Socializing taste

Family meals are associated with lower substance use in female adolescents

Adolescents, especially female youth, who have more family meals tend to be at lower risk for substance use. The present study tested whether family meals relate to substance use count and frequency during high school, whether associations differ by gender, and whether other family-related variables explain these associations. A community sample of 316 adolescents (M age = 16.40, SD = 0.74; 56.96% female; 41.77% Latine, 23.10% Asian American, 29.11% European American, 6.01% from other ethnic backgrounds including Middle Eastern and African American) reported the number of substances they have ever used and how often they used alcohol, marijuana, and cigarettes, and completed measures of parental support and family cohesion. Across 15 days, they reported whether they had a family meal, got along with parents, and spent leisure time with their family each day. Regression models tested associations between frequency of family meals and substance use, whether associations differed by gender, and whether associations were explained by other family-related variables. Results indicated that more frequent family meals were associated with lower substance use count and less frequent alcohol, marijuana, and cigarette use among female adolescents but not male adolescents. Other daily family experiences were unrelated to substance use, and family meal frequency was independently related to lower substance use after accounting for parental support and family cohesion. Taken together, more frequent family meals in high school may reduce substance use risk for female adolescents, and interventions could consider promoting family meals in addition to other positive family values.

Claiming and attributing (dis)taste: Issues of sharing a meal as a competent member

Eating together is a primordial social activity with robust normative expectations. This study examines a series of instances where appreciative elements about the food during a shared meal are treated as noticeably absent and where some of the participants are attributed to exhibit a negative stance towards the food, which furthermore is used as a resource for engaging in membership categorization. Situated within the cognate approaches of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this study draws on video recordings of an integrated language and cooking workshop organized for immigrants in the French speaking part of Switzerland. The participants include a French teacher, two chefs and five immigrant women with various native languages. The detailed sequential, multimodal analysis details and explains how the participants treat gustatory features of eating as publicly available and accountable, and how the absence of evaluative elements contribute to the situated achievement of a plural "you" as a group that does not like "this" food. Ascribing (dis)taste for food on behalf of others, occasions accounts for just how to eat, showing the strong normative features that make up to the recognizability of sharing a meal as a competent member - including how sensorial experiences are evaluated and expressed. In this way, this study contributes to our understanding of the (non)ordinary features of eating together as a situated, embodied achievement and social institution that is built in and through interaction.

Interaction as the foundation for eating practices in shared mealtimes

Mealtimes shared with other people define how, what, how much, and with whom we eat. On such occasions, whether in private or public spaces, and as formal or informal events, our eating practices are inseparable from our interactions with other people. In this Editorial for the Special Issue on Interactional approaches to eating together and shared mealtimes, we provide an overview of the interdisciplinary field of research on eating together and shared mealtimes to illustrate the breadth and depth of work that has been developed in this area to date. The overview is divided into three broad clusters of research that focus primarily on (1) cultural or societal aspects, (2) individual outcomes, or (3) interactional practices. Commonalities across these clusters are discussed, the need for more research across a greater global and cultural diversity of eating practices is highlighted, and the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration on research on eating together and shared mealtimes across diverse scientific disciplines is explored. The papers in this Special Issue showcase a sample of contemporary work from within the cluster of research on interactional practices, and a brief overview of these papers is discussed. Finally, it is argued that as a common area of interest, social interaction as the foundation of eating practices within shared mealtimes poses considerable potential for interdisciplinary collaboration across scientific disciplines, and between scientists, professionals, and participants from the study populations.

Shaping a moral body in family dinner talk: Children's socialization to good manners concerning bodily conduct

The family meal has been extensively investigated as a site for children's acquisition of eating-related behaviors and attitudes, as well as culture-specific rules and assumptions. However, little is known about children's socialization to a constitutive dimension of commensality and even social life: good manners concerning bodily conduct. Drawing on 20th century scholarship on body governmentality and good manners, and building on recent studies on family meal as a socialization site, the article sheds light on this overlooked dimension of family commensality. Based on a corpus of more than 20 h of videorecorded family dinner interactions collected in Italy, and using discourse analysis, the article shows that family mealtime constitutes a relevant arena where parents control their children's conduct through the micro-politics of good manners. By participating in mealtime interactions, children witness and have the chance to acquire the specific cultural principles governing bodily conduct at the table, such as "sitting properly", "eating with cutlery", and "chewing with mouth closed". Yet, they are also socialized to a foundational principle of human sociality: one's own behavior must be self-monitored according to the perspective of the generalized Other. Noticing that forms and contents of contemporary family mealtime talk about good manners are surprisingly similar to those described by Elias in his seminal work on the social history of good manners, the article documents that mealtime still constitutes a privileged cultural site where children are multimodally introduced to morality concerning not only specific table manners, but also more general and overarching assumptions, namely the conception of the body as an entity that should be (self)monitored and shaped according to moral standards.

Exploring unequal class logics of mealtime food socialisation. An ethnography of family meals in France and Australia

Regular family mealtimes are occasions to model food consumption and have been associated with health and well-being benefits for children. This study aimed to investigate children's mealtime food socialisation in socially diverse households. Nine families from France and five from Australia were recruited, ranging from lower middle-class to upper-class positions, with children mostly between the ages of five to eight. The data is composed of the observations of 47 mealtimes and semi-directive interviews with both parents. The results showed that food socialisation and parents' understanding of children's taste development were linked to the household's social class position as well as to the temporal, cognitive and emotional resources parents possessed at mealtimes, in a similar manner across France and Australia. The more capital and resources the parents had, the more they were able to perform an intensive food socialisation style, which led them to prepare balanced menus and get children to eat the food served. The less capital and resources the parents had, the more they engaged in a hands-off food socialisation style, leading them to serve more child-oriented and less diverse menus. Importantly, all parents strived to serve healthy food, but limited resources prevented some of them from doing so. These food socialisation styles were also connected to the development of different social skills in children: with the intensive model, children were closely managed by their parents at the table but also learnt negotiation skills, whereas with the hands-off style, children learnt to be quite autonomous in their eating. The findings presented here contribute to Hays' intensive mothering concept and to Lareau's class-based parenting models. They also challenge Bourdieu's differentiation between a taste of necessity and a taste of luxury.

The reflective eater: Socializing French children to eating fruits and vegetables

Studies often suggest that the family meal is the locus for the acquisition of healthy eating habits. However, these studies rarely offer a deeper understanding of what it is about eating together as a family that increases the intake of healthy foods, such as fruits and vegetables. This ethnographic study examines dinners in French households, whose children have shown to habitually consume fruits and vegetables, analyzing talk around the dinner table. Our analysis shows that naturally occurring exchanges between parents and children socialize children to experiencing eating in culturally informed ways that promote attending to the prized characteristics, such as origin, quality, taste, and preparation of food items that intrinsically elevates their value and leads to their consumption. These communicative patterns also encourage reflection and openness to foods, which, we posit, constitute ways of 'doing being French'. Ultimately, we argue that French children's readiness to eat fruits and vegetables is not linked to them being healthy, but rather is derived from the cultural significance of experiencing sensory pleasure from food and from being able to talk about and share these experiences with others, that is being reflective eaters.

Language in popular American culture constructs the meaning of healthy and unhealthy eating: Narratives of craveability, excitement, and social connection in movies, television, social media, recipes, and food reviews

Many people want to eat healthier but struggle to do so, in part due to a dominant perception that healthy foods are at odds with hedonic goals. Is the perception that healthy foods are less appealing than unhealthy foods represented in language across popular entertainment media and social media? Six studies analyzed dialogue about food in six cultural products - creations of a culture that reflect its perspectives - including movies, television, social media posts, food recipes, and food reviews. In Study 1 (N = 617 movies) and Study 2 (N = 27 television shows), healthy foods were described with fewer appealing descriptions (e.g., "couldn't stop eating"; d = 0.59 and d = 0.37, respectively) and more unappealing descriptions (e.g., "I hate peas"; d = -.57 and d = -.63, respectively) than unhealthy foods in characters' speech from the film and television industries. Using sources with richer descriptive language, Studies 3-6 analyzed popular American restaurants' Facebook posts (Study 3, N = 2275), recipe descriptions from Allrecipes.com (Study 4, N = 1000), Yelp reviews from six U.S. cities (Study 5, N = 4403), and Twitter tweets (Study 6, N = 10,000) for seven specific themes. Meta-analytic results across Studies 3-6 showed that healthy foods were specifically described as less craveworthy (d = 0.51, 95% CI: 0.44-0.59), less exciting (d = 0.40, 95% CI: 0.31-0.49), and less social (d = 0.36, 95% CI: 0.04-0.68) than unhealthy foods. Machine learning methods further generalized patterns across 1.6 million tweets spanning 42 different foods representing a range of nutritional quality. These data suggest that strategies to encourage healthy choices must counteract pervasive narratives that dissociate healthy foods from craveability, excitement, and social connection in individuals' everyday lives.

"The Rest of my Childhood was Lost": Canadian Children and Adolescents' Experiences Navigating Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Children and adolescents with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) face significant and unique challenges related to their condition. The aim of this study was to better understand some of these challenges, and to explore how Canadian youth respond to them. We interviewed 25 pediatric patients with IBD, ranging in age from 10-17, to find out about their illness experiences. Using a thematic analysis, we discerned three themes: challenges related to diagnosis, making sense of change, and navigating sociability. Taken together, they paint a picture of young people facing great uncertainty prior to diagnosis, pronounced changes to selfhood as they make lifestyle adjustments, and facing difficulties with the implications of reduced sociability because of their disease. We conclude by providing recommendations for the development of resources aimed at helping newly diagnosed pediatric patients navigate these issues.

Associations between food provision and feeding practices in socially disadvantaged childcare centres

Preschool children consume a large proportion of their daily food intake in their childcare settings. These settings, therefore, provide important opportunities for children to experience food socialisation, and related positive nutrition. Yet, the extent to which these opportunities are taken, particularly in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas where risk of poor nutrition is high, is not well documented. This study focused on 10 childcare centres in socially disadvantaged locations and examined daily feeding practices via direct in-situ observation (n = 189 children observed). Centres were randomly selected based on type of food provision: centre-provided (n = 5 centres) or family-provided (n = 5 centres). Analyses showed that where food was family-provided, educators were significantly more likely to use controlling feeding practices, including pressuring children to eat, restricting food choices and rushing children into finishing meals. These practices were particularly evident during mid-morning meals, where pressuring children to eat healthy foods first, was more often observed. Further research and interventions that target feeding practices in childcare are indicated and should consider how source of food provision impacts upon these practices.

Orchestrating children’s action: an in-depth multimodal analysis of child-educator interactions in one Italian early childhood education setting

Early childhood educational centers (ECEC) are contexts where young children make their first contact with specific, culturally determined rules, practices, and values. Only a few studies have analyzed in-depth the practices through which the educators direct the children’s action and attention while they are performing routine educational activities. By means of detailed transcription of educators-children conversations and Conversation Analytic methodology, this work examines a set of videorecorded interactions collected in one Italian ECE center (“nido”), particularly focusing on the verbal and multimodal resources employed by ECEC teachers as they manage episodes, where the children diverge from an expected course of action. Analyses reveal that the educators employ a variety of multimodal resources to orchestrate the child’s attention and actions toward the desired course of activity, which open spaces where the child’s agency, however more or less strongly reprimanded, is admitted and negotiated.

Children’s participation and agency in Italian residential care for children: Adult-child interactions at dinnertime

This paper analyzes the impact of adults’ interactive moves and strategies on children’s participation and agency at dinnertime in two Italian residential care facilities, one of the most widely used alternative care life-context for children and youth coming from vulnerable families. Participants are 14 children and 11 educators living in two residential care facilities in Rome (Italy). Adopting an interactional and multimodal analytic approach, this paper focuses on two dinnertime activities: the routine activity of praying before eating and the very frequent one of talking about rules and transgressions. The comparative analysis of the two facilities shows how, in stable patterns of adult-child interactions recurring across different activities in the same facility, adults’ strategies and interactive maneuvers differently impact on children’s participation and agency and consequent socialization practices. In the conclusion, we emphasize the relevance and implications of this study for either research in educational sciences and for professionals operating in alternative care and related fields.

Mealtimes in Head Start pre-k classrooms: examining language-promoting opportunities in a hybrid space

In this study we sought to identify profiles of talk during Head Start preschool mealtime conversations involving teachers and students. Videos of 44 Head Start classrooms' lunch interactions were analyzed for the ratio of teacher-child talk and amount of academic vocabulary, and then coded for instances of academic/food, social/personal, and management talk to highlight the degree of hybridity of talk within this unique setting. Cluster analysis revealed four distinct patterns of teacher-child mealtime interactions in 44 Head Start preschool classrooms: classroom discourse, home discourse, hybrid-low, and hybrid-high. Multilevel models further demonstrated a relationship among these clusters of teacher-child interactions and children's end-of-year expressive vocabulary scores controlling for ratio of teacher-child talk and pre-test scores. Children in classrooms displaying a hybrid style of mealtime discourse made the greatest gains on measures of expressive vocabulary in contrast to their peers in classrooms displaying other discourse styles.

Poverty and Children's Language in Anthropolitical Perspective

From the “verbal deprivation” and “restricted codes” of the 1960s to contemporary “language gap” discourses, deficit models of children's language have been posited to explain social ills ranging from school failure to intergenerational poverty. However, researchers from a range of disciplines have problematized such models on the basis of the power of language to reflect, articulate, produce, and reproduce structural inequality. This review considers how the discursive construction of language, poverty, and child development contributes to deficit-based research agendas and the resulting interventions aimed at remediating language use in homes and schools. We suggest that an anthropolitical language socialization approach deconstructs ideologies of linguistic (in)competence and more accurately traces how children across cultures and social contexts develop communicative resources, cultural knowledge, and social practices in the face of political and economic adversity; it also helps articulate alternative ways of respecting and building on difference.

Digital Commensality: Eating and Drinking in the Company of Technology

Commensality is a key aspect of social dining. However, previous research has identified a number of pros and cons associated with the incorporation of digital technology into eating and drinking episodes. For instance, those who are distracted by digital technology may eat/drink more (that is, they may overconsume) as a result of their failure to attend to the food-related sensations that are thought to cue the termination of eating. Similarly, it has often been suggested that the use of mobile devices at mealtimes can disrupt the more commensal aspects of dining/drinking (at least among those who are physically present together). At the same time, however, looking to the future, it seems clear that digital technologies also hold the promise of delivering opportunities for enhanced multisensory experiential dining. For instance, they might be used to match the auditory, visual, or audiovisual entertainment to the eating/drinking episode (e.g., think only about watching a Bollywood movie while eating a home-delivery Indian meal, say). Indeed, given the growing societal problems associated with people dining by themselves, there are a number of routes by which digital technologies may increasingly help to connect the solo diner with physically co-located, remote, or even virtual dining partners. In this review of the literature, our focus is specifically on the role of technology in inhibiting/facilitating the more pleasurable social aspects of dining, what one might call "digital commensality." The focus is primarily on Westernized adults with reasonable access to, and familiarity with, digital technologies.

Moments of Pleasure: A Preliminary Classification of Gustatory mmms and the Enactment of Enjoyment During Infant Mealtimes

The enjoyment of food and the sharing of mealtimes is a normative cultural and social practice. Empirical research on eating enjoyment has, however, been a rather neglected area across the social sciences, often marginalized in favor of health or focusing on individual preferences rather than shared enjoyment. Even with regards to children, their enjoyment of food is typically rated retrospectively via parental reports of mealtime behavior. What is missing is an understanding of how enjoyment becomes a normative, cultural practice during mealtimes. This paper examines this issue in the context of parents feeding their 5–8-month-old infants in the family home, since it is within this context that we can see the early emergence of such practices in often highly routinized situations. The enactment of eating as enjoyable, and of the food as appreciated or “liked” in some way, is a culturally normative practice that becomes recognizable through particular non-lexical (“mmm,” “ooh”) or lexical (“this is nice, isn't it?”) utterances. The data comprise 66 infant mealtimes video-recorded over almost 19 h, from five families living in Scotland. The analysis uses discursive psychology and focuses on the sequential position of different types of parental gustatory mmms as produced during the infant meals. A classification of four types of mmm were identified in the corpus—announcement, receipting, modeling, and encouragement mmms—each associated with features of sequential and multimodal organization within the mealtime. In the majority of instances, mmms were uttered alone with no other assessment terms, and parents typically produced these as an orientation to the enjoyment of their infants', rather than their own, eating practices. The receipting mmms, for instance, occurred at the precise moment when the infant's mouth closed around the food. It is argued that eating enjoyment can be considered as much an interactional practice as an individual sensation, and that non-lexical vocalizations around food are an essential part of sensory practices. The paper thus aims to bridge the gap between cultural and psychological studies of eating enjoyment and contribute to developmental studies of infant feeding in everyday interaction.

Food and Language: Production, Consumption, and Circulation of Meaning and Value

We interrogate the many ways that language and food intersect. Food and its uses provide setting and structure for language, just as language and its uses constrain and inform food activities. We illuminate where and how food and language co-occur and how they are dynamically co-constitutive, foregrounding the potential for food-and-language scholarship to contribute to understandings of political economic processes and structures. We organize our review around the mutual production, consumption, and circulation of food and language. We show that the richness of scholarship about consumption (especially around the family meal) has not been matched by research concerning the production of food and language, whereas the co-constituting circulation of food and language contributes to new meanings and values for both. More research is needed to clarify the surging attention to food, which may be motivated by the complex global food system and the speed and ease of mediatization and circulation of food images and ideologies.

Barriers to and facilitators of ultra-processed food consumption: perceptions of Brazilian adults

OBJECTIVE

To explore how individuals perceive the availability of ultra-processed foods in their neighbourhoods and the barriers to and facilitators of consumption of such foods.

DESIGN

A qualitative design was chosen. In-depth, face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted and a content analysis was performed.

SETTING

São Paulo, Brazil.

SUBJECTS

A purposeful sample of adults (n 48), stratified by sex and age group (20-39 years and 40-59 years).

RESULTS

All participants perceived their neighbourhoods as favourable regarding the availability of ultra-processed foods. Three barriers were identified: health concerns, not appreciating the taste of these foods and not being used to eating them. Five facilitators, however, were identified: appreciating the taste of these foods, their children's preference, convenience, addiction and cost.

CONCLUSIONS

Participants perceived their neighbourhoods as favourable to the consumption of ultra-processed foods and reported more facilitators than barriers to their consumption. Reported barriers point to the need to include measures promoting a healthy food system and traditional eating practices. The facilitators reinforce the idea that these foods are habit-forming and that regulatory measures to offset the exposure to ultra-processed foods are necessary.

Planning a Typical Italian Meal: A Family Reflection on Culture

The paper addresses the issue of cultural descriptions as they are perceived and used within mundane conversation. We analyze a discussion of an Italian family about a future formal occasion (a party) in a foreign country (Austria), with foreign participants, in which they shall produce a typically Italian meal. The analysis shows how cultural descriptions are both a resource and a constraint when they must orient a practical activity which must be publicly acknowledged for its cultural typicality. Discrepancies are highlighted between cultural descriptions and ordinary practices, but it is also shown how culture (or ‘cultural preferences’) gets produced, at a less explicit level, within discursive practices, through turn-taking filtering, sequential architecture and selection of differentiated addressees. The socializing import of the discursive situation for the younger participants is also discussed, with reference to the relevant conversational devices.

In Pursuit of the Study of Pleasure: Implications for Health Research and Practice

Many public health interventions attempt to promote health and well-being while simultaneously engaging with or negating pleasure-seeking activities. Yet the examination of pleasure is under-researched, especially within health and health-related areas. We examine pleasure as both an innate drive and a socially constructed phenomenon. Using the development of religious ideas in western cultures, we identify four forms of pleasure: carnal pleasure, disciplined pleasure, ascetic pleasure and ecstatic pleasure. These pleasures dramatically affect the construction of social and cultural identities. Moreover, they influence approaches to our understandings of health in general and interventions to public health in particular. The pursuit of the study of pleasure opens up a number of worthwhile areas for cross-disciplinary discussion and study.

Eating Your Words: Discursive Psychology and the Reconstruction of Eating Practices

Psychological research into eating practices has focused mainly on attitudes and behaviour towards food, and disorders of eating. Using experimental and questionnaire-based designs, these studies place an emphasis on individual consumption and cognitive appraisal, overlooking the interactive context in which food is eaten. The current article examines eating practices in a more naturalistic environment, using mealtime conversations tape-recorded by families at home. The empirical data highlight three issues concerning the discursive construction of eating practices, which raise problems for the existing methodologies. These are: (1) how the nature and evaluation of food are negotiable qualities; (2) the use of participants' physiological states as rhetorical devices; and (3) the variable construction of norms of eating practices. The article thus challenges some key assumptions in the dominant literature and indicates the virtues of an approach to eating practices using interactionally based methodologies.

A moveable feast: Contemporary relational food cultures emerging from local food networks

Although the globalised food system delivers unparalleled food variety and quantity to most in the developed world it also disconnects consumers from where, how and by whom food is grown. This change in the food system has resulted in an acceptance of an anonymous and homogeneous food supply, which has contributed to over-consumption and the rise in diet-related diseases. 'Nutritionism' responds to this issue by maintaining that a 'healthy diet' can be achieved by consuming the correct balance of energy and nutrients, but with limited success. Yet, some food cultures can moderate the effects of the environmental drivers of increasing global obesity rates. This paper draws on this premise and presents an alternative eco-dietetic response, exploring people's meaning-making of food and food culture through local food networks. This research used narrative inquiry methodology and purposive sampling to gather stories through focus group conversations. Twenty people attended focus groups comprised of food procurers from one of three local food networks in the Canberra region: community gardens, a modified Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and farmers' markets. The findings showed that those using local food networks enjoyed a 'contemporary relational food culture' that highlighted the importance of people, place and time, in their visceral experiences of food. The community gardeners made meaning of food through their connections to the earth and to others. The farmers' market and CSA food procurers valued the seasonal, local and ethical food produced by their beloved farmer(s). This paper provides qualitative evidence that local food networks enable people to enjoy multi-dimensional relationships to food. Further research is required to examine whether experiencing a contemporary relational food culture can lead to improved health outcomes for people and the planet.

How Postindustrial Families Talk

The nuclear family is both crucible and product of capitalism and modernity, carried forth and modified across generations through ordinary communicative and other social practices. Focusing on postindustrial middle-class families, this review analyzes key discursive practices that promote “the entrepreneurial child” who can display creative language and problem-solving skills requisite to enter the globalized knowledge class as adults. It also considers how the entrepreneurial thrust, including the democratization of the parent–child relationship and exercise of individual desire, complicates family cooperation. Family quality time, heightened child-centeredness, children's social involvement as parental endeavor, children's autonomy and freedom, and postindustrial intimacies organize how family members communicate from morning to night.

Eating fruits and vegetables. An ethnographic study of American and French family dinners

The French eat more fruits and vegetables than Americans and have lower rates of childhood obesity. This ethnographic study compares various aspects of meal environment in sixteen households in LA, California and Paris, France, and offers insights on the relationship between local practices and preferences and children's consumption of fruits and vegetables. Our analysis of video-recorded naturalist data reveals that the consumption of fruits and vegetables is linked to the cultural organization of dinner--what, when and how food is served--and to local beliefs about children's eating practices. We also found that the French model for dinnertime prioritizes the eating of fruits and vegetables more than the American model does. We propose that local eating models should be taken into account in research on childhood obesity and in prevention programs.

"You must eat the salad because it is nutritious". Argumentative strategies adopted by parents and children in food-related discussions at mealtimes

At mealtimes, the evaluation of the appropriate (or not appropriate) behavior concerning the food is often assumed as a topic of discourse. The aim of this study is to single out the argumentative strategies used by parents with their children and by children with their parents in order to convince the other party to eat or not to eat a certain food. Within a data corpus constituted by 30 video-recorded meals of 10 middle to upper-middle-class Swiss and Italian families, we selected a corpus of 77 argumentative discussions between parents and children arisen around a food-related issue. Data are presented through discursive excerpts of argumentative discussions that were found within the data corpus and analyzed through the pragma-dialectical model of critical discussion. The results of this study show that the feeding practices in families with young children during mealtimes are argumentatively co-constructed by participants. In most cases parents put forward arguments based on the quality (e.g., very good, nutritious, salty, or not good) and quantity (e.g., too little, quite enough, or too much) of food to convince their children to eat. Similarly, children put forward arguments based on the quality and quantity of food to convince their parents to change their standpoint, although their view on the issue is the opposite of that of their parents.

Il y a kébab et kébab

Cet article analyse un cas de racisme gastronomique qui a eu lieu dans la ville de Bergame située dans le nord de l’Italie. Basé sur des recherches ethnographiques de longue durée, il s’intéresse particulièrement à la façon dont les membres d’un groupe Facebook – créé spécifiquement pour protester contre la présence d’un stand à kébab dans la Ville Haute (historique) de Bergame – utilisent des ressources sémiotiques et linguistiques telles que l’alimentation, le site, le langage et l’expérience corporelle pour établir des limites entre les membres de ce groupe et les intrus. Ce faisant, l’article s’inscrit dans une discussion sur la signification de l’alimentation au sein de communautés et de réseaux locaux et globaux. Il considère que la nourriture est un signifiant puissant et très marqué du global et du local et qu’elle fait partie des débats locaux, nationaux et globaux sur la valeur attribuée aux gens, aux choses, aux pratiques et aux valeurs toujours en mouvement.

Beyond the reproduction of official accounts: parental accounts concerning health and the daily life of a California family

Considering the purported bias of interviews to elicit "official accounts"--conveying conventional teachings from health promotion--and limited insights individuals may have into their own health behaviors, the challenges of relating health as talk (directed at researchers) to health as enacted are examined. Focusing on one family from a study of dual-earner middle-class Los Angeles families, I propose and apply four analytic lenses to a conjoint analysis of ethnographic interviews and videorecordings of family life to examine the parental claim that their family is a "healthy family." Findings indicate that parental accounts enable deeper insights into health as entrenched in everyday life, here revealing the centrality of a relational view of health as "family well-being" (vs. individual health) extending into the social world. Discussion considers debates over the extent to which "discursive consciousness" in interview settings illuminates health-relevant practices in everyday life contexts.

Finishing the family meal. The interactional organisation of satiety

This paper provides an extended review of psychological, sociological and interactional research on mealtimes and satiety (fullness), arguing for a focus on how fullness and finishing a meal is interactionally achieved. Drawing on three specimen data fragments from contrasting family settings, routinely used resources for pursuing completion and expressing satiety are described. We show how checks on completion are tailored to children according to their age, the intimate knowledge family members have of one another and attuned to contingencies, such as, whether there is a further course to be offered. Equally, that in teaching children how to eat together with others, the family also transmits and transforms all manner of other eating practices such as how to comply, or not, with requests to finish. A central aim of the article is to complement the many studies of satiety that have explained its physiological aspects by providing the familial logics that are expressed in bringing the meal to a close. We offer a suggestive analysis, based on conversation analytic principles, to illustrate our argument and to provide a starting point for further work in this field. Where bodies of work have previously used mealtimes as a convenient setting for accessing other social practices, this article turns its focus back toward the tasks of dining together.

On the conditions for generative collaboration: learning through collaborative research

Drawing on autobiographical recollections, I propose to see collaborative research as a learning experience. I assume a sociocultural psychological approach to the social understanding and interpretation of different scientific research practices. I examine the modalities of collaboration in my first experience of managing an important national research project on Italian families' dinner table conversations, and in a larger collaborative research endeavor concerning the everyday life of middle-class Italian, Swedish and US families from a comparative view (the Sloan project). On the basis of these experiences, I highlight some of the difficulties met by two other projects presented in this special issue, the DUNES project (Tartas and Muller Mirza, this issue) and the Transition project (Markova and Plichtova, this issue). I conclude by suggesting a provisional criterion for generativity in collaborative research. I suggest that generativity occurs when the more expert and academically oldest ones become conscious that they are learning something new from the group and from some other, independently from age and experience.

Talking about taste: using a discursive psychological approach to examine challenges to food evaluations

This study is concerned with developing the interdisciplinary nature of food research, and with examining eating practices as they occur in everyday situations. The aim is to demonstrate how discursive approaches may contribute to eating research using a specific analytical example. A discursive psychological approach is used to examine mealtime conversations from 10 families with the analysis focusing on how food evaluations are challenged in interaction-for example, asking someone to justify what they think is 'wrong' with the food. Data are presented with 7 examples of the 30 challenges that were found within the data corpus. The analysis demonstrates how people may be held accountable for their expressed taste preferences when being challenged, and how this contributes to our understanding of eating as primarily an individual and embodied experience. It is argued that a specific and detailed analysis of eating interactions provides an alternative way of conceptualising food evaluations as discursive rather than mentalistic concepts. A discursive approach also opens up practical ways in which the social and familial aspects of eating may be examined as they occur as part of food practices.

Privileged Treatment of Toddlers: Cultural Aspects of Individual Choice and Responsibility

This study examined the idea that toddlers in some communities are accorded a privileged status in which they are allowed what they want, assumed not yet to "understand" how to cooperate. U.S. middle-class and Guatemalan Mayan mothers and 3- to 5-year-old siblings were observed while the siblings and toddlers (14-20 months) both sought access to attractive objects. The Mayan toddlers' desires were usually respected by both the mothers and the siblings, who often voluntarily cooperated without mothers' intervention. In contrast, the U.S. middle-class toddlers seemed to be expected to follow the same rules for sharing (with some leniency) as the older children. The Mayan pattern fits a cultural model prioritizing both responsibility and respect for others' freedom of choice.

Gay and Lesbian Language

▪ Abstract  The past two decades have witnessed a minor explosion in publications dealing with the ways in which gay men and lesbians use language. In fact, though, work on the topic has been appearing in several disciplines (philology, linguistics, women's studies, anthropology, and speech communication) since the 1940s. This review charts the history of research on “gay and lesbian language,” detailing earlier concerns and showing how work of the 1980s and 1990s both grows out of and differs from previous scholarship. Through a critical analysis of key assumptions that guide research, this review argues that gay and lesbian language does not and cannot exist in the way it is widely imagined to do. The review concludes with the suggestion that scholars abandon the search for gay and lesbian language and move on to develop and refine concepts that permit the study of language and sexuality, and language and desire.