Dr Karin Eli

© 2018, © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper examines how US parents and grandparents describe their provision of food to preschool-age children. Drawing on forty-nine interviews with sixteen families, most of which were socioeconomically disadvantaged, it is argued that gender and generation intersect in everyday efforts to care for children’s eating. The analysis explores gendered divisions of foodwork, highlights the struggles of single mothers, and examines fathers’ redefinitions of the paternal role to include feeding and caring for children. At the core of the analysis, however, is the participants’ emphasis on grandmothers as sources of knowledge and support, with both fathers and mothers citing grandmothers and other women of earlier generations as culinary influences and as role models for good parenting. The article thus discusses “feeding the extended family,” and concludes with a discussion about moving beyond the couple-focused paradigm of parenting in research on food and the gendered division of foodwork.

BACKGROUND:Characteristics of picky eaters of different weight status have not been sufficiently investigated. We used two newly developed screening cut-offs for picky eating in the Food fussiness (FF) subscale of the Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire (CEBQ) to investigate the prevalence and characteristics of picky eaters in preschool-aged children with thinness, normal weight, overweight or obesity. METHODS:Data for 1272 preschoolers (mean age 4.9 years) were analyzed. The parent-reported FF subscale ranges from 1 to 5, and two screening cut-offs were applied to classify children as picky eaters (3.0 and 3.33). Structural Equation Modeling was used to study associations with other factors in the CEBQ, the Child Feeding Questionnaire (CFQ) and the Lifestyle Behavior Checklist (LBC). Scores were compared separately for each weight status group. RESULTS:Nearly half of the children were classified as moderate or severe picky eaters (cut-off 3.0) and 30% as severe (cut-off 3.33). For both cut-offs, prevalence was significantly lower in the obesity group. Still, one-third of children with obesity met the cut-off of 3.0 and 17% met the cut-off of 3.33. While picky eaters displayed similar patterns across weight status groups, some differences emerged. Food responsiveness was lower for picky eaters, but the difference was significant only among children with obesity. Slowness in eating was not as pronounced among picky eaters in the obesity group. In the overweight and obesity groups, parents of picky eaters did not report as high pressure to eat, as compared to the thinness or normal weight groups; in the obesity group, parents of picky eaters also perceived their children's weight as lower. In all weight status groups, parents of picky eaters were more likely to report their children had too much screen time, complained about physical activity, and expressed negative affect toward food. CONCLUSIONS:Picky eating was less common but still prevalent among children with obesity. Future studies should investigate the potential influence of picky eating on childhood overweight and obesity. Moreover, as children with picky eating display higher emotional sensitivity, further research is needed to understand how to create positive eating environments particularly for children with picky eating and obesity.

In this article, I argue that eating disorders constitute a form of social suffering, in which sufferers embody liminality as a response to, and a reflection of, oppressive sociality, structural violence, and institutional constraints. Based on the illness narratives of people with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and their subclinical variants in Israel, the analysis draws the experiential, the social, and the structural into critical focus. These narratives, which delineate lived experiences of self-starving, bingeing, and purging, and the attendant viscerality of hunger, fullness, and emptiness, reveal how participants developed an embodied drawing inward and away, being at once within and without society for extended periods of time, through eating disordered practices. This liminal positioning, I argue, was a mode through which participants cultivated alternative (if temporary) personal spaces, negotiated identities, and anesthetized pain: processes many deemed essential to survival. Embedding the participants' narratives of eating disordered experiences within familial, societal, and political-economic forces that shaped their individual lives, I examine the participants' striving for liminality as at once intimately embodied and structurally mapped. The analysis suggests that policy initiatives for eating disorder prevention must address the social suffering that eating disorders manifest: suffering caused by structures and institutions that reinforce social inequality, violence, and injustice.