The study’s main aim was to map and understand the
effects of the rise of maternal/dual parental employment in England on the quality
of children’s diets. Its key research questions were:

• How does parental employment influence and shape family food practices, in
particular the diets of children aged 1.5 to 10 years?
• How do parents’ experiences of negotiating the demands of ‘work’ and ‘home’
affect domestic food provisioning in families?
• What foods do children of working parents eat in different contexts (home,
childcare and school)?
• How do children negotiate food practices?

The study combined secondary analysis of three large datasets – the English 2008/09
National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS), the Health Survey for England and
the – with a qualitative study of 48 families drawn from the first of these.3 After
obtaining ethical approval from the Faculty of Children and Learning at the Institute
for Education, a subsample of households with employed mothers and fathers was
selected with children aged 18 months to 10 years.The aim was to include households
with higher and lower incomes, and a roughly equal distribution of children by
gender, age and diet score (Simon et al, 2012). The majority of the households were
two-parent households (42/48); most were White British (37/48); there were more
girls (28/48) than boys; and children had a mean age of six.
The aim was to understand the social processes that influence healthier and
unhealthier diets of children both within and outside the home. Qualitative methods
were employed, including interviews with parents (in most cases mothers); visual

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methods were employed with the children as well as interviews, depending on the
age and interest of the child.
This article draws mainly on the data collected from the semi-structured interviews
held with mothers, which lasted for around one-and-a-half hours. The interview
schedule covered a number of areas such as food eaten, where and when on a typical
working and non-working day, the food children ate in settings other than the home,
shopping practices and the domestic division of food work. One of the questions
asked was ‘When you were growing up, how important were mealtimes and food?’;
this and questions about who lived in the household and childcare arrangements
invoked responses that referred to the grandparents’ involvement in current family
food practices and/or mothers’ childhood memories of food and eating and how
these influenced their current practices. In addition, participants sometimes drew
spontaneously on the past to explain current practices.
The data collected were analysed both thematically and by using a case study
approach, in which emblematic cases illuminating specific examples of food practices
were produced. This was achieved by team members summarising all the material
collected for each case/household using a common framework but one that allowed
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new themes to arise.This approach thereby ensured that the analysis was comparable
and rigorous.
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In the following analysis we suggest the ways in which intergenerational relations

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are played out in family food practices. First, we analyse the ways in which mothers
and grandmothers negotiate matters to do with feeding grandchildren when they
are in their care. Second, we show how for some mothers food emerged as salient
memories from their childhoods and how they influenced mothers’ current ways of
feeding their families. All names given are pseudonyms.

Everyday food practices and grandparenting

Caring for grandchildren; providing ‘proper food’

Generally, research shows that despite rapid societal changes, including geographical
mobility and changes in living arrangements, many people still remain committed to
reciprocal care and support and rely on family, especially grandparents, when caring
for young children (Brannen et al, 2004; Gray, 2005; Arber and Timonen, 2012).
Grandparents are often part and parcel of the everyday worlds of many children; they
are important to children in symbolic, practical and expressive ways, providing them
with a sense of continuity and belongingness (Brannen et al, 2000).
In line with other research (Statham, 2011), 15 of the 48 families in our study used
grandparents for some childcare while the parents worked. Ten of the 48 families
relied on grandparents to provide some form of childcare during the week, either in
the grandparents’ home or in the child’s home. For another five families, grandparents
provided some childcare on an ad-hoc basis, for example occasionally during the
school holidays. In most of the former 10 families, the grandparents were providing
meals for children whereas in a small number of families, the parent (usually the
mother) was providing the food for the grandparents to give to the child, a strategy
that was easier to implement for very young children.This practice appeared to be a
way of retaining some control over what the child was eating in their grandparents’
care, as well as a way of trying to make the grandparents’ lives easier. Two-year-old

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Layla, for example, was occasionally looked after by her maternal grandmother when
her parents were working; her mother explained how she sometimes provided food
and always knew what her mother was giving her child. This task was made a lot
easier because Layla’s grandmother had a similar view about healthy eating:

‘My mum might feed her sometimes but.... I’ll either take her lunch with
me in which case it will be sandwiches and fruit and yoghurt, or else my
mum will feed her something. But she’ll say to me first “Can she have this
for lunch?” And I’ll say yeah. My mum would never suggest anything that’s
not appropriate.... I just think my mum likes healthy food as well, she likes
you know, a lot of salads and nice cold meats, we like similar things.’ (Mother,
child aged two, White British, two-parent family)

Grandparents may not simply cater for children’s tastes: cooking grandchildren their
favourite meals they saw as a way of making their time and relationships with them
special. Meghan’s grandmother appeared to have done this successfully. Ten-year-
old Meghan occasionally stayed with her maternal grandparents during the school
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holidays while her parents were working. Meghan described in detail her “nan’s toad
in the hole” as her favourite meal, confirming her positive experience of the food her
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grandmother provided and its consistency as reassuring: “[I like] the way she cooks it
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and puts a little of everything with it. She always puts like vegetables and gravy, and
it’s always the same, I just like it.”
In addition, providing food to grandchildren raised issues about what constitutes
‘proper food’, reflecting different values and norms about childrearing and what is
acceptable and healthy for them to eat, held by older and younger generations. The
grandparents’ involvement in providing care was important to parents – they were
reliant on them practically and also did not want to disturb the emotional ambience
between grandparents and grandchildren.Yet mothers also wanted to exercise their
own influence over what their children ate at the grandparents’ home.
Most of the mothers were happy with the meals children ate at their grandparents’
home. Some children and their mothers reported having a greater variety of food
because of the grandparents’ direct involvement in providing them with meals.
However, a few mothers were fearful that a bad example might be set by the
grandparent and hence that they might pass on ‘bad food habits’. One lone mother
with a four-year-old daughter, Sarah, used a private day nursery for her child during
the week and was happy with the food provided there. Given she worked on Saturdays
once a month, she also had to rely on her mother to help her with childcare at the
weekends. However, she was critical of her mother and step-father’s involvement
in her child’s food practices, and was trying to compensate for this by attempting
to educate her daughter about healthy choices and by labelling some behaviours
and drinks as ‘naughty’, thereby attributing them with moral properties: “My mum
smokes and drinks Pepsi all day long and she [child] loves my mum and I don’t want
her to pick up bad habits so ‘it’s naughty sticks and naughty drinks and alcohol’, it’s
‘naughty drink’ as well.”

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Grandparents ‘treating’ grandchildren

An important aspect of children’s diet concerns snacks and treats, which are considered
as distinct from ‘proper food’ and are thus surrounded by moral discourses (Curtis
et al, 2010). Providing ‘treats’ for children by their grandmothers was a complaint
made by parents in Blaxter and Paterson’s (1983) study and in research by Curtis
et al (2009, 2010). In the context of distancing themselves from a relationship of
authority over grandchildren, some grandparents felt that they could be indulgent; a
common complaint made by mothers about grandparents caring for their children
was that they indulged them too much. In particular, mothers said that they gave
children too many ‘treats’, such as fizzy drinks, crisps, ice creams, biscuits, chocolate
and sweets or gave them things that they would not buy, such as branded snack foods
like Cheesestrings and Fruit Shoots. Thus, grandparents were not so much seen as
‘interfering’ (May et al, 2012) as going against mothers’ wishes and ways of bring up
their children. The following mother, for example, complained that her mother-in-
law, who collected her eight-year-old daughter from school three days a week, was
buying her too many sweets, and that this had caused some conflict: “I don’t know
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what my mother-in-law gives them. She pops into the sweet shop quite a lot. We’ve
had a few conversations about that.... I don’t like them having sweets every time
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they’re collected ... there’s certain sweets I won’t let them have” (mother, child aged
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eight, South European, two-parent family).

The ‘spoiling’ of children by the grandparents, thereby ignoring or bypassing the
authority of the parent generation in the process, suggests how power relations are
played out in families through such practices (Curtis et al, 2009), as well as reflecting
current norms and professionalised discourses about healthy eating and ‘responsible
parenting’ (Ramaekers and Suissa, 2012). Grandparents’ provision of special foods
and ‘treats’ echoes ambivalences in the role of grandparent (May et al, 2012). Thus,
grandparents symbolically reproduce themselves as not responsible for grandchildren’s
nutritional wellbeing in the context of distancing themselves from positions of
responsibility and authority over them.This may create ambivalences for parents and
especially mothers who feel ‘undermined’ or frustrated.
Some of the children were learning to bake with their grandparents and this was
increasing their involvement and interest in food practices as well as providing them
with a sense of continuity. As in Curtis et al’s (2009) study, baking, in most cases
cakes, was also tied up with ‘treating’ grandchildren, as demonstrated in the quote
below. Here baking is a way of bridging the generational gap, an activity inherently
appealing to children but one in which grandmothers have skills to transmit. Two-
year-old Layla was already baking with her grandmother:

‘She [child] really enjoys baking actually. We do, that is the time actually
when she will get something nice to eat, I say nice, a treat. If she’s made some
buns, or we’ll make pizza or some flapjack. And she’s always allowed to eat
what she’s made.’ (Mother, child aged two,White British, two-parent family)

Similarly, 11-year-old Phoebe was described by her mother as showing an interest

in baking, which she did mainly with her grandmother. Her mother described her
mother as a much better cook than her, suggesting the importance of the transmission
of skills between grandparents and grandchildren:

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‘She’d [child] love to bake every weekend if I was interested. She’s never going
to be a great cook watching me or him, but with my mum she learns all sorts.
So yeah, she gets a lot of that from my mum, sadly it missed a generation,
so when my mum comes here they bake together and they cook together,
she [child] loves spending that time with grandma.’ (Mother, child aged 11,
White British, two-parent family)

Mothers’ childhood memories of food

In the interviews we asked a question about the parents’ own childhood experiences
of food practices and whether these had influenced them subsequently. In addition to
these elicited responses, sometimes mothers spontaneously drew on past experiences
in accounting for their current practices.Analysis of the interview data revealed strong
childhood memories of family food practices in some cases. These included strong
emotional responses, ranging from resentment, dislike, physical revulsion to security,
love and nostalgia, reminiscent of Lupton’s (1994) study using memory work to
find out more about food. These biographical accounts, which served to emphasise
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the temporal nature of their family food practices, included positive memories and
influences relating to experiences of migration and family cultures that mothers
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said they wanted to continue with their own families. They also included negative
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childhood memories resulting in the mothers making a conscious effort not to

reproduce patterns of behaviour with their own families now that they had children
of their own. We will now explore these themes in turn.

Positive food memories and cultural influences

About a fifth of the sample of mothers described being influenced by cultures other
than British ones because either they or their parents had been brought up in a
different country than the UK. As a result, many of these parents expressed the desire
to foster a sense of continuity in their family food practices within the context of
experiencing home environments that differed from those governed by British customs
and cultural norms. Countries and their influences on food practices experienced by
the parents included Cyprus, India, Mauritius, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Spain and
the United States. Mothers described learning how to cook from their own mothers
and much of this involved cooking ‘from scratch’ with fresh ingredients, a practice
they had continued with their own family (Moisio et al, 2004).
One mother, who had a five-year-old son, Bhavesh, and who described herself as
British Asian, saw food from her own background as a vehicle for shaping her son’s
ethnic and cultural identity.Transmitting memories through stories associated with (or
embedded in) food was an important way of doing this and of transmitting meaning
or ‘semantic provisioning’ (Cook, 2009). This next mother speaks about ‘then you
sort of pass those foods down’. Moreover, she suggests how her son had understood
the significance of transmitted health remedies, as she explained:

‘It’s not even, you know it’s conscious, it’s subconscious, you cook the foods
that you grew up to eat and then you sort of pass those foods down, the
tastes and the cuisines down. So it’s something we always grew up eating
and sometimes I say to my son: “This is something my mum made, you

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know. And I enjoyed it so maybe you’ll like it.” And he may not like it but
I’ll tell him of that story. The story was this to this food.You know when I
was little, my mum used to make that ’cos I had a cold, or my mum made
me certain teas for medicinal purposes. And she’d put aniseed in them and
she’d put cinnamon and she’d put in cloves and she’d put all these different
things and she’d brew them up. And you’d have them if you didn’t feel well
and had tummy aches and things like that. So if my son has a tummy ache
he’ll say to me: “Mummy make me the tea that your mummy made you,
my grandma made you.” And I’ll make it and he’ll drink it, “oh I feel better
now”. It’s those small things.’ (Mother, child aged five, British Asian, two-
parent family, pilot study)

In examples like this, memories of food may be markers of ethnicity but also mirror
intergenerational family cultures of solidarity and cohesion (Lupton, 1994) and
processes of intergenerational transmission. White British parents also spoke about
fostering family continuity in eating patterns, reflecting culturally normative ideas.
One such ideal concerned the ‘family meal’ (DeVault, 1991). In this case it is the
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social context of the eating occasion, along with the food, which marks it as a proper
family meal. Discussing the topic of eating together as a family, one mother, for
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example, described the importance of family meals when she was a child, especially
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at the weekends and she said: “So yeah I think I’ve been brought up with that and
that’s what I want to pass on to my children. And hopefully it makes them closer
as brother and sister as well in future life” (mother, child aged seven, White British,
two-parent family).
Eleven-year old Dylan’s mother who grew up with her mother and grandparents
also described family meals as a child:

‘I’ve always done it, I think it’s from a child, as I was a child, we always use[d]
to have to eat together. It’s a time, for me, it’s just how I’ve been brought
up; it’s a time when everyone talks about what they’ve done during the
day. So I tend to just keep that going really … it was just my mum, but my
grandparents lived with us as well, so it was like them three, and the three
children, so we always use[d] to sit together and eat. So erm, and I think my
mum use[d] to do that with her mum as well. And I think it’s just something
that I’ve always liked doing. And it’s just a chance to get everyone together.’
(Mother, child aged 11, White British, lone parent)

‘Like mother used to cook’ typically meant ‘homemade’ and thus highlighted the
importance of the production process as well as the producer, giving such food
meaning.4 As in a previous study (James et al, 2009), many childhood experiences
referred to by mothers centred on cooking from ‘scratch’ with fresh products –
practices that they wanted to continue with their own families. The White British
mother of 11-year-old Dylan recalled her mother owning a greengrocer’s shop. She
said this meant there was always a lot of fruit and that her mother and grandmother
cooked a lot of vegetables; the only problem was, they were usually rotten! Some
parents wanted to continue the emphasis on home-cooked food that they had
experienced as children.The following mother, for example, began by recalling happy
memories of baking with her grandmother (encouraging her to do the same with

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her own daughter) and went on to talk about the importance of cooking ‘proper
meals’ with raw ingredients, such as stews:

Mother: ‘I was always baking with me grandma.And those are my best

memories really, baking with me grandma so I always wanted
to make sure that she [my daughter] did.And cooking other
things as well like stews and things like that.’
Interviewer: ‘So lots of home-cooked food.’
Mother: Yeah lots of home-cooked food.That’s why I want her to be
brought up exactly the same and to be able to cook things
and not just go to the nearest freezer, buy a ready-meal and
zap it in the microwave sort of thing.’ (Mother, child aged
five, White British, two-parent family)

Further, as in the study by Moiso et al (2004), the mothers’ in our study were all in
paid employment and described feelings of ambivalence and inadequacy in relation
to the disjuncture between their expectations of themselves, based on memories of
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their mothers’ practices, and the reality in which they found themselves, often citing
the issue of lack of time or energy for home-cooking. A sense of loss and of guilt
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pervaded some of these accounts, albeit that this may be as much a reflection of social
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expectations about mothering or about displaying mothering, as about personal regret.

For example, the mother of Bhavesh, introduced above, described in some detail
how her mother prepared all the food at home from scratch. She suggested she had
internalised taking responsibility for cooking but regretted that she did not live up
to her own expectations, despite her husband sharing the cooking. Charlie’s mother
also suggested that her mother had influenced her expectations of herself: “I think
it’s just my mum cooked everything pretty much from scratch so you kind of feel
like you should do the same don’t you?” (mother, child aged three, White British,
two-parent family).
Gemma’s mother, who was also one of the few women in the study whose partner
did most of the cooking, spontaneously reflected on an idealised past:

‘When I was a child, you know, my mum would get up early in the morning
and she’d prepare a pie base, so that then when she came in from work all
she’d got to do is shove the pie on the oven and put the ’tatos on you know.…
I would like to go back to more like the olden days where you know you’d
sort of make a pie from scratch and use the meat left over from the Sunday
dinner, you know, and things like that.’ (Mother, child aged eight, White
British, two-parent family)

Negative childhood memories of food

About a third of the parents we interviewed described childhood experiences of
food practices negatively and, as parents, they said, were making a conscious effort
to act differently with their own families. Resonating with Lupton’s (1994) study,
the most common memory was being forced to eat things as a child and there was
a desire not to impose this practice on their own children. The theme of parental
control over eating practices of the child and the child’s attempt to resist this power

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by hiding or refusing food, ran through memories of past intergenerational relations

relating to food as well as through current intergenerational relations. Such memories
not only invoked emotions such as dislike, anger and resentment about being forced
to eat but also their powerlessness at the time.Yet it was also clear that the struggle
for power between child and parent continued to be played out in parents’ current
relations with their own children (Grieshaber, 1997; O’Connell and Brannen, 2013).
Katie’s mother, for example, described vividly some difficult childhood experiences
around food and how they had influenced her subsequently as a parent, while also
recognising the context and reasons why at that time she was forced to finish the
food on her plate:

Mother:
‘But when I was younger it was definitely “you’re not kind
of leaving the table” or “you definitely won’t have pudding
if you don’t eat your dinner”. I do remember some terrible
mealtimes actually. ’Cos my sister was a really fussy eater.And
I do have memories of her sitting there crying her eyes out.
Or spreading the dinner around the plate, so it looked there
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wasn’t much left. But you know times were hard when we
were younger, in our family, they were very, we didn’t have
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a lot of money. I guess they didn’t want food to go wasted.

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I do remember family dinners when we were younger. It

was always family, whole family sat down and had meals
together.’
Interviewer:
‘Yeah, has that affected how you bring up your own children?’
Mother: ‘Yes I won’t force them to eat something if they’re full up. I
don’t see, you know if they’re full up I don’t think that they
should be made to carry on eating.’ (Mother, child aged six
and a half, White British, two-parent family)

Some of the mothers spoke about having a negative relationship with food, something
they did not want to convey to their children. This negativity was linked to such
childhood experiences of being overweight or having parents who either appeared to
be ‘ultra-healthy’ in their approach or did not value food or eating as a social, family
experience and parents who lacked cooking skills. William’s mother, for example,
described growing up with a self-perception of being ‘fat’ compared to her sister,
and narrated a poignant story from childhood about eating a whole tub of ice cream
at a friend’s house and the effect the experience had had on her as an adult and as a
parent, demonstrating the role of the past as a resource for making positive changes,
thereby enabling her to take charge of the present:

‘But really, I ate nearly a whole tub of ice cream in one sitting and it was
wrong really … I suppose I have a few issues with food and I’m quite
conscious that I don’t want my children to … it’s become a big deal. So
I’m not super-strict but I’m aware of like there’s got to be limitations and
we don’t talk about people being fat or overweight or anything like that.’
(Mother, child aged four, White British, two-parent family)

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 Abigail Knight et al

Owen’s mother described her parents’ food practices – when she was a child up to the
present day – as having a negative effect on her. She described her parents as being
‘obsessed’ with healthy eating and not putting on weight – an anxiety about food
she felt had affected her detrimentally. As a result she said she was consciously trying
to be very relaxed about what her children ate, by doing the antithesis of what her
parents had done – not necessarily cooking from scratch as they had done, sticking
to particular meals on particular days or being overly health conscious. Her aim was
to prevent her children from becoming ‘hung up’ about food as she had been:

‘As a result I don’t think I grew up with a very healthy attitude towards
food and I’ve been desperate not to pass that on to the kids. As a result I’ve
probably gone a bit the other way. But I’ve tried to be hyper-relaxed about
it. And they’re not overweight and so long as they stay like that and my
philosophy with children genuinely, I really believe this, if you give them
an unlimited range of food they will choose a healthy diet…. I would much
rather they [the boys] ate a slightly less healthy diet now but just ended up
completely relaxed about food.’ (Mother, child aged four and a half, White
IP : 5.189.200.149 On: Sat, 02 Jul 2016 10:04:59

British, two-parent family)

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In other cases in which mothers ‘defended’ their relaxed attitude to feeding children
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and not demanding that they finish or try foods, some mothers recalled being forced
to eat certain foods that disgusted them, creating embodied reactions and visceral
memories, which were also described by some of the children in response to parental
persuasion or after having been (perhaps coincidentally) sick.
These negative memories reflect a struggle between the generations about
expectations about eating and what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food. They demonstrate how
moralities of food (Coveney, 2006) play out and are (re)negotiated across generations
(Curtis et al, 2009).These practices relate to past identities as in the case of a mother
who recalled being fat as a child. Negative memories evoked beliefs that are recast
in hindsight according to current identities and current societal norms about what
it means to be a child (not to be coerced) and how to be a good parent. In this
sense, as Lupton (1994) points out, all food inhabits a moral space. Furthermore, in
demonstrating the unequal interplay of power between parents and children, doing
things differently with their own children constituted for these mothers a way of
recasting the present differently.

Conclusions
Family food and mothers’ feeding practices have undoubtedly changed over time;
developments have arisen in the context of increased globalisation, commodification
and changing work patterns. Ideals may be slower to change and indeed may become
more important as they become harder to achieve (Gillis, 1996; Brannen et al, 2013).
In addition to these structural influences on food and eating, the findings from our
study suggest that children’s and their parents’ family food practices are influenced
by intergenerational relations both in the present everyday practice of family life and
through intergenerational relations cast in the past, thus emphasising the importance of
using a temporal lens. Mothers are to some extent influenced by their own childhood
experiences and acquire dispositions and values about food and eating in the form

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 The temporality of food practices

of a habitus (Bourdieu, 1977, 1993), which is reproduced or discontinued in the

present. Mothers felt responsible for feeding their children but also described a sense
of wanting to fulfil this aspect of motherhood – in some cases feeling disenfranchised
when their paid work or a more equitable distribution of domestic labour meant they
did not do much cooking in practice. As a mode of providing for children, feeding
them may help to forge a sense of connection for mothers between themselves and
their children.
Present-day narratives based on childhood memories are often nostalgic, looking
back to a cosy past.They may serve to rewrite the past so that the present can be given
meaning and value. Family food practices are therefore influenced by the ‘baggage
of previous experiences’ (Lupton, 1994) with food; memories and experiences not
just reflect foods eaten, but also inscribe meaning to particular foods or food events
mirroring past and current feelings and social and familial relations. As a result, food
practices are both more or less self-consciously reproduced or discontinued across
the generations and are mediated through temporal lenses.
By using an intergenerational lens to study family food practices, the findings
from our study also reflect ambivalences inherent in varying values and norms about
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childrearing held by parents and grandparents. Parents’ desire to provide their children
with ‘proper’ food through regular family meals and their irritation at grandparents
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‘treating’ the children with sweet snacks not only locate the family intergenerationally
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(Curtis et al, 2009), but also mirror current cultural discourses about how best to feed
young children. Furthermore, childhood memories of being ‘fat’ or having parents
who were ‘obsessed’ with healthy eating reveal the construction of food practices
based on today’s societal norms and practices that in turn influence childrearing in
relation to food and eating.
By looking at family food practices, this study has shown that intergenerational
relations are not fixed but are rather based on a movable feast of evolving power
relations, memories, negotiations and compromise over the lifecourse and in relation
to time. Stories about family food practices for many reflect a desire for continuity
with the past while for some they represent a conscious decision to make family
life different from what has gone before. Studying the everyday practices of food
therefore shows how adult–child relations change and adapt according to different
social situations and contexts and not only reveals the complexity of family life
between children and their parents but also across generations. Food is therefore an
important part of family scripts that connect the past and present as well as playing an
important role in everyday family practices and intergenerational relations between
grandparents, parents and children in the present day.

Notes
1 We asked to speak to the main food provider, and if the food work was shared, we asked

to speak to both adults. In practice, it was usually mothers who did the bulk of the food
work and who volunteered to be interviewed. In total we interviewed 48 mothers and
four fathers. For the purposes of this article we have adopted the practice of referring in
general to mothers as mothering is the focus of this analysis.
2 We are also examining this topic in our use of narrative archival data in the Novella

study (Narratives of Everyday Life and Linked Approaches).

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 Abigail Knight et al

3 The secondary analysis found no link between maternal employment and children’s
diets in the NDNS, the Health Survey for England or The Avon Longitudinal Study of
Parents and Children (ALSPAC).
4 The meaning and content of ‘homemade’, like ‘convenience’, may differ across social

groups and generations (Thompson, 1996; Moisio et al, 2004).

Acknowledgements
The study that is the focus of this article was funded as a collaborative grant between the
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Food Standards Agency (FSA)
in 2009 (RES-190-25-0010). On 1 October 2010, responsibility for nutrition policy
transferred from the FSA to the Department of Health (DH). As a result, the research
project also transferred to DH.The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support
of the ESRC, FSA and DH, and of course the children and families who generously gave
their valuable time to participate in the study.

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