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Macro-social disruptions and evolutions open up new possibilities for feeding the family. This paper aims to review prior constraints imposed by the gendered history of care work as part of the moral economy, with particular focus on how food traditions and routines reproduce family relations.

An assemblage perspective provides an appropriate theoretical lens to trace such emergent reconfigurations.

The paper takes as its focus three macro shifts with the potential to incite more and less intentional changes to the realities of feeding the family: changes in home life and organization of care, dads’ participation in feeding the family and innovation in food systems.

Theoretical contributions reveal how shifting macro-social structures constrain and shape trajectories for the work of feeding the family.

Practical implications focus on how creative family members, marketers and policymakers influence arrangements, capacities and practices of family life.

This commentary brings an assemblage view of family life that proposes potential lines of flight when considering macro-context shifts, with particular attention to the relationship between food and family.

Celiac disease is an auto-immune disorder that requires strict lifelong adherence to a gluten-free diet. I explore how a celiac diagnosis affects gendered feeding work within families.

This chapter is based on a grounded theory analysis of field research with five celiac support groups and 80 in-depth interviews. I interviewed 15 adult men and 56 adult women with celiac, plus nine additional family members.

Gendered care work norms place the onus of responsibility for gluten-free feeding work on women, multiplying time spent planning, shopping, and preparing meals. Women employ distinct gendered strategies to accommodate the gluten-free diet. Following a strategy of integration, women tailor family meals to meet other diagnosed family members’ dietary needs and the entire family’s taste preferences. However, when women themselves have celiac, they follow a pattern of deferential subordination, not allowing their own dietary needs to alter family meals. Thus, women continue to prepare family meals as a form of care for others, even when their medical needs justify putting themselves first.

Social support is a key determinant of compliance with necessary lifestyle and dietary changes in chronic illness. However, little research explores the gendered dynamics within families accounting for the link between social support and dietary compliance. I show how gendered care work norms benefit husbands and children with celiac, while simultaneously disadvantaging women with celiac.

The low rate of exclusive breastfeeding and the early introduction of complementary feeding are among the causes of nutritional problems in children. The national coverage of exclusive breastfeeding in 2019 was 67.7%, surpassing the target of the 2019 Strategic Plan, which was 50%. However, there are still several practices of early and inappropriate complementary feeding (32.3%) that can be contributing factors to malnutrition problems in children. The purpose of this study was to determine the factors that influence mother’s self-efficacy levels regarding complementary feeding practices among toddlers in the Tengger tribe.

The study conducted was an observational study with a cross-sectional design. It focused on mothers with children aged 6–24 months in Wonokitri village, East Java. Data was collected using a structured questionnaire and information from the local health center. The analysis involved univariate and bivariate analysis using the chi-square test.

Most mothers were aged 20–34 years (78.9%), had a good level of knowledge (61.4%), the last education level of fathers and mothers was high school (47.4%; 54.4%), parents work as farmers (86.0%; 61.4%), Hinduism (98.2%), family income is less than the minimum wage (78.9%), and mothers receive good family support (73.7%). Most toddlers were boys (56.1%), aged 13–24 months (68.4%), and the second child (66.7%). Family support was the only factor that was significantly related to a mother’s self-efficacy in complementary breastfeeding practices (p-value = 0.042).

It is hoped that more families and health workers will support mothers in giving food to their babies based on the guidelines.

This paper collects evidence from indigenous people of the Tengger tribe.

Literature from across the social sciences and research evidence are used to highlight interdisciplinary and intersectional research approaches to food and family. Responsibilisation emerges as an important thematic thread, as family has (compared with the state and corporations) been increasingly made responsible for its members’ health and diet.

Three questions are addressed: first, to what extent food is fundamentally social, and integral to family identity, as reflected in the sociology of food; second, how debates about families and food are embedded in global, political and market systems; and third, how food work and caring became constructed as gendered.

Interest in food can be traced back to early explorations of class, political economy, the development of commodity culture and gender relations. Research across the social sciences and humanities draws on concepts that are implicitly sociological. Food production, mortality and dietary patterns are inextricably linked to the economic/social organisation of capitalist societies, including its gender-based divisions of domestic labour. DeVault’s (1991) groundbreaking work reveals the physical and emotional work of providing/feeding families, and highlights both its class and gendered dimensions. Family mealtime practices have come to play a key role in the emotional reinforcement of the idea of the nuclear family.

This study highlights the imperative to take pluri-disciplinary and intersectional approaches to researching food and family. In addition, this paper emphasises that feeding the family is an inherently political, moral, ethical, social and emotional process, frequently associated with gendered constructions.

This ethnographic study of school food service employees at an elementary, middle, and high school in the Midwest introduces “feeding labor,” a concept to signify a form of gendered labor that entails emotional and bodily feeding activities.

This chapter is based on 18 months of participant-observation and 25 in-depth interviews.

I illustrate three characteristics of feeding labor: (1) the physical labor of attending to the feeding needs of customers, (2) the emotional labor of managing feelings to create and respond to customers, and (3) variations in the gendered performance of feeding labor as explained through the intersection of race, class, and age. These dimensions vary across different field sites and emerge as three distinct patterns of feeding labor: (1) motherly feeding labor involves physical and emotional attentiveness and nurturing with mostly middle- and upper-class young white customers, (2) tough-love feeding labor involves a mix of tough, but caring respect and discipline when serving mostly working- and lower-middle class racially mixed young teens, and (3) efficient feeding labor involves fast, courteous service when serving mostly working- and middle-class predominantly white teenagers.

These findings show that a caring and nurturing style of emotional and physical labor is central in schools with white, middle-class, young students, but that other forms of gendered feeding labor are performed in schools composed of students with different race, class, and age cohorts that emphasize displaying tough-love and efficiency while serving students food. Examining this form of labor allows us to see how social inequalities are maintained and sustained in the school cafeteria.

This introduction provides an overview of the themes and chapters of this volume.

The chapters present original qualitative and quantitative research illustrating the complex relationship between gender and food. The need to understand the relationship intersectionally and in historical context is apparent and provisioning as caring emerges as a major theme.

Food is a human right yet it is not always and everywhere available and when it is not always humanly produced and healthful. The fact that food production and consumption is gendered cannot be ignored in the quest for feeding our planet.

The chapter and the volume are intended to illustrate some of the many ways that food and gender are related and to encourage gender scholars to continue to pay attention to food research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the way diverse family forms are depicted in recent TV advertisements, and how the ads may be read as an indication of contemporary attitudes to food. It focuses particularly on consumers’ ambivalent attitude towards convenience foods given the way these foods are moralised within a highly gendered discourse of “feeding the family”.

The paper presents a critical reading of the advertisments and their complex meanings for diverse audiences, real and imagined. The latter part of the paper draws on the results of ethnographically-informed fieldwork in the north of England.

The research highlights the value of food as a lens on contemporary family life. It challenges the conventional distinction between convenience and care, arguing that convenience food can be used as an expression of care.

The paper makes limited inferences about audiencing processes in the absence of direct empirical evidence.

The paper’s value lies in its original interpretation of TV food advertising within the context of contemporary family life and in the novel connections that are drawn between convenience and care.

This paper aims to examine how Mulino Bianco, an iconic Italian bakery brand, has reshaped the symbolic and material aspects of breakfast in Italy, transforming a declining practice into a common family occasion.

A socio-historical analysis of the iconisation process has been undertaken with a framework for investigating the symbolic, material and practice-based aspects of the brand and their changes over time. Archival marketing material, advertising campaigns and interviews with brand managers constitute the main data for analysis.

Three crucial moments have been identified in which the brand articulates its relationship with the practice of breakfast. During the launch of the brand, the articulation was mainly instigated via the myths of tamed nature and rural past and the material aspect of the products reinforced such an articulation. In the second moment, the articulation was established with the brand’s materiality, emphasised through the use of promotional items targeting mothers and children. In the last phase, a cementification of the articulation was achieved mainly via the symbolic aspect of the brand – communicating Mulino Bianco as emblematic of a new family life in which the “Italian breakfast” was central.

Theoretically, this paper advances the understanding of the pervasive influence of brands in family life, showing how they do not simply reshape existing family food practices, rather they can re-create new ones, investing them with symbolic meanings, anchoring them with novel materiality and equipping consumers with new understandings and competences.

From the 1970s onwards, studies of the dynamics involved in family food provisioning in Britain and the USA have provided consistent evidence of the centrality of husbands and male breadwinners to food decisions. Recent studies are beginning to show the significance of children or the “junior consumer” to household food decisions. This paper reports on focus groups conducted in Australia in the mid‐1990s that support the argument that children exert considerable influence over family diets. One obvious reason for this trend lies in the activities of food retailers and advertisers/marketers, who target their goods, services and messages to children. These marketplace actors are encouraging children to identify as consumers. A less obvious explanation, and the one explored in this paper, concerns changing parenting practices. Despite the double workload of many family food providers, children's demands are being responded to in unprecedented ways. Metaphorically, children are displacing male adults at the head of the table. The paper comments on the consequences of children's dominance over dietary practices.