Sociology, online first https://doi.org/10.

1177/0038038519880087

Cuisine, Health, and Table Manners:

Food Boundaries and Forms of Distinction among Primary School Children

Abstract

Using data gathered during ethnographic fieldwork in two primary school canteens, this paper investigates
how pupils from different social origins perform and embody social class through food knowledge and
demeanour. I employ Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to highlight three main oppositions concerning
children’s relationship with food, which are rooted in the social and material environment of their families.
Their gastronomic horizons (wide versus narrow), their awareness of the links between nutrients and health
(specific versus general), and their embodiment of table manners (etiquette versus ludic) unveil how
children’s dispositions are simultaneously structured by familial endowments and actively at work in the
construction of social divisions.

Keywords: children, distinction, food, gastronomy, health, inequality, school meal, symbolic boundaries,
table manners

Name and Affiliation: Filippo Oncini, University of Manchester, UK

Email: filippo.oncini@manchester.ac.uk

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Background

Studies on cultural stratification usually adopt an adult-centric perspective that overshadows children’s
accounts, despite research indicating that by their early years they are already competent actors able to
perform class identities and reproduce classed practices (Lareau, 2003; Reay, 1995; Streib, 2011; Willis,
1977). For instance, the omnivore-univore debate, which has characterised the literature on taste hierarchies
since the 1990s, has practically ignored childhood as a realm of inquiry. Decades of studies have widely
demonstrated that children are active economic agents, capable of strategic thinking, and markedly
influenced by the social context in which they grow up (Pugh, 2014); they are neither passive, uncritical, nor
all alike. And yet, most contributions on social class differences in socialisation concentrate on parental
rearing strategies (Lareau, 2003), giving relatively little attention to children’s personal views and strategies
(Levey, 2009; Calarco, 2011; 2014). This aspect is particularly relevant, as it allows us to bridge well-known
findings in social stratification and cultural reproduction with the recognition of children’s agency (Corsaro
2005; Calarco, 2011).

Building on the concept of habitus (Bourdieu, 1990; Reay, 1995), this paper focuses on social class
differences in children’s food knowledge and table manners in an Italian context. Despite a growing body of
literature on children’s meals, dietary compliance and social stratification based on Bourdieu’s work (Oncini
and Guetto, 2017; Wills et al., 2011), few studies consider the multifaceted ways in which social origins
shape children’s relationship with food. This is somewhat surprising, as Bourdieu’s theorisation is markedly
concerned with the reproduction of inequalities across generations and he is famously quoted as observing
that ‘it is probably in tastes in food that one would find the strongest and most indelible mark of infant
learning’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 79). The habitus indeed refers primarily to the dispositions and ways of seeing
mainly acquired through parental tacit and dialogical practices, which indirectly suggest looking at children
to unveil how the ‘indelible mark’ is interiorised and reproduced. In this light, this research considers how
children’s culinary discourses are displayed in the school setting in the presence of an adult, and aims to
answer the following questions: how do children’s social class backgrounds equip them with different
culinary resources and food understandings? How do upper class children mark symbolic boundaries and
distinguish themselves from their less advantaged peers?

The Italian case is particularly interesting, as discourses about nutrition, cuisine and gastronomy are central
in Italian cultural life, and have become particularly widespread since the ‘90s (Leitch, 2003). The myth of
the Mediterranean diet and the rise of the Slow Food movement are two of the most obvious examples. For
many Italian families, especially from the middle class, aesthetic and sensorial evocations set the tempo of
commensality, and children are expected to learn how to take pleasure from eating (Ochs et al., 1996). This
attention is in turn mirrored in the organisation of the school meal, which is configured as an actual moment
of food education, to transmit both a sense of taste and knowledge on local cuisines (Morgan and Sonnino
2008; Oncini 2018a).

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Using data on children’s dialogues and behaviours gathered during ethnographic fieldwork in two primary
school canteens in Northern Italy, I shed light on three main forms of distinction rooted in the social and
material environment of the children’s families. Their gastronomic horizons (wide versus narrow), their
awareness of healthy food (specific versus general), and their embodiment of table manners (etiquette versus
ludic) reveal how the habitus in fieri is simultaneously structured by familial endowments and actively at
work in children’s construction of social divisions. These ‘immature’ conduits for distinction indicate that
food can be used to construct symbolic boundaries from the very early stages of life.

Children’s Food Between Home and School

Over the past two decades food sociologists have analysed the many ways eating is socially organised and
patterned (Warde, 2016). Whether considering the culinary field (Johnston and Baumann, 2010), the relation
between nutrition and health (Wright et al. 2015) or the procurement and provisioning of groceries (Paddock,
2016; Oncini, 2019), scholars have highlighted how meals can be used to mark boundaries and reproduce
inequalities. Crucially, given the well-known association between children’s social origins and their patterns
of food consumption (Oncini and Guetto, 2017) several authors have scrutinised the role of food in family
relationships. Meals can be used to call into question and reconstruct family identities, trigger a mother’s
moral accountability, and carve a space for youngsters’ autonomy (Harman and Cappellini, 2015; Valentine,
1999; Wills et al. 2011). In fact, children can exert particular influence over familial food choices, in
discussions with parents during grocery shopping sessions (Gram, 2015) and in making their case in the
development of family meal routines (Thompson et al., 2016). At the same time, home is the place where
‘proper meals’ come to life as complex interplays of economic, cultural, and environmental factors that
reinforce children’s perceptions of their position in the social space (Valentine, 1999). The forms of capital
(Bourdieu, 2011) thus prefigure the forms of (dis)advantage in children’s access to and consumption of
meals, while constituting the scaffolding for their habitus formation.

Within Bourdieu’s theory of taste, the habitus is the matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions that
generate and organise likes and dislikes, bodily dispositions and skills. Despite its ambiguities, the concept is
a productive tool to delineate the subtle and semiconscious ways people take up and classify practices and
tastes, and offers a lens to disentangle the principles through which cultural fractures come to life and are
perceived as ‘common-sense’ to the eyes of the beholders (Bourdieu, 1984). For this reason, studies on class
distinction in food practices have fruitfully applied the concept to show the difference between middle and
working class aesthetic preferences, opposing the cosmopolitanism and openness of the former with the
functionality and constraints-driven nature of the latter (Cappellini et al., 2015; Sato et al., 2016).
Predilections for and rejections of certain meals or drinks therefore signal much deeper cultural hierarchies,
and eventually objectify the symbolic tension between social classes.

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As the family is the primary site of (food) socialisation, the investigation also concentrated on the ways
households’ eating and feeding practices concur with the construction of children’s habitus, for instance by
envisioning food as an investment for children’s health and culinary knowledge (Wills et al., 2011; Wright et
al., 2015). This enables us to understand how principles of food divisions are literally embodied from the
very beginning of life, as the acceptance and rebuttal of food is built up precociously. Exposure to certain
flavours starts in the foetus, continues throughout breastfeeding, and eventually becomes social learning
thanks to the food stores attended, and the prohibitions and concessions of the family (Beauchamp and
Mennella, 2011; Oncini, 2019; Ladini et al., 2019). Affluent parents can afford healthier choices, introduce
their children to exotic and rare edibles, and fill up the pantry with an ethos of sustainability and eclecticism
(Cairns et al., 2013); vice versa, economic and cultural constraints may reduce children’s opportunity to
habituate to healthy options, lower their range of culinary competencies, and hinder the internalisation of
dietary compliance conducts (Daniel, 2016).

Research in linguistic anthropology has illuminated the many ways in which language operates ‘around,
about and through food’ to align children to cultural and social expectations (Karrebæk et al., 2018).
Interactive talks during family mealtimes socialise children to food moralities and priorities differently
depending on a country’s cultural codes (Ochs et al. 1996; Paugh and Izquierdo 2009) and social status. For
instance, Yount-André (2016) illustrates how the verbal registers used in snacks redistribution in Dakar
parallels widespread Senegalese ideologies of caste-based modes of conduct. Domestic food practices thus
influence children’s taste dispositions, and thereby lead to the construction of a natural sense of boundaries
and dividing lines on appropriate meals and food registers that will accompany them throughout the course
of their lives.

As children’s tastes are taken to school, recess and lunch provide an opportunity to study in vivo how
children reconstruct boundaries with their peers through food. Despite a common depiction of school
commensality as an experience of in-group production, school meals are often the catalysts of divisions,
frictions, and fractures (Oncini, 2018a; Wills et al., 2018). The infamous ‘Battle of Rawmarsh’1 (Pike and
Leahy, 2012) or the evidence regarding the emergence of a black market in confectionery organised by teens
in two English secondary schools (Fletcher et al., 2014) are just two examples of such fractures.
Undoubtedly, children’s exchanges play a role in overcoming boundaries and inequalities, as consumer
culture can be used as much for domination as for bonding (Nukaga, 2008; Pugh, 2011). Nonetheless, ethnic,
class, and gender divides inevitably highlight differences in taste socialisation, and coincide with the
construction of barriers in a seemingly equalising context. Meals can thus become a means for evaluating
levels of integration, conformity, and compliance with food culture and dietary guidelines (Allison, 1998;
Karrebæk, 2012).

In this light, looking at children’s class habitus in fieri allows us to examine ‘how children use language and
physical and emotional displays to dominate or subordinate themselves to others’ (Cicourel, 1993; Reay,

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1995: 359). By stressing the importance of the early acquisition of perception and bodily schemes, as well as
the objective basis for routinised and regular modes of behaviour, the habitus can be used as a lens to
appraise how primary school children’s food conducts differ depending on their endowments. In doing so, it
unravels how families’ food choices structure the internalisation of dispositions, and by that give rise to
differences, conduits for distinction, and small forms of symbolic domination.

The Study

This study is part of a larger project of ethnographic research in several primary school canteens in Italy (see
Oncini, 2018a; 2018b for full details). This contribution makes use of fieldnotes gathered during recess and
lunch in two schools situated in Poversano and Goldazzo, two small towns in Trentino where I spent around
eight months. The project obtained all necessary authorisations from the parents, the primary school board
and the doctoral school committee, and was presented to children, parents, and teachers in public and
classroom meetings differently tailored for the specific audiences. To gain information about children’s
views on food, I sat and ate at the canteen tables with them every day for around four consecutive months in
each school. During recess and lunch, I talked with them about their likes and dislikes, favourite cuisines,
healthy and unhealthy foods, while taking note of their behaviours, transcribing as accurately as possible
their words, and letting them draw on my diary or on the paper tablemats. Within the established
conversational boundaries, this flexibility made them free to communicate in their own way and gave them
the right to be heard in their authentic voice. They became active participants in the project, a level of
involvement that they enjoyed and that produced a more ecological report of their views (Alderson, 2000;
Grover, 2004).

To obtain data about their social origins, I asked them about their parents’ professions, which I double-
checked with the teachers when I was not sure about the reliability of their answers – especially with first
graders. I then distinguished between children of high and low social origins, the former including
professionals, businessmen and white collars, the latter manual and unskilled workers. Fieldnotes were
digitally transcribed immediately after the lunch to guarantee a more accurate report. Importantly, in order to
examine how food boundaries are reproduced by children, both in the observation phase and in the
subsequent redraft I dedicated special attention to the dialogues, responses and behaviours of children from
divergent social milieus, aiming to identify differences in their relation to food and exclusionary strategies.

The setting of the school canteen gave me the opportunity to explore how children’s class habitus emerged in
small-scale interactions and through their bodily hexis. The habitus hence became both a sensitizing concept
that guided the observation and an analytical lens for identifying binary oppositions related to children’s
culinary and nutritional knowledge (Warde, 1997). Most of the fieldnotes come from the Goldazzo school
canteen for two main reasons. First, there I could sit with just two or three children at the same time: this
allowed me to take notes and ask questions in much more detail compared to Poversano, where the pupils

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usually sit in larger groups. Second, while in Poversano most of the children come from lower classes
(mainly working class and petty bourgeoisie), in Goldazzo I shared several school meals with kids from
highly polarised backgrounds. This is due to the position of the school in the urban context. While Goldazzo
is prevalently inhabited by wealthy families, the school is close at hand for some families from a nearby, less
affluent neighbourhood. This diversity enabled the adoption of a strategy based on ‘diverse cases’, namely a
selection of cases encompassing a range of low and high values on relevant dimensions (i.e. children’s social
origins), that eased the identification of ‘typological differences’ among children from opposite social
milieus (Gerring, 2006: 97-98).

Three Forms of Distinction: Cuisine, Health, and Table Manners

Cuisine and Gastronomy

The observation of children’s class performances is a powerful means to understand how inequalities
reproduce in the ‘innocent language of likes and dislikes’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 243), and more broadly in the
seemingly natural differentiation of taste. In this view, talking with children about the many facets of food
permits us to grasp the main lines of differentiation already at work in the construction of classed practices.
As reported by many studies, upper class parents are more involved in the concerted cultivation of their
children: the transmission of differential advantage, however, does not solely lead to ‘the development of
greater verbal agility, larger vocabularies, more comfort with authority figures, and more familiarity with
abstract concepts’ (Laureau, 2003: 5), but also to a broader gastronomic horizon. At home, they are exposed
to a wide variety of edibles and cuisines; their pantries and fridges have plenty of diversified and rare
dressings, vegetables and fruit; parents cook for them innovative and salubrious meals, often with the help of
food processors. Francesco, the seven-year-old son of a secondary school teacher and a university professor,
explained the advantage of having a dehydrator and a juicer to experiment with:

We can make all types of dry fruit. We also tried to make dry persimmons, but they weren’t
very good. We like doing experiments from time to time […] We also have a juicer, and once I
tried to squeeze a tangerine: it’s just as good [as orange juice], but there’s less quantity.

He also explained that his mother often tries to make jams with unusual fruit, such as pomegranate. The
opportunity to experiment with his parents has thus triggered Francesco’s curiosity, habituated him to
healthy snacks, and gradually expanded his knowledge on types of fruit.

Yet the home environment is just a small part of upper class children’s food experiences. Outside the home,
their perspectives can grow even further. They go more often to restaurants, where they can become familiar
with ethnic and regional cuisines, but also with rare or unusual meals. They also travel very often, as their
parents can afford holidays to far-away cities and countries that allow them to gain knowledge of global,
national and regional cuisines. In this way, they become invested with omnivore and cosmopolitan capital
(Johnston and Baumann, 2010; Prieur and Savage, 2011). In the school canteen, this information is proudly

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displayed: upper class children can list many exotic fruit or fish types, and can narrate curious food
experiences they had with their parents.

Maria: ‘I’ve been to Kenya with my family, but I ate plain pasta the whole week because I don’t
like many things. But there, you could eat a lot of different fish, crocodile meat and even
insects!’

Elisa: ‘I tried the avocado at the Expo…then also the escargots in Paris, I mean, my father asked
for them and I tasted from his plate. It’s not my favourite meal, but they’re edible […] Then I’ve
been to Barcelona, where I tried the paella, and in Berlin, where I had the baked potatoes… do
you say baked, right?’

Elisa and Maria have already engaged with exotic and unusual cuisines thanks to their travels. In this way
they are learning that ‘taste classifies and it classifies the classifier’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 6): exoticism and
neophilia distinguish these children from their less well-travelled peers. At 11 years old, the former had
direct experience of edible crocodile meat and insects, the second had tasted French escargot, Spanish paella
and German baked potatoes. Their dispositions toward omnivorism have thus been built up through a duality
of objective and embodied forms of cultural capital, which are enacted through the economic capabilities of
their families. This does not imply that they immediately appreciate all the newness they are exposed to, as
Maria suggests. Nonetheless, this motley food environment lays the foundation for their future stock of
knowledge on food.

At the same time, their breadth of taste coincides with a capacity to exclude and hierarchically categorise.
Roberto, a very talkative second grader whose family owns a second holiday home on the Adriatic coast,
exemplifies how food boundaries are spontaneously at work from an early age. One day, during recess, I
asked him if he could suggest some restaurants in the city where he spends his holidays, since it is near my
hometown and I might soon have the occasion to go there for dinner:

Roberto: ‘Well, well, good restaurants: you can go to Gente di Mare, Piccadilly, Il Faro, which
is close to Il Pirata […] The Piccadilly, they make fantastic pizza, they never get that wrong.
Sometimes we order pizza from Il Pirata… when they work hard the pizza is good, but
sometimes it’s too oily. Then we also went to Gente di Mare, but do not order the seabass there,
because my father said the fish there is not good … as a matter of fact we didn’t go a second
time.’

Roberto shows an extraordinary competence for his age: he correctly lists three high-quality restaurants in a
city far from his hometown, and he can suggest what to eat, what to expect, and what to avoid in each of
them.2 Through his families’ dining experiences, he is learning that eating fish in an expensive waterfront
restaurant (Gente di Mare) is a normal contingency, and, more importantly, that quality food is the result of
exclusionary judgments: a proper pizza is not supposed to be ‘too oily’; an uncongenial seabass meal can be
used to evaluate the calibre of a restaurant.

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Conversely, children of lower social origins interiorise the ways in which the economic limitations of their
families can obstruct certain food experiences. When asked about eating out, they often mention pizzerias
and restaurants close to their homes; in contrast with their more advantaged peers, they are less likely to
name exotic or unusual culinary experiences. In the most extreme cases, children have learned that eating out
itself is an unaffordable activity. As one child in Poversano responded when asked about eating out: ‘we
can’t go, my dad says that these are lacking.’ When saying these, the child reproduced the Italian hand
gesture that indicates money – or a lack thereof.3 On another occasion, a seven-year-old child explained to
me that he often eats out with his family, but:

Filippo: ‘We eat out on the balcony. My mum says that’s how we can afford to eat out because
my mum says we don’t have the money to eat at the restaurant.’

Such limitations do not only pertain to the possibility of eating meals outside the home. Marco, the fourth-
grader son of a barmaid and an artisan, revealed to me that his family cannot regularly purchase the ‘meat
that costs a lot, because we don’t have the money.’ This admission came after he had extolled the virtues of
the fillet, which he has tasted and appreciated, and revealed how a child’s experience of food can contribute
to the internalisation of certain prohibitions. In his case, it is not a lack of experience; in fact, he has tried and
appreciated the tenderness of the meat cut. Yet his knowledge is marked by his recognition that an absence
of economic resources can hinder the enjoyment of that meal – what Lareau (2003, 6) calls ‘an emerging
sense of constraint.’4

Since their culinary knowledge is more limited, children from lower class origins have less to say when they
are asked about unusual food and cuisines; consequently, in Goldazzo they were often forced into silence by
their more cultivated peers, who gave rise to forms of discursive domination. The following dialogue reveals
how symbolic violence can be imposed even by very young children and, in a nutshell, it also demonstrates
that children are not passive, not innocent and not universal (Pugh, 2014).

I start talking about fish dishes with two 10-year-old girls. Matilde’s parents are both engineers;
Letizia is the daughter of a carpenter and a homemaker. I ask which types of fish they know,
and Letizia immediately tries to respond:
Letizia: ‘Mussels, clams…’
Matilde: ‘That is not fish, it’s seafood.’
Letizia: ‘…fillet?’
Matilde: ‘[laughing] But fillet is not a fish! It’s a part of the fish, when you “f-i-l-l-e-t” the fish.’
Letizia: ‘Hammerhead?’
Matilde: ‘Letizia, but hammerhead is not good, it’s not edible!’
Letizia looks frustrated and unconvincingly says ‘octopus’. I interrupt the dialogue by
explaining how my mum can cook an octopus salami with the use of a plastic bottle.

This back-and-forth dialogue illustrates how Matilde’s self-confidence, coupled with a seemingly greater
knowledge of fish categories, drives her to correct Letizia three times in a row. By interrupting and
patronising her tablemate, she is able to distinguish herself as a connoisseur of the right food and cooking

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categories. Stressing the difference between seafood and fish and the usage of the right verb for indicating
the deboning practice thus permit her to display knowledge and gain credit in front of an adult.

Food and Health

If all children interiorise general rules of thumb regarding nutritional knowledge, a marked difference exists
in the ‘depth’ of these notions. Although the school aims to shape the nutritional conduct of children, it only
partially succeeds (Oncini and Guetto., 2017), because while teachers do explain to pupils the beneficial or
harmful effect of certain food products, these efforts are not nearly comparable to maths or grammar lessons
(Oncini, 2018a). Thus, the family provides the true backbone for the development of these notions. As upper
class parents assist children with their homework (Lareau, 2000), they also help them to understand why
certain edibles are good for the body and others are not. These notions change depending on different
familial credos, but still have strong foundations in common. Upper class children can therefore interiorise
and reproduce a complex discourse regarding ‘appropriate’ nutritional conduct.

Giovanni is the ten-year-old son of an accountant and a kindergarten teacher. I ask him if he
ever goes to McDonald’s and he responds: ‘Just a few times per year. I went yesterday, but I
haven’t been there for a long time’ ‘Is it good or bad for your health?’ ‘Of course, it’s bad,
basically what they offer in McDonald’s is a reversed food pyramid.’ ‘What’s that?’ I wonder.
He replies: ‘That means that you have more fat than what you should, and fewer vegetables than
what you need. It’s all off-kilter, there’s much less salad in the sandwich than what there should
be, while the amount of ‘junk’ is too big. Yesterday I had the Crispy McBacon, that I really like,
but it never fills you up, they do that on purpose.’

In this excerpt, Giovanni proficiently discusses the unhealthy composition of a McDonald’s menu, which
offers the opposite (a ‘reverse food pyramid’) of what a compliant diet should be: ‘what you need’ in your
everyday life cannot be found in the famous fast-food chain. Moreover, he seems already aware that fast-
food proposals are deliberately engineered to create dependency and halt satiation (Moss, 2014), and that
they should only be eaten from time to time. Conversely, children from more disadvantaged households,
despite classifying healthy and unhealthy foods in a very similar manner, are not as prone to giving advanced
explanations regarding the reasons for such dichotomisation. This distance emerges very clearly when
children are asked which foods are good and bad for their health.

I sit with Giacomo and Alessio, both first graders, but from very different families. Giacomo’s
father is an architect, Alessio’s father is a part-time cleaner. When asked if they know which
foods are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, both can correctly distinguish between healthy and unhealthy items.
However, only Giacomo engages in a meaningful discussion when I try to scrutinise their
answers. For instance, in the case of juices, he explains that they ‘should not be drunk very
often, especially those in cartons, those are bad!’ ‘And why?’ ‘Because they have sugar that
causes cavities. My mom gives me dry fruit instead, because she tells me it’s good.’ […] ‘What
about coke? Do you like it?’ ‘Coke is bad. I like it, but you can’t drink it always, and especially
before sleeping, because it has caffeine.’

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Despite both being first graders, Alessio and Giacomo exemplify the opposition between specific and general
awareness of the relationship between food and health. Alessio, despite being able to categorise the healthy
and unhealthy foods according to conventional criteria, does not specify the reasons behind his choices.
Conversely, Giacomo seems to recognise that nutrients can affect the body in different ways: sugar causes
cavities, while caffeine causes sleeplessness. Indeed, he seems aware that fruit juices ‘in cartons,’ despite
being extracted from a healthy food, contain plenty of sugar and should not be consumed too often.

Table Manners and Conventions

The last conduit refers to the embodiment of table manners and can be more easily noticed among fourth and
fifth graders. Although all children respect general conventions regarding commensality, the purposeful
display of table manners in front of an adult is more prevalent among children with upper social origins.
Regardless of gender, they are usually more contained when sharing the table with an older person.
Conversely, children with lower social origins, particularly males, approach eating in a more playful manner.
In my presence, once understood that it was not my duty to reprimand them, they touched food with their
hands, played with water and glasses, and smudged the tablecloth on purpose. In short, as this fieldnote
illustrates, they maintained childish behaviour while taking real pleasure in their mealtime.

Mattia and Giuseppe are eight years old, and they both share a working-class background. They
start eating bread before the cooks serve the pasta. Mattia is the first to finish his portion of
pasta, and he immediately goes to Tommaso, a kid from the next table who hasn’t touched his
portion. He takes three quarters and then gives the remaining part to Giuseppe, who is
complaining because of the unfair share received. ‘Sorry, that was stuck,’ argues Mattia. When
the chicken leg is served, they hold the bone and bite the meat and the skin (‘that’s the best
part!’ he explains). They are very hungry and funny, and I can’t hold back laughing. They eat
the cabbage by putting the food on their forks with their hands, and when they drink they grease
their glasses. After a while, Mattia looks at me and asks: ‘Why are you eating with the forks?
Chicken should be eaten with your hands while smiling with your mouth full of food!’

Mattia and Giuseppe do not feel the necessity to display their knowledge or manners. Indeed, they are also
rather uninterested in the questions I would like to pose. Rather, they transform the meal in a moment of pure
play and take full advantage of my presence – teachers tend to be more indulgent towards the pupils I am
sitting with. This allows them a greater degree of freedom, as they do not feel obliged to contain themselves;
they exploit the teachers’ lack of control on our table, thus maximising fun and minimising formalities.
Nevertheless, this approach should not be seen as a lack of punctilios transmitted by their families. Although
some upper-class parents might be more concerned with formal rules and be less indulgent with their
children, etiquette lessons are by and large outmoded. More likely, the codes adopted by children reflect the
different relationships they are used to establishing with adults (Lareau, 2003). In other words, it is my
presence at their table that ‘forces out’ contrasting behavioural codes.

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The day of Halloween, children are invited to ‘build’ their own hamburger. They are given two
pieces of bread, a medallion of meat, salad and some tomato sauce. I am making the hamburger
using a fork and knife, and I share the table with Giuseppe, the son of a lone working-class
mother, and Francesco, who comes instead from a family of professionals. The former uses his
hands to place the salad over the medallion and immediately gets his lunch ready; Francesco
halts and comments: ‘it’s not proper to pick up the salad with your hands, we should use forks.’
Then he starts preparing the sandwich using fork and knife, slowly moving leaf by leaf over the
meat, while Giuseppe already bites his hamburger. He gives up after a while and then comments
‘we shouldn’t lift food with our hands, but from time to time we can. We don’t say this to
anyone.’

In this excerpt, Francesco marks a boundary by showing off his table manners. By stating that food should
not be touched with the hands, he can distinguish himself from his tablemate, who is already composing his
sandwich. The unnecessarily formal use of fork and knives, probably mirroring mine, slows him down and
creates an artificial situation, but simultaneously allows him to demonstrate that he can behave as if he were
an adult. In Bourdieu’s words, his ‘body believes in what it plays at’ (1990, 73). His manners are thus
unconsciously embodied (his gestures are natural) and consciously displayed (he wants me to notice).
Eventually, once understood that this is taking too much time, he surrenders while confessing this small
infraction.

Table manners also enable us to understand how soon ‘signs of entitlement’ emerge among advantaged
children. Lareau’s (2003, 124) famous study on families’ rearing strategies shows how upper class parents
teach their children how to engage in a conversation with professionals, balancing the need to respect
authority and the right to assert their opinions. Similarly, verbal agility entrenches food knowledge and
results in a socio-conversational ability that can be deployed to put oneself on an equal footing with adults.
This eventually results in the performative capacity to engage in a conversation for illustrating personal
views that are worth the adults’ attention. Conversely, this set of skills does not emerge as clearly with lower
class children, as they are probably less interested in being treated as peers. In the following notes, I am
being challenged for appreciating the meals the school provides – a common trope among fourth and fifth
graders. Yet the way these two children make their point illustrates the distance that characterises their
relationship with adults.

I’m sitting at the table with fifth graders. Riccardo is the son of an engineer and a civil servant.
He already knows that he will go to the Scientific Lyceum and tells me that from the next year
he will no longer eat the ‘junk’ provided by the service provider. He explains to me that the
canteen is not bad because the food is inedible. As a matter of fact, he is the only one that
finishes his meal. The problem is how the food is cooked. ‘Take the chicken they give us. It’s
too dry on one side, and too wet on the other. That’s probably because they cook them all
together and don’t turn them over. But that’s not how you’re supposed to cook that.’ I try to
insist, ‘Well, yesterday I ate that, and I actually liked it.’ He looks at me, and smiles slightly:
‘that’s probably because you have a healthy appetite [buona forchetta].’

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I am eating with some fifth graders. Everyone has just finished the orzotto, a traditional barley
soup with vegetables. Marco, the son of a small producer of grappa and a housewife, challenges
me for praising the meal we have just finished: ‘How can you like this shit? This meal sucks, we
even pay money for this. We want our money back. It really sucks!’

In both cases, the canteen food, and my favourable attitude towards it, are critically assessed: however,
dissatisfaction is displayed in diametrically opposite manners. Riccardo neatly describes what is wrong with
the way the chicken is cooked, and when I contradict him, he responds with a certain degree of irony: I have
a healthy appetite, which might suggest that I am not good at disentangling degrees of tastiness. His culinary
repertoire, mediated by his linguistic capital, thus helps him to develop a sense of entitlement and to confront
me with sharp reasons. Marco, on the other hand, does not care about explaining why he does not like the
meal, or why I appreciate it. Rather, he goes straight to the point and challenges my authority, aware that
teachers’ ears are not around. Interestingly, he immediately associates the meal with its economic value, and
in a protest-like manner demands a refund. Unlike Riccardo, Marco does not want to engage in a one-to-one
conversation with me but rather aims to display his adultness by using swear words against me.5

Discussion and Conclusions

Research on the way food is used as a criterion of inclusion and exclusion is probably one of the most
developed areas of food sociology. However, research has mostly concentrated on adults, mothers, and
families (Cairns et al., 2013; Johnston and Baumann, 2010; Wills et al., 2011), while neglecting the active
processes through which children interiorise and reproduce classed practices through food. Seeking to fill
this gap, this study concentrates on the ways social origins shape food knowledge and table manners among
primary school children. In doing so, it builds on and expands research on children’s boundaries and
conduits for distinction and aims to connect childhood scholars’ findings with well-known processes in
social and cultural stratification. More generally, the study explores one of the facets through which social
class differences in socialisation eventually shape children’s future life opportunities and health chances.

The ethnographic endeavour shed light on three main binary oppositions which can be connected to findings
obtained in the sociology of culture, health, and family life. First, differences in gastronomic horizons mirror
the evidence on the characteristics of the omnivore and alternative consumer (e.g. Johnston and Baumann,
2010; Paddock, 2016) and reflect upper class parents’ efforts to socialise their children to the aesthetic and
gustative quality of meals (Wills et al., 2011); diversity, experientialism or simply a deeper food knowledge
thus characterise the gastronomic space of privileged children.

The second conduit concerns the awareness of the links between nutrition and health. In this case, although
all children seem to have interiorised general rules regarding the do’s and don’ts of dietary compliance, the
difference lies in the specific details provided by more affluent children. This finding resonates with the
evidence on the ways social class shapes and constrains parental eating and feeding choices, and more
particularly mothers’ ‘foodwork’ (Cairns et al., 2013; Daniel, 2016; Wright et al., 2015). In a moment of

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increased attention on the school-food binomial (Morgan and Sonnino 2008; Oncini, 2018a), this finding
may suggest that meal policies should more decisively address food literacy gaps (Velardo, 2015) by
thinking about how children’s social origins influence their knowledge of nutrition, as much as their reading
and math competencies (Marks, 2005).

Finally, the contrasting table manners displayed by the children sharing their mealtimes with me
substantially echo Lareau’s (2003) findings, and are likely to reveal the dissimilar relationship children are
used to establishing with adults. For children with lower social origins, my presence did not trigger the need
to engage in a conversation or a display of table manners, but was rather exploited once it was understood
that I was providing a safe space from teachers’ reproaches. Henceforth, they actively confronted table
manners for their own enjoyment. Their counterparts, on the other hand, seemed to display their demeanour,
and ‘by assuming a position of mutuality or equality vis-à-vis adults, frequently pass[ed] judgment on the
adults around them’ (Lareau, 2003: 111).

These forms of distinction unravel how the efforts made by parents contribute to the reproduction of
inequality in very small, and apparently insignificant, aspects of children’s everyday lives. In particular, they
provide insights into the ways through which the forms of capital create advantage and mould their
offspring’s habitus in the making. The conduits illustrate how higher economic resources are entwined with
objectified and embodied cultural capital. Affluent families can afford a wide and heterogeneous variety of
foods both in and outside the household, convert them through the use of processors, and engage in
explanations regarding the harmful or beneficial effects of certain nutrients. This dialogical and tacit
transmission of advantage results not only in dispositions towards omnivorism and healthy meals, but also in
the internalisation of additional soft-skills that will help their children to feel at ease in a wide range of
circumstances. Children’s forms of distinction signal upper class parents’ capacity to turn cultural capital
investments into forms of social recognition and advantage distinct from and supplemental to school
performance. Cultural innovation, in the guise of openness to new foods and ostensible understanding of
food-health claims, might be seen as another way for offspring to take a position of advantage and be given a
head start (Bourdieu, 1984; Prieur and Savage, 2011; Oncini, 2019), especially in a moment characterised by
widespread food obsession.

Some limitations of the study and future directions should be addressed. To begin with, in my analysis I
consciously avoid focusing on children’s ways of overcoming differences and building solidarity (Pugh,
2011). This may therefore have generated an extremely polarised picture of food boundaries. Yet, although
‘childhood research demonstrates that children can evince similar tastes across race, class, gender, and other
categories’ (Pugh, 2014, 80), studies in social mobility, health, and cultural stratification tell us that ‘barriers’
eventually prevail over ‘bridges’. This is the reason why I gave boundaries research priority over
connections. In addition, the analytical strategy based on diverse cases selection (Gerring, 2006) is

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particularly well suited to construct typologies and generate hypotheses that could be further assessed and
refined using large-scale datasets (e.g. Bodovski and Farkas, 2008).

Secondly, I did not pay attention to food and gender dynamics, which net of social origins are of great
importance in the construction of gender roles during childhood (Thorne, 1993), and likely set the basis of
men and women’s relationship with food during adulthood (Counihan and Kaplan, 2013). In fact, it is widely
acknowledged that women pay more attention to dietary compliance and body weight (Arganini et al., 2012).
Future research should carefully examine this issue, as school canteens provide a golden opportunity to study
how boys and girls use food to reconstruct masculinity and femininity. More generally, studies on children’s
social stratification could take a similar approach to explore other forms of cultural consumption, such as
holidays, music creation or sport activities, in greater depth, as these have been mostly studied through
parents’ voices.

Finally, the analysis is based on fieldwork conducted during recess and school lunch: although in another
contribution (Oncini, 2019) I present how children’s parents construct food boundaries depending on their
cultural and economic endowments, I did not observe the intimacy of family life. This would enable a deeper
exploration of feeding practices (Bowen et al., 2019) and possibly a more refined analysis of the tacit and
dialogical dimensions involved in the transmission of food (dis)advantage.

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Endnotes

1
The Battle of Rawmarsh refers to an episode at a secondary school in the UK in 2006. Two mothers purchased
takeaway food from a nearby shop and passed it through the school railings, as their children were unsatisfied with the
healthy school lunch menu proposed by the school. This event captured the attention of media and public opinion, and
many journalists depicted the mothers as inadequate, poor in taste and deficient in intelligence (Pike and Leahy,
2012).
2
Since I could not believe such a detailed account, I have checked the veracity of Roberto’s indications. The restaurants
exist and have a very positive rating on TripAdvisor. Moreover, the Piccadilly pizza, following users’ comments,
seems excellently cooked.
3
The gesture is made by touching the forefinger and thumb, closing the other fingers and then rubbing the two fingers
against each other forwards and backwards.
4
Marco’s words can be compared with the meticulous description of a grilled fillet that Gianni, the fourth grader son of
a manager and a teacher, can cook: ‘You first cut the fillet into small cutlets. Then you put the big ones at the centre
of the pan, where the flame is stronger, and the less thick ones at the edges, where it takes longer to cook. And then
you dress it with oil and salt, or coarse salt.’ In Gianni’s case, there is no pointing to the cost of the meat cut, but
rather a seeming familiarity with the cooking practices necessary to promote its taste.
5
Children’s linguistic codes are related to their social class (Bernstein, 2003), and the use of pejorative language is
usually a characteristic of boys with lower social origins (MacRuairc, 2011; Willis, 1977).

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Filippo Oncini is research fellow in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento. His research
interests lie in the fields of consumption, health, and cultural sociology, with attention to social inequalities
and food consumption. He is currently working on project PLATEFORMS, which focusses on how food
practices in the home are affected by innovations in provisioning platforms. From November 2019 he will be
Marie Curie Fellow at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Manchester with a mixed method
project on food poverty and food bank use in Greater Manchester.

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