Feeding Anxieties: The Politics of Children's Food in Poland 9781800738720

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
FIGURES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 EAT IN CONTEXT On Post-Socialist Transformations, Mothering and Making Citizen-Consumers with Food
CHAPTER 2 EAT AND HAVE SOME FUN On New Consumers and How the Food Industry Creates Children’s Food
CHAPTER 3 EAT JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE On Family Meals, Balancing Acts and Intergenerational Negotiations
CHAPTER 4 EAT LIKE A NORMAL PERSON On School Food, Catering to Children and Adjusting Bodies and Tastes
CHAPTER 5 EAT FOR THE GREATER GOOD On Nutritional Norms, Food Education and Making Healthy Citizens
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
INDEX

Citation preview

FEEDING ANXIETIES

NEW ANTHROPOLOGIES OF EUROPE: PERSPECTIVES AND PROVOCATIONS Series Editors: Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University Melissa L. Caldwell, UC Santa Cruz The anthropology of Europe has dramatically shifted ground from its emergence in descriptive ethnography to the exploration of innovative theoretical and methodological approaches today. This well-­established series, relaunched by Berghahn Books with a new subtitle, invites proposals that speak to contemporary social and cultural theory through innovative ethnography and vivid description. Topics range from migration, human rights and humanitarianism to historical, visual and material anthropology to the neoliberal and audit-­culture politics of Schengen and the European Union. Volume 6 Feeding Anxieties: The Politics of Children’s Food in Poland Zofia Boni Volume 5 Punching Back: Gender, Religion and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing Jasmijn Rana Volume 4 The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work: Craftwork in Twenty-First-Century England Trevor H.J. Marchand Volume 3 Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples David E. Sutton Volume 2 Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen Daniel M. Knight Volume 1 Modernity and the Unmaking of Men Violeta Schubert

FEEDING ANXIETIES The Politics of Children’s Food in Poland

 Zofia Boni

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Zofia Boni

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boni, Zofia, author. Title: Feeding anxieties : the politics of children’s food in Poland / Zofia Boni. Description: 1st Edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations; 6 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022045360 (print) | LCCN 2022045361 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800738713 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800738720 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Food habits--Political aspects--Poland. | Children--Nutrition--Poland. | Intergenerational relations--Poland. | Polish people--Food--History. | Poland--Social life and customs. Classification: LCC GT2853.P7 B66 2023 (print) | LCC GT2853.P7 (ebook) | DDC 394.1/208309438--dc23/eng/20230109 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045360 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045361

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-­1-80073-­871-­3 hardback ISBN 978-­1-80073-­872-­0 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800738713

CONTENTS

 List of Figuresvi Acknowledgementsviii Introduction1 Chapter 1.  Eat in Context: On Post-­Socialist Transformations, Mothering and Making Citizen-­Consumers with Food

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Chapter 2.  Eat and Have Some Fun: On New Consumers and How the Food Industry Creates Children’s Food

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Chapter 3.  Eat Just a Little Bit More: On Family Meals, Balancing Acts and Intergenerational Negotiations

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Chapter 4.  Eat Like a Normal Person: On School Food, Catering to Children and Adjusting Bodies and Tastes

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Chapter 5.  Eat for the Greater Good: On Nutritional Norms, Food Education and Making Healthy Citizens

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Conclusion167 References173 Index190

FIGURES

 Figure 0.1. Drawing of a typical meal by 11-­year-­old Zuzia. Published with permission.

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Figure 0.2. Drawing of a typical meal by 8-­year-­old Sylwia. Published with permission.

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Figure 2.1. Chocolate cereals in a pink bowl, 6-­year-­old Marta’s drawing of her favourite food. Published with permission.

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Figure 2.2. A school shop, photographed by the author, 2013.

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Figure 2.3. Sweets bought in a school shop. Photographed by Katarzyna Boni.

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Figure 4.1. Seven-­year-­old Basia’s drawing of her best imagined and the worst possible lunchbox. The latter (on the right) includes brussels sprouts, potato and a fish with bones. Published with permission.

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Figure 4.2. Six-­year-­old Olek’s drawing of his best imagined drugie śniadanie, which consists of a shake and hamburger from McDonald’s, and a piece of a chocolate pie. Published with permission.120 Figure 4.3. A menu from a school canteen, photographed by the author, 2013.

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Figures 4.4–4.6. School meals, photographed by the author, 2012–2013.130 Figures 4.7–4.8. School canteens, photographed by the author, 2012–2013.132



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Figure 5.1. Food pyramid for children (2009). Created by the National Food and Nutrition Institute. Reprinted with permission.147 Figures 5.2–5.3. Food pyramids created by children, displayed in one of the schools. Photographed by the author, 2013.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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his book has been long in the making. With all the hopes and aspirations, as well as doubts and anxieties poured into it, this book marks the end, and one of the highpoints, of an incredibly important process and time in my life. And it would not have happened without the help of many people. First and foremost, my thanks go to all the research participants. Everyone I talked to, children and adults, parents, school principals, cooks and teachers, state officials and non-­governmental activists, food producers and marketers. This book would not have existed without them. Special thanks go to Paulina, Dominika, Mikołaj, Marysia, Nina, Krzysztof, Dominika, Sylwia and Tomek. I would also like to thank everyone who helped me with looking for participants and with access to my field sites. Secondly, I should mention that this book has been supported by two research grants from the National Science Centre in Poland (DEC-­ 2012/07/N/HS3/04137 and DEC-­ 2016/20/S/H53/00310), by Sir Richard Stapley Educational Trust and by SOAS University in London, which granted me a research award. The third group is the biggest, as it consists of colleagues, mentors, friends and family who supported me over the years. To start with, I would like to thank Harry West. I vividly remember a phone conversation I had with him to talk about my research project before submitting it to SOAS. Already during that first conversation, Harry believed in this project and in me doing it, and provided helpful remarks. That was a boost of confidence that really helped me at that time. Throughout the following years, he provided guidelines and support when it was needed, and space when it was required, always appreciating my work and helping me to develop my research. Special thanks should also go to Jakob Klein who provided detailed, meticulous and very helpful suggestions on my work. He supported this book project from the start, and was always interested in and happy to talk to



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me about my research. Thank you to both Jakob and Harry for encouraging and supporting me through ups and downs over the years. I would also like to thank Harry and Jakob for building the SOAS Food Studies Centre which became my home for a few years. It created a much needed sense of community, academic stimulation and emotional support. The regular seminar series, lectures and many other more or less formal events allowed me to learn from wonderful researchers and to build friendships for life. Emma Jayne-­Abbotts and Lizzie Hull were part of that community. Always happy to have a chat about my work or life in general, they both understood well the hurdles of being an early career female academic. I am incredibly grateful for all the conversations and glasses of wine shared. They both have been a true inspiration for me. Other people in the SOAS Anthropology and Sociology Department also played a part in my anthropological development. Special thanks should go to Kit Davis, Marloes Janson and Trevor Marchand. Trevor was incredibly supportive and made me feel welcome, and as if I was in the right place, from the first day. Similar thanks should go to other colleagues at SOAS, particularly Mary-­Anne Decatur, Jamila Dorner and Niamh Clifford Collard. There are many other people in the academic community I would like to thank: Anne Murcott, for her time, support and asking challenging and provocative questions; Rebecca O’Connell, for sharing her expertise, valuable remarks on my work and patiently listening to my anxieties; Frances Pine, for encouragement, exciting ideas on how to develop my work, and supporting this book project throughout; Samantha Punch, for critical and reassuring reading of my work; and Wendy Willis, for sharing her thoughts and comments. Chats with them at different moments of this project were essential to my work and my academic development, and were always inspiring in more ways than one. I also received continuous guidance, encouragement and support over the years from Lissa Caldwell who backed this book project from the start until the very end. I would like to thank her for so many comments on different versions of the manuscript, for our conversations in person and over emails, and for mentoring me through pathways of building an academic career and publishing. Lissa’s intellectual support and emotional care were always a reminder that academia can be wonderful. I would also like to thank Michael Herzfeld, the other series editor, for patiently guiding me through the publication process, sharing his notes on index making and supporting this book project throughout. Special thanks should also go to two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped me to greatly improve this book.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Doing research can be such an alienating and challenging experience. I would not have been able to do it without my friends and colleagues from the SOAS Food Studies Centre, Kat Cagat, Nese Ceren Tosun, Jess Chu, Anna Cohen, Anna Colquhoun, Mukta Das, Lucy Dow, Petra Matijevic, Leo Pang, Nafsika Papacharalampous, Claudia Prieto Piastro, Hannah Roberson and Fran Vaghi. You provided lightness, intellectual inspiration and feedback on my work, support and fun, as well as couches to sleep on and endless dinner conversations. Conferencing together, organizing workshops, venting our frustrations over pints kept me going. Being part of that community is something I still cherish. I miss you and our London times terribly. From that group there are two people, two of my best friends, who deserve my special thanks. I could not imagine doing this without Katie Graf who has become my constant and the vital part of my support system. I greatly appreciate our work and life conversations over coffees and drinks, walks in London parks to take breaks from writing, visiting each other’s field sites, great feedback on my work, and all the dinners and family visits. Celia Plender has ceaselessly listened to my doubts and anxieties, and championed this book project from the start until the very end. A big thanks for always bringing my confidence back up, for reading and commenting on my work, for always being there for me. I cherish our work discussions, holiday trips and online and offline dinners immensely. Throughout this process I also received support from many colleagues in Poland for which I am incredibly thankful. Renata Hryciuk was very helpful in my transition to SOAS and during my fieldwork. Mateusz Halawa provided ample support during and after fieldwork. Special thanks should also go to Dorota Dias-­Lewandowska, Aleksandra Leyk, Joanna Mroczkowska and Michał Murawski. Colleagues from the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where I currently work, provided helpful comments on parts of this manuscript, and support in general. Special thanks should go to Michał Buchowski, Natalia Bloch, Wojtek Dohnal, Gosia Kowalska, Iza Main, Danuta Penkala-­Gawęcka, and the warmest thank you to Ola Lis-­Plesińska. Similarly, friends and colleagues from the Interdisciplinary Childhood Studies Research Team at University of Warsaw supported me over the years, and commented on this manuscript. A big thank you to Ania Krawczak, Ewa Maciejewska-­Mroczek, Magda Radkowska-­Walkowicz, Marta Rakoczy, Marysia Reimann and Ania Witeska-­Młynarczyk. I would also like to thank my friends, Magda, Kasia, Ula, Piotrek, Janek, Ania, Piotrek, Dorota, for patiently listening to me and supporting me when I worked on this book. Finally, I want to thank my family for different kinds of support, emotional and otherwise. Both of my parents never for a minute doubted that I could and should do this, and really were there for me in moments of doubt



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or crisis. I hope I make you proud with this book. Thank you to my mum for creating an oasis in the countryside, where I could both concentrate on work and rest like nowhere else. Thank you to my dad for a steady supply of delicious chocolates. And thank you to my sister, for writing suggestions, laughs and travelling together, for always believing in me, and for inspiration. Special thanks should also go to Frajda, my dog, for taking me on long walks and providing a respite from work. Last but not least, my thanks go to Marcin Serafin, my best friend and my partner who is my rock. From reading different versions of the manuscript and providing fantastic comments, through always believing that I can do this and championing my work, to taking all the housework upon himself when I was deep into writing mode. His incredible patience and understanding throughout this process, and his support, have really been unmatched, and I would not have been able to do this without him.

INTRODUCTION

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e were sitting with Magda at a dinner table in her kitchen. With a smile on her face, she told me she can already imagine how this table will be covered with stains and doodles, and will come to represent her family’s happy life. We were in her newly renovated flat in one of the outer neighbourhoods of Warsaw. It was a warm summer midday. The sun was bright, but not too hot. There was a nice breeze coming from the open windows. Magda’s husband was at work. Her 3-­year-­old daughter was out with her grandmother, and her baby son was sleeping in his crib. Magda noticed it was unusually calm. In her late twenties, she was just a few years older than me. We were talking about food, about what it was like to move out of her family home, about her likes and dislikes, her daily and weekly routines. We were chatting and laughing a lot, both at ease. Then suddenly the atmosphere in the room changed. Once our conversation steered towards feeding her children it got more tense. I saw her whole posture change. She became at once agitated and stiff. ‘I’m so stressed about it’, she told me, ‘there is so much pressure to do it right! And I already constantly feel that I’m failing’. We had talked before about her husband cooking for both of them. He enjoyed it, she did not like to cook. But with children something changed. ‘I have been indoctrinated into being a cooking and feeding mother’, she observed. ‘And I hate it’. She told me how anxious she already was about what will happen in the future. ‘I don’t know how it will be when my children will be ten and twelve… Why can’t they stay at the age of two, when it is easier to control what they eat? I don’t know how I’m going to do this!’. After a longer pause, she continued: ‘I think it comes from home. I prefer that my daughter eats even a whole bar of chocolate, rather than a pack of white and pink marshmallows. So hopefully she sees that I eat chocolate rather than other things. I’ll let her go to school only after removing all crisps from the school shop’ – she said laughing – ‘and I will prepare a packed meal for her instead of giving

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her money to buy food’. She stopped laughing and again repeated, ‘I don’t know, it really scares me!’ I could feel her discomfort and concern. I immediately became tense myself. Not being a mother myself, I was puzzled by this situation. It struck me that, unprompted by my questions, Magda expressed so many negative emotions about feeding her children. She clearly needed to vent. But why did she feel as if she was failing? Failing at what exactly? Failing whom? What was she so scared of? The juxtaposition of marshmallows and chocolate was still vivid in my head, when I started wondering why feeding Gosia and Kuba caused their mother so much anxiety. My meeting with Magda took place in the summer of 2010,1 and it inspired me to do research on the social and cultural dynamics of feeding children in Poland. Feeding children might seem like the most intimate, private and primal act: a banal occurrence of daily life.2 And yet, while private and intimate, it is also a deeply politicized sphere, one in which many social actors are engaged, not only parents and children, but also other family members, schools and other state institutions. It also involves politicians, media outlets, market agencies and the food industry, non-­governmental organizations, or even international corporations and agencies, such as the World Health Organization or the European Union. These various actors often have very strong, sometimes even contradictory, ideas about what ‘proper’ feeding entails: eat a lot of dairy or limit dairy consumption; ban all sugar or allow sweets. These are quite extreme examples, but there are many more subtle discrepancies. With all these contrasts and diverse expectations, feeding involves power struggles, tensions and negotiations that happen at multiple scales: from a family table or a shopping aisle to food companies’ international offices and parliamentary chambers. The main argument of this book is twofold. Feeding is political. That means that what and how children eat is of interest to many private and public actors who want to make claims about and shape the way in which children eat. Possessing this influence is supposed to enable shaping the minds and bodies of the future generation. So the stakes are high. Because feeding is so political and contested, while feeling very personal and intimate, it elicits anxieties. The politics of children’s food lies at the root of the anxieties that mothers experience perhaps most intensely, but that permeate different parts of society, and are experienced differently by various actors: children themselves, families, schools and other state institutions, and the food industry. Feeding anxiety links these different actors and spheres, and for many people and institutions becomes one of the ways of being in the world. It becomes a new form of sociality. In this book I uncover what makes children’s food such a political issue, and how different actors experience and deal with its consequences: feeding anxieties.



INTRODUCTION 

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Feeding anxiety is as much about the practices of feeding and eating and related expectations, as it is about food, about what it signifies and what kind of a person it, literally and symbolically, makes. As John Coveney (2006) demonstrated, through food people construct themselves as certain kinds of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects. Food is tangible, material, easy to spot and judge. That is partly why it evokes so many emotions and moral judgments (Boni 2021). Take the chocolate and marshmallows pointed out and juxtaposed by Magda. Each of these foods not only tastes differently, but is also perceived to influence the body and the character of the child in a different way. Marshmallows are considered by many ‘improper’ food, connected with the negative influence of the food industry. They appeared in Poland as the materialization of the images about American family lifestyles. They are ‘fake’, not natural and unhealthy, and do not even resemble food anymore. But they are loads of fun. And chocolate is a more acceptable sweet treat. It has a longer presence in Poland, seems more natural and by some is even considered healthy. That is why Magda prefers her children to eat chocolate and not marshmallows. Contrasts like that, between diverse expectations of feeding and eating, and between different kinds of food, produce feeding anxieties. Feeding anxieties are not limited to any particular national borders. They occur in various shapes and forms in many places where there are local and global political interests in children’s food (see e.g. Jing 2000). But Poland provides a particularly fertile ground for feeding anxieties to develop, with its semi-­peripheral geopolitical status, ramifications of post-­socialist and neoliberal transformations, and still prevailing aspirations to be modern and ‘Western’. Food is particularly strongly connected to the expressions of home, care and love. There are very strong cultural norms about mothering, exemplified in the figure of Matka-Polka (Polish-­Mother), who completely devotes herself to her family, and through that sacrifices herself for the nation. The tensions between the family, the state and the market around children seem to be ever increasing. Poland, and Warsaw more specifically, is where I did uncover feeding anxieties. And although they are shaped by and connected to many international institutions and global trends, they are deeply localized and guided by cultural and social norms and understandings related to food, motherhood and modern personhood, which I delve into in this book. During my fieldwork in Warsaw, people in diverse contexts related to varied conceptions of ‘good food’, ‘proper feeding’ and ‘bad’ food habits. Food, and particularly children’s food, evokes multiple normative assumptions and moralized judgements. I will be unpacking these cultural assumptions one by one in this book, demonstrating how relational and contextual, as well as how emotional such opinions are, and how they reproduce social

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hierarchies. When relating to these normative judgements expressed by my interlocutors, I put the adjectives good, bad, proper and not proper in inverted commas to emphasize that these are not my own sentiments. In fact, in this book you will not find a recipe for what is a proper diet for children or how good feeding should be organized at home or at school. This book rather unpacks and critically studies such assumptions to demonstrate why feeding children is indeed such a contested issue. The experiences and stories presented in this book are depictions of love, care, fun and pleasure, on the one hand, and struggle, concern and self-­ doubt, on the other hand. These are not, however, the stories about struggling to put food on the table. Rather, they are about attempting to control what food is placed on that table while being pulled into tens of different directions. Feeding anxieties to a large extent are about control and restriction, about creating particular kinds of people with the means of food. And in that sense, they are about daily life in a neoliberal context which places value on individual success, development, life-­projects, slim bodies and self-­ discipline. With all of that, the book is also about what feeds our anxieties about children, responsibility, mothering, ‘good food’, health, the ‘right’ kinds of bodies, and being ‘proper people’.

FEEDING ANXIETIES Anxiety is an undirected emotion of uneasiness and worry about the future. It is a general state of mind and body, often not focused on a specific person or entity. In this book, I do not use anxiety as a psychological concept, but rather as a social concept. I use the notion of anxiety to describe what is happening to individual people, particularly mothers, but also what is happening at a larger societal scale. As a social concept, feeding anxiety is experienced by individuals and institutions. This book focuses in particular on families, schools, the state and the food industry. Just when I started my fieldwork in 2012, the research report about the future costs incurred by the Polish state due to the current ‘bad’ food habits was published (KPMG 2012). It was predicted that the current generation of children are likely to die at a younger age than the generation of their parents, and that the ‘bad’ food habits people have today will supposedly lead to health problems in the future, which would be very costly for the state. At the same time the World Health Organization published their research showing that the overweight and obesity rates among children in Poland have risen at the quickest rate in Europe (Currie et al. 2012). This was followed by a conference in the parliament, entitled dramatically ‘Can we afford to feed children badly?’ In one of the parliamentary conference rooms, on the podium,



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experts and politicians discussed how badly children in Poland eat and that it is not affordable to the Polish state in the long run. In these parliamentary discussions, children were positioned as not informed, not even fully aware of what adults were doing to them, as if feeding children was something that is done to them without their will or even acknowledgement. There were few mentions of the food industry and the schools as contributing to this ‘bad’ situation, but parents featured in most of the statements. They were presented as not knowledgeable about how to feed their children and not aware that their feeding practices might shape the food habits of the future generation (Szymańczak 2012: 43). P ­ arents – ­implicitly meaning m ­ others – w ­ ere portrayed as responsible for what was seen as a great public problem caused by their carelessness. This is just one example illustrating how parents, mainly mothers, are portrayed in a public domain, and how the state becomes anxious about feeding children, and in turn causes anxiety in others. Fear and anxiety have been identified by m ­ any – f­ rom Ulrich Beck (1992) to Li Zhang (2020) – as a shared emotion that extremely well characterizes contemporary lives. One of the great empirical examples of anxiety has been provided by Röttger-­ Rössler et al. (2015), who study anxiety as a socializing emotion that children among the Tao in Taiwan must learn. Children need to constantly be on their guard to be able to identify approaching dangers in time, dangers which lurk in the natural environment, as well as those coming from social and supernatural actors. Children can protect themselves from these multiple dangers only by keeping everything around them in sight and by not taking any risks. While Röttger-­Rössler et al. (2015) show us how Tao children are socialized through anxiety into being adults, in this book I ­show – ­among other ­things – ­how women in Poland are socialized through anxiety into being mothers. I am certainly not the first person to make the connection between anxiety and food. Chad Lavin (2013), a political scientist based in the US, pointed to various anxieties around ­food – c­ onnected for instance to identity, cultural authenticity, obesity and meat ­consumption – ­to demonstrate that contemporary food politics are actually a response to what is perceived as threats to individual and national sovereignty. He treated what has been happening around food as a response to the political anxieties surrounding globalization. Peter Jackson (2015), a human geographer from the UK, studied consumer anxieties at a range of scales, from international food markets to individual families and households. He analysed different cases of food fears, for instance the 2013 ‘horsemeat incident’, and how these affected people’s consumer choices. He saw the roots of contemporary food anxieties in the increasing gap between food producers and consumers, and studied the historical and social context of food safety.

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While Lavin (2013) studied food discourses and treated food anxiety as a political concept, Jackson (2015) focused on consumers and different scales of production-­consumption chain that created anxious appetites. This book adds a new ethnographic and theoretical perspective to these broader discussions about food and anxiety in contemporary societies, by focusing on multiple feeding anxieties around children’s food in Poland. Similarly to Lavin, I am interested in the connections between food anxieties and politics, but I take a more focused, ethnographic and detailed look at how exactly the broader politics and discourses around children’s food are connected to children’s and adults’ daily practices. Similarly to Jackson, I study different scales of feeding anxieties and treat this as an important social issue to be explained. But I also approach it as an explanatory term, a social concept that is about much more than food safety, but is about modern aspirations, tensions and personhoods, and as such it grasps what I have encountered during my fieldwork in Warsaw. Although my research focused on Poland, feeding anxieties in different forms occur in many places of the world. In Feeding China’s Little Emperors (2000), Jun Jing and other authors studied the impact of the policy of one child on the changing family relations and food cultures in China, and how the new parenting styles, children’s roles as well as societal tensions were exemplified with the means of food. Anne Allison (2008) vividly described how in Japan, she and other mothers were expected to create elaborate lunchboxes for their children to demonstrate their own investment in their children’s wellbeing, their development and their future. Allison James, Anne Trine Kjørholt and Vebjørg Tingstad (2009) studied children’s and their parents’ food practices, and family dynamics mediated with food, in Northern European countries. Jo Pike and Peter Kelly (2014) analysed the ambiguous figure of Jamie Olivier, and the political and moral economy of children’s school food in the UK and Australia. Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton and Sinikka Elliott (2019) critically studied the idealized conceptions of homemade food and family meals vis-­à-vis the realities of children’s food and maternal foodwork among working class families in the US. Jennifer Patico (2020) studied the contradictory expectations middle-­class families have to deal with, and the politics of parenting and feeding and their connection to the neoliberal capitalist ethic in the US. These are just a few examples that demonstrate that feeding anxieties, in their many forms and shapes, are a global or Global North phenomenon. They might, but do not necessarily have to, take different forms in the Global South (see e.g. Bosco 2007; Remorini 2015; Baviskar 2018). This multitude of different perspectives and accounts of anxiety confirms that indeed it is a concept that accurately describes the contemporary ways of being in the world. I did not look for it, but it is what I have found when



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studying the politics of children’s food in Poland. Feeding anxiety is an etic concept. My research participants talked about and expressed stres (stress), lęk (fear), niepokój (anxiety), napięcie (tension), obawa (worry), złość (anger), poczucie niepowodzenia (a feeling of failure), poczucie winy (guilt). I came to interpret all these emotions and feelings related to children’s food as feeding anxieties. I use the concept of anxiety to analyse and understand what is happening around children’s food and mothering: to grasp something ephemeral that relates to how people think about their bodies and their food, but also about their futures. Similarly to Sarah Ahmed’s work (2004, 2014) on collective feelings, I approach emotions as not solely private matters. As she explained, Emotions do things, and work to align individuals with c­ ollectives – o ­ r bodily space with social s­ pace – ­through the very intensity of their attachments. Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and collective. (Ahmed 2004: 27)

Feeding anxieties are emotions felt and embodied both by individuals, be it mothers, and institutions, such as schools, and what holds and binds the social body and the collectives together. I treat feeding anxieties as a new form of sociality, a way of engaging with oneself, as well as with each other, and with the world. The state of anxiety that many mothers live in and possibly experience most intensely also draws in and concerns others. Feeding anxieties cross many boundaries and move through different scales in Warsaw. Many institutions, including the state and schools, are anxious about children’s eating, although their anxieties take different shapes. Their uncertainties and worries about the future are related not only to individual ­children – ­as in the family ­domain – ­but to the whole generation, the future adults. Those multiple anxieties feed off each other. Feeding anxiety is connected to broader social tensions and expectations placed on parents (Furedi 2002; Cucchiara 2013; Hryciuk and Korolczuk 2015). And the state’s anxiety related to feeding children, as noticeable in the parliamentary discussion recounted above, is connected to parents’ behaviour. Children are pulled more and more into this overwhelming state of anxiety by their mothers and fathers, by the school and other institutions. Children too experience anxiety by dealing with many expectations, worries and tensions about food. In contrast to Ahmed’s (2004, 2014) analysis of collective feelings, feeding anxieties do not create a bounded and supportive collective. Even though it is a shared emotion, it is deeply individualizing and alienating. Feeding anxiety encompasses the feeling of failure related to not feeding children in the perceived right way, as well as the feeling of worry for being judged because

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of that, and fear for the child who does not eat in a proper way. Feeding anxiety includes both very tangible fears about particular foods, given to children by grandparents or friends at school, that might cause dental caries, and more abstract fears about children’s future. Even though different actors might have similar emotions, albeit expressed and experienced in varied ways, it does not mean that this shared feeling creates a bounded and binding sympathetic group. Rather, what makes this experience so powerful is the fact that it alienates specific actors, as everyone else is deemed a threat to ‘proper feeding’, responsibility for which is individualized. So while for a mother, other family members, other adults and children, as well as public and market institutions, might seem harmful to ‘proper feeding’, so are the other mothers who might be perceived as judging and scrutinizing actors. And for the state institutions, mothers are seen as at fault, and so it goes on. The object of feeding anxiety is often difficult to name and grasp, because it is multiple and ephemeral, so the solution is to control the subject of that anxiety: children themselves. Anxiety is also connected to trust, or rather lack thereof. Frank Furedi (2002) pointed out that the expert alarming rhetoric has deprived ­parents – ­and other groups of adults I would ­add – ­of a much-­needed trust: trust in other people, but also trust in themselves that they are able to engage in parenting and in feeding children. And it seems that adults in general do not trust children to make the ‘right’ food decisions. Such lack of trust in other adults, in children as well as in one’s own abilities, lies at the core of feeding anxieties. Another way of thinking about it is through what Manpreet Janeja calls a food-­trust nexus. Janeja (2010) shows how food is embedded in the familial and school networks of trust and distrust, and how the conceptions about ‘normal’ and ‘not normal’ food influence people’s daily lives. She demonstrates how the relations of power, notions of health and the politics of belonging and nation-­building are entangled with the dynamics of trust, distrust and mistrust in food. There are important connections between such issues of trust, as they are discussed by Janeja in her forthcoming book in relation to school food in the UK, and what I discuss as feeding anxieties in Poland (personal communication). Feeding anxieties are experienced by individual people, but are also connected to public health. The raising rates of childhood obesity are an important element of these worries, fears and lack of trust, as demonstrated above. Childhood obesity, as children’s food in general, is a highly politicized and contested topic. Fat children are often used in public and private conversations, and media representations, as props to scare mothers into ‘proper’ feeding and children into ‘proper’ eating. The varied aetiologies of childhood obesity, connected to genes, hormones and metabolisms, systemic



INTRODUCTION 

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inequalities and structural violence, are often reduced to mothers’ and children’s individual food choices (Warin et al. 2008; Maher, Fraser and Wright 2010; Yates-­Doerr 2020; Boni 2022a). This certainly exacerbates feeding anxieties by adding pressure to what and how children eat. When Furedi (2002) wrote about trust, he mainly referred to paranoid parenting in middle-­class families. Indeed, the internalized expectations about raising ‘healthy’ children, dealing with multiple social pressures and aspirations, are often discussed in the literature as middle-­class phenomenon (e.g. Ochs and Kremer-­Sadlik 2013; Fischer 2014; Patico 2020). But most parents, from various social and economic backgrounds, attempt to feed their children well. What they understand as ‘good’, and to what extent they are able to achieve and practise these ideas, might be diversified, but many of them experience some kinds of feeding anxieties, either related to health aspirations, social recognition or access to food. Bowen, Brenton and Elliott (2019) demonstrated for instance how poor working-­class families in North Carolina, in the US, struggle to feed their children in the ‘right’ way, and how part of that struggle is an immense pressure placed on parents, mothers in particular, by the society at large. So while the public perceptions of class, parenting and food entanglements often seem to fall along the lines of health obsessed upper middle-­class families on the one side, and working-­class families dealing with financial constraints on the other side, the realities are much more complicated. Wealthy families might be equally worried about access to the ‘right’ kind of ­food – f­ or instance organic, local, or in any other way special; and working-­class families might be similarly preoccupied with healthy food. Nevertheless, as Biltekoff (2013) demonstrated, the dominating perspectives on ‘good’ food and feeding are to a large extent informed by middle-­class ideals. And the situation is similar in Poland. I use feeding anxieties as a social concept that encompasses tangible and abstract fears and worries about children’s food. Feeding anxieties stem from multiple conceptions and expectations of what is ‘good food’ and what ‘proper’ people should eat. They are also fuelled by fears about failing at ‘proper’ feeding, being criticized and judged by oneself and others. In diverse forms and shapes, feeding anxieties are shared by individuals and institutions. But even though they come out of concern and care for and about children, these collective emotions do not create a supportive group. The processes of individualization, responsibilization and alienation are ingrained in feeding anxieties. As such, this new form of sociality creates an alienated community, and social relationships characterized by tension, distrust and harsh judgements.

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RELATIONAL APPROACH TO FEEDING-­E ATING In order to uncover the politics of children’s food, and understand the feeding anxieties it elicits, I take a relational approach to feeding and eating. Such an analytical and methodological perspective assumes that these two processes should not be separated, but rather treated as always intertwined. After all, it is the eating of chocolate or marshmallows that is the source of fear. Children in many intentional and unintentional ways influence the process of feeding (see e.g. Keenan and Stapleton 2009; Vaghi 2019). They are not the passive recipients of the feeding process. And the societal interest in children, and how they eat, is what implicates their parents and their feeding practices in the politics of children’s food. Therefore, in order to understand feeding anxieties, we have to analyse eating as well. Both feeding and eating consist of a multitude of intermingled practices, such as planning, shopping, preparing food, choosing what to eat, putting food in a mouth, chewing and swallowing, and digesting it.3 These practices are the result of people’s embodied dispositions and the contexts of the interactions in which they occur (Lahire 2011: xi). As Marjorie DeVault (1991) argued in her seminal book Feeding the Family, feeding and foodwork consist of both mental processes and physical activities that stretch over time. And I would add that feeding is not possible if eating does not occur, both conceptually and practically.4 Though feeding and eating are biologically grounded, they are also deeply cultural and social practices filled with social and symbolic meanings (Douglas 1975; Strathern 2012; Abbots and Lavis 2013). The negotiations about food, feeding and eating practices happen within a particular system of meal patterns and food categorizations. As Mary Douglas (1975) indicated, the shared cultural ideas about what constitutes particular food occasions and meals, and how they relate to each other, are the bedrock of any particular food culture. As Chapter 3 demonstrates in more detail, the repetitive food rhythms become particularly important for adults when feeding children. The typical meal pattern in Poland consist of three main meals (Domański et al. 2015). There are also two additional ones, often organized when feeding children. Breakfast (śniadanie) usually consists of sandwiches or cereals with milk or yogurt during the week, and often of eggs during weekends. This is followed by drugie śniadanie (a second breakfast), a smaller snack usually comprising of sandwiches or fruits. Many children take drugie śniadanie to school, as you will see in Chapter 4. Obiad, the main meal of the day, is typically eaten around 2–3pm. The Sunday dinner would be eaten at such a time. But during the week, this pattern tends to change in an urban context, with a smaller lunch eaten during the day, and a larger diner (obiad) eaten in the evening. In its ideal type, obiad consists of two warm dishes, a soup and a second dish comprising of meat,



INTRODUCTION 

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potatoes and vegetables, although more and more often during the week this consists of just one dish. This is followed by a desert, served either right after the main meal, or few hours later. And finally, in the late afternoon or evening, many Poles eat supper (kolacja), often consisting of sandwiches. This pattern fluctuates and changes, but when talking about food all of my interlocutors referred to these meals. The daily and weekly food rhythms are dictated by such a cultural coding, as well as by daily occurrences and plans which tend to change quite often. Feeding-­eating negotiations, which happen within and around the above-­ mentioned food pattern, are embedded in the past, influenced by what parents ate as children, and anchored in the ­future – ­they influence how today’s children will eat, and possibly how they will feed their own children. In that sense, the relationality of feeding-­eating stretches over time. These relationships not only extend to the past and the future, but are indeed entangled in many ways in the present. A mother feeds her child at home, while at the same time feeding a (future) Polish citizen. The way in which she feeds can be influenced by an article she reads or by a promotion in her grocery store. The way in which a child eats might be shaped by an education programme implemented in school or by her friends’ food habits. Moreover, the individual actors engaged in feeding and eating are in fact plural, that is, they are not completely the same in different contexts of social life, for example home and school (Lahire 2011). Children often eat differently at home and at school. Parents feed their children differently at home and in public places. Feeding-­eating constitute very dynamic and fluctuating relationships with multiple actors involved; they are not a static configuration. Feeding and eating practices are the daily stuff of family or school life. They involve adults, children and food in everyday dealings and negotiations. But they are also the subject of state policies and programmes, be it agricultural ones or those directly connected to children’s food and health. Feeding-­eating relationships are also influenced and play out in the realm of the food industry. And they may take a different life in the media. In each of these domains feeding and eating are imagined and practised differently. And yet these different ideas and expectations interact throughout the scales. A child might want to buy particular breakfast c­ ereals – a­ llowed for sale according to the state ­regulations – ­as a result of marketing campaigns, while a mother might not allow it after reading a newspaper article referring to dietary advice about the sugar content in cereals. Feeding-­eating relationships, as do feeding anxieties, play out in and connect different registers and scales. Such a relational approach to feeding and eating links in a meaningful way with the relational approach to women’s and childhood studies. Rachel Rosen and Katherine Twamley, in their Introduction to Feminism and the

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Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes?, pointed out that in academic discussions and public debates, women and children are often constituted as one ­entity – a­ s ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe 1991; see also Oakley 1994): ‘There are many parallels between the social position of children and women, who have been similarly constituted and subjected to treatment as vulnerable victims, or valorized as angelic innocents of home and hearth, and the subject through which hopes for national development flow’ (Rosen and Twamley 2018: 3). Or, alternatively, women and children are positioned antagonistically, in a sense that we can develop the rights of one group (children) only at the expense of the freedoms of the other group (women). Together with the other contributors to the book, Rosen and Twamley argue that exploiting these dependencies positions both women and children in a particular relationship to men, patriarchy and capitalism. Instead, they suggest rather conceiving of women’s and children’s positioning as relational, and engaging ‘in the complexity of social relationships and relations which can be simultaneously ones of love, reciprocity, oppression, struggle and exploitation’ (2018: 10). Feeding often continues to be relegated, in academic and public debates, to the consumption sphere, as a solely ‘private’ domestic matter, even though the public-­private division has been criticized, blurred and stretched for a long time not only by feminist scholars (see e.g. Rose 1987; Pateman 1989). This book shows that children’s food, and feeding anxieties, are not only a matter of private consumption, or rather that the ‘private consumption’ is never really private. What might be viewed as private and personal is indeed political. Research over the years have demonstrated that feeding work is part of an unpaid care work conducted to a much greater extent by women than men (Murcott 1983, 2000; Titkow, Duch-­Krzystoszek and Budrowska 2004). The monetary value of women’s unpaid care work globally has been estimated at $10.9 trillion in 2020 (Coffey et al. 2020). I am not convinced that this is something we could and should monetize; nevertheless, this demonstrates well the scale and the importance of this phenomenon. Feeding and foodwork constitute an important part of women’s unpaid labour. It is in many respects about production and reproduction. And as such, studying feeding-­eating relationships, and the politics of children’s food, is certainly not only a domain of consumption. With love and care embedded in feeding practices comes the experience of oppression and the feeling of failure. Because women are primary caretakers and feeders, any interest in children’s f­ ood – b ­ e it from the position of the state, the World Health Organization, the food industry or other p ­ arents – ­draws in the focus on mothers and families. As such, any political interest in children and their eating elicits an interest in women, and contributes to,



INTRODUCTION 

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as well as gains from feeding anxieties. When mothers become anxious and doubt themselves with regard to feeding their children, it might be easier to control them and exert one’s influence over the feeding-­eating process. Controlling children’s bodies and minds, and shaping the way in which women position and think of themselves, and as mothers care for their children, is a source of power. Feeding anxieties help to produce and exert that power. Feeding children is not only a matter of domestic consumption, but it is simultaneously a much bigger political issue. It is political because it is about ­power – ­power over children and women. It is political because it builds on and exacerbates gender inequality, as well as age inequality. By arguing that we have to look at feeding and eating relationally, I want to put children in the picture. They are too often omitted from academic and non-­academic discussions about them. The class politics are also involved in feeding children, as the dominating perspectives on ‘good’ and ‘proper’ food are usually dictated by upper middle-­class ideals, and the access to food and food information is shaped by people’s socio-­economic situation. By taking a relational approach to feeding and eating, I also want to demonstrate how many actors influence these practices; how deeply feeding and eating are intertwined with many power struggles and social relationships. This book explores these connections and disconnections between different scales and actors engaged in the feeding-­eating relationships, and the tensions between them.

THE FIELD AND METHODS The encounters I recall in this book took place in Warsaw, Poland’s capital, over a period of twelve months in 2012 and 2013. My fieldwork was based on researching different actors engaged in the process of feeding children, and different field sites: families, primary schools, state institutions, food industry, NGOs and media. It was a multi-­sited (Marcus 1995, 1998), and relational ethnography, focusing on fields rather than places, boundaries rather than bounded groups, processes rather than people, and cultural conflicts and negotiations rather than group culture (Desmond 2014). In practice this meant researching different field sites in a period of twelve months, which was at times an organizational challenge. I frequently spent the first part of the day in school, and in the evening spent time with families, or conducted interviews with state or food industry representatives. Sometimes I had two or three meetings in one day, and I had to travel throughout the city, from one end to the other. I also had to switch from one role and mindset to another, for instance from participating in a non-­governmental cooking workshop to interviewing food producers. I became tuned into my interlocutors’ various voices, refraining from judgements or critiques. My

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FEEDING ANXIETIES

research was guided by the rhythms of different places, homes and schools, private and public, personal and commercial spaces and actors, their foodways and food routines. And then there were days and even weeks when seemingly nothing happened and I was anxiously waiting to hear from my interlocutors. My time was not entirely my own, which I guess is the prerequisite of any intensive fieldwork.

A Glimpse into Family Life I had my first dinner with the Podolscy family on a cold December day. We ate almost immediately after my arrival. I asked if I could help, but was told to sit at the table with the children, 7-­year-­old Bartek, and his younger sister, 4-­year-­old Zuzia. Food was already prepared and ready to eat. The table was set up in their living room. Małgosia and Mikołaj, both in their late thirties, were in the kitchen, putting the portions of fried fish on our plates, and then they brought them to the table where I and the children were sitting. I was invited to serve myself, while Małgosia put surówka (a salad made from raw vegetables) and boiled potatoes on her children’s plates. This was followed by a discussion: – ‘No, I don’t want surówka, I’m not going to eat it’, said Bartek. – ‘Try at least a little bit. I will give you some. How many potatoes do you want?’ responded Małgosia. – ‘Fifty spoons, a lot, a lot!’ – ‘You won’t eat so much, I will give you three, and if you want more, I’ll add more.’

We started eating. One more fish was still in the pan, so from time to time Małgosia went to the kitchen to turn it over. Zuzia wanted to change seats, so Małgosia, and later again Mikołaj, switched seats with her. She also complained that she wanted more fish, and more surówka, though she still had not eaten what was on her plate. She played with the surówka ingredients pretending that they were worms. She put a piece of cabbage under my nose, while asking if I would like to eat a worm. Everyone talked at the same time. Bartek was telling me about his school. At some point he stood up from the table and went to his room to get a book he wanted to show me. His father asked him to get back to the table and sit up straight. After a while Zuzia said that she could not eat anything anymore: – ‘Can I go now? I don’t want to eat anymore!’ – ‘Eat a little bit more’, answered Małgosia. – ‘But I don’t want to.’ – ‘You have barely eaten anything.’ – ‘I can’t eat more.’



INTRODUCTION 

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‘Eat a piece of fish and a bit more of surówka, and then you can go. You can leave the potatoes’, said Małgosia while indicating with a fork on Zuzia’s plate what she should eat. Zuzia put all of it in her mouth at once and left the table. This is a fairly typical example of family meals I joined throughout my fieldwork: events filled with little dramas, expressions of love and discipline, curiosity and playfulness, conviviality and control. I often witnessed such verbal and non-­verbal negotiations at family tables. I explore these family dynamics in more detail in Chapter 3. During my fieldwork in Warsaw I conducted research with fifteen families. I conducted participant observation at their homes, and interviewed children, their mothers and fathers and on a few occasions also their grandparents. I was always very clear that I wanted to do research on/with families, but still everyone assumed that they should put me in touch with ­mothers – ­the assumption was that they know the most about feeding children. Indeed, that was usually the case. Nevertheless, it is striking that I gained access to more than twenty families, and except in one case, it always happened through a woman. Out of the fifteen families participating in my research, I talked to children in fourteen of them, both my research participants aged between 6 and 12 years old, and their younger siblings. I managed to talk to only four fathers. As their wives told me, they either would not have time for an interview, or did not know anything about feeding children and therefore could not contribute anything to my research. Feeding children is certainly considered to be women’s expertise, a virtue out of necessity perhaps. As Walczewska (2008) noticed, women in Poland have very limited power in most realms of their lives, but they do indeed have power in the kitchen, and cherish it dearly, sometimes not allowing others access to it. My conversations with parents were often interrupted: somebody constantly wanted something. Dogs ran around the apartment, wanted to play and needed to be scolded or walked. Children and their friends often wanted to join us and constantly interrupted with diverse questions or arguments. They climbed on their parents, or on me, played with my recorder, looked into my bag, and played with my phone. Their younger siblings needed to be breastfed. Unless the mother or the father was alone in the flat, those initial meetings and interviews never went easily and were always interrupted. Both their attention and mine was always divided, and that was just a glimpse into their everyday lives. This of course made conducting research more difficult, but at the same time provided an insight into their daily experiences, as well as making the interview situation more relaxed and casual. I worked more closely with three families, spending time together over the period of a few weeks or months. I call them Szymańscy, Podolscy and

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FEEDING ANXIETIES

­ arciniak – ­their names and surnames, as well as everyone else’s, have been M pseudonymized. I was introduced to 40-­year-­old Natalia Szymańska through a colleague of mine. We met for the first time in the cafe next to her w ­ ork – ­she worked in public administration. Later on, I joined her, her husband Tomek, who worked in the restaurant business and was also in his early forties, and their two daughters, 9-­year-­old Julia and 5-­year-­old Kasia, for many food occasions at their home. I also talked to the grandparents on both sides and to the nanny who took care of Julia and Kasia, and was considered by the family to be the third grandmother. I was put in touch with Paweł Marciniak, a 43-­year-­old musician, by a friend. Paweł was separated from his wife Paulina, also a musician in her early forties. They have two children: 11-­year-­old Adam and 5-­year-­old Basia. Both parents travelled a lot for work and they shared childcare. I met with them on separate occasions, in their two households, and also met Paweł’s girlfriend. I met 37-­year-­old Małgosia Podolska through a friend. We met to talk near her w ­ ork – s­ he worked in a non-­governmental organization. After that I arranged a meeting with her husband Mikołaj (aged 38), a photographer. Later, I came to their home for meals, and also talked and drew with their 7-­year-­old son Bartek and 4-­year-­old daughter Z ­ uzia – ­whom you have already met above. In these three families both mothers and fathers were involved in feeding children, which was a fairly atypical situation for families living in Warsaw, and in itself was a source of some tensions, which I explore more in Chapter 3. I met other families either through schools where I did research, or through acquaintances, and through a snowball technique. In general, my meetings with the families were not as frequent as I would have hoped. I was also hoping to be able to work with the same children at home and school, which in the end worked out only with three children, and to a very limited extent. When starting my research, I had a romanticized idea about what fieldwork and research with families might look like. But I was not able to spontaneously meet with them, walk children to school, or even spend as much time with them as I would have liked. I was not able to join them for shopping excursions. Both the parents and the children had very busy lives, and then someone got ill, travelled or something else came up, and our meetings were much fewer than I had hoped for and anticipated. Nevertheless, we established a sense of familiarity and intimacy, and even friendship. I joined the family foodways, learning about their daily, weekly and monthly rhythms, and power negotiations at the table. I joined them for lazy breakfasts during the weekends, when children were still in their pyjamas, and for dinners during the week. I helped with preparations or setting up the table where we all sat down. Parents set up the rules, which I followed but



INTRODUCTION 

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children challenged, as Bartek and Zuzia did in the ethnographic vignette above. They often got up from the table to bring something to show me. They have usually negotiated what food was put on their plates, and what they ate in the end. They shared their food with me, while I was trying at the same time to participate and observe. It seemed that everyone talked at the same time. These were joyful and loud research encounters. ‘How weird is that?’ – commented 11-­year-­old Adam Marciniak during our first meal together. And truly, it is a weird experience to come to strangers’ homes and join them for a meal. Particularly when research is about food, things might become a bit more tense and the research participants become more self-­conscious. Although, after the initial intimidation and embarrassment, the atmosphere is always relaxed. Young children are especially helpful in such a situation. Not long after I arrived at the Podolscy home, Zuzia was climbing on my knees, and Julia and Kasia were fighting about who would sit next to me at the dinner table in the Szymańscy home. I always emphasized that they should not prepare anything special and out of the ordinary to eat when I joined them, and I think all of the families accepted that. This relatively relaxed atmosphere during our initial meetings and their acceptance of inviting a researcher to their home was facilitated by the fact that we were more or less from the same social group: not only was I introduced by their friends or acquaintances, but also all three families were educated upper-­middle class. If there had been be a larger social difference between us, they might have felt more judged and behaved more out of the ordinary, which was my impression when I visited some of the other families.5 Social class is an important issue in the context of politics of parenting, social judgements and health, and certainly, albeit sometimes implicitly, informs people’s ideas about how others feed and eat, as well as how one does it oneself. Families participating in my research were diversified in terms of their economic, social, cultural and symbolic capitals (Bourdieu 1984). Some of them were single-­parent households, others were divorced, many were nuclear families. Most, though not all, of the parents had higher education, and they worked in diverse fields: from florists, cleaners, truckers and nurses, through accountants, teachers and small business owners, to academics and creative freelancers. They were all in their thirties or forties, lived in flats in different parts of Warsaw or in the outskirts of the city. They stretched throughout the vast spectrum of who constitutes, and who considers themselves, the middle class in Poland,6 although some of them might be identified as working class, and others as at the high ends of the upper middle class.7 And even though the Szymańscy, Marciniak and Podolscy families were stereotypically middle class, this book is not about middle-­ class anxiety per se. I am interested in their practices of feeding and eating

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as an expression of personal dispositions (Lahire 2011), rather than class affiliations (Bourdieu 1984; Warde 2015; Domański et al. 2015). The families participating in my research were diverse, but it was a fairly specific group of people who agreed to talk to me about feeding their children, allowed me to talk to their children, and invited me to their homes.

Going Back to School Besides working with families, I carried out participant observation in three public primary schools in Warsaw, spending from nine to twelve weeks in each of them.8 At the time of my fieldwork, primary schools in Warsaw had six grades attended by children between the ages of 6 and 12. They were all ethnically homogenous, with few children who were not white, Polish and nominally Catholic attending the schools. To some extent the experiences of doing research in different schools merged into one, although each school was a different social world where I established particular relationships and certain routines. The first school I researched was situated in a neighbourhood considered one of the most socio-­economically disadvantaged. It was one of the poorest districts of Warsaw. The school occupied two buildings located close to each other. Overall, there were 690 students. I gained access to that school through one of my interlocutors’ family members who used to work there. I arranged a meeting with the principal during which I explained my research. I was asked to supply an official document with my university’s logo, explaining my presence in the school, which the principal displayed in school and shared with parents. Compared to other places (e.g. Kennedy-­Macfoy 2013), once I was put in contact with a principal through someone they knew, gaining access to schools in Warsaw was a relatively easy process. The first day of my research felt as if it was my first day of school. I was not sure how to prepare. In the end I decided to take with me not only a notebook and a ­pen – a­ ttributes of an a­ nthropologist – ­but also a bottle of water, and I made myself a sandwich. I was not sure what to expect in terms of food. When I arrived on the appointed day I had to wait for a while for the principal who was supposed to show me around, whilst my tension and anxiety grew. A janitor had mistaken me for somebody’s child, who has already graduated, but still I could not decide if it was an advantage or a disadvantage that I looked so young. To put it simply: I was terrified. I felt that I had no idea what I was doing. It was loud. Children were running everywhere. There were all these routines and rules, movements around the school which I did not know about, and which with time I learnt to understand. When the principal arrived, she led me to the small room where the food supervisor was w ­ orking – ­and that is how I met Mr Bronisław.9 Mr Bronisław



INTRODUCTION 

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was a very opinionated man in his sixties. He had been working in this school for two years as a food supervisor.10 He had held different jobs before, but had no previous experience with food or cooking. He welcomed me in a very friendly way and was always extremely helpful: he invited me to participate in the official announcement of tender results for the food suppliers; he provided me with information about all the necessary laws and regulations related to organizing work in the school canteen; and he was always more than happy to chat with me. I became his protégé of sorts, which sometimes proved problematic when other people in school did not want to discuss him or the canteen freely with me. I spent most of my time in the canteen, usually observing cooks and children, the line in front, sometimes talking to teachers, and chatting with Mr Bronisław and the cooks. I also helped a couple of times in admitting children to the canteen. Moreover, I walked around the corridors during the breaks, mostly near the vending machine which was based on the ground floor. As the school was based in two buildings, I also spent some time in the other building where children from grades 0 to 3 were taught. There was a separate canteen there, where I observed what was going on, and talked to teachers, children, workers and the owner of the catering company which serviced that canteen, Mr Piotr. The second school was based in the neighbourhood nearby, but it was considered one of the best schools there. There were 409 students. Natalia Szymańska, one of my main fieldwork brokers and interlocutors, facilitated my access to that school. As with the first school above, I met with the principal to discuss my research and facilitate my entry to the school. When I arrived at that school to start research, the principal walked around the school with me and introduced me to all the teachers, who were already informed about my ­arrival – u ­ nlike in the other school, where for quite a long time people were not sure who I was, looked at me with suspicion and kept asking me if I was evaluating the school, or if I was an intern studying to be a teacher. She also showed me the canteen and introduced me to the main cook, Mrs Krystyna, who in this school also played the role of the food supervisor, and to Mrs Teresa who worked in the school shop. In this school I mostly divided my attention between the canteen and the school shop. Mrs Teresa, in her late sixties, proved to be an especially helpful and friendly interlocutor. We usually chatted whilst the lessons were going on, as during the break it was too busy. I think she was often bored, and found my presence an interesting distraction. Additionally, I helped her with her English ­assignments – ­she was taking night courses in order to be able to communicate with her son-­in-­law. Moreover, I walked around the corridors and also went into classrooms: I visited two classes during the Easter celebrations. I also spent a bit of time in Julia Szymańska’s classroom observing

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how children eat their drugie śniadanie (second breakfast) brought from home. Furthermore, I spent some time in the teachers’ room talking informally to teachers. The third school was situated in a central and relatively wealthy neighbourhood. I contacted the third school through my friend’s mother. So once again, I was introduced to the principal by someone familiar, which influenced the way in which I was welcomed. The school had 484 students. On my first day of school the principal introduced me to Mrs Hanna, the food supervisor, in her late thirties, and she introduced me to the cooks. Mrs Hanna was a nutritionist who had recently changed the school canteen into the catering business which she led. She had attended the school as a child and her mother was still one of the cooks. Two of her sons also went to the school at the time of my research. Here I spend most of my time in the canteen, often talking to Mrs Hanna, other cooks or the teachers. I also participated in serving the meals to the pre-­school children, which was organized in their classrooms. Additionally, I observed the life around the school shop and talked to Mrs Iwona who worked there. I also participated in the Health Food Picnic organized by the school one Saturday during the school year. Moreover, I conducted interviews with the owners of school shops in the two schools where I did research. I entered the lives of the schools with both a sense of familiarity and astonishment. My perspective had changed of course since I was a primary school student in Warsaw. I was no longer in that role, however, I was also clearly not in a teacher’s role, which was sometimes problematic. People reacted differently to my presence. All three principals were very friendly and helpful, and they introduced me to the food supervisors. Initially, some of the teachers looked at me with suspicion and were convinced that I was evaluating the school in some ­way – a­ common situation when doing research in schools (see Messerschmidt 1981; Hume and Mulcock 2004). After a while everyone got used to me and I became a part of school life. When I was ill for a long t­ ime – ­one of the results of doing research in schools and being surrounded by children’s ­germs – ­and returned after a long break to the first school, people were happy to see me and said they had been worried about where I was. I was often asked how my research was going, though the research itself was understood in different ways and some people could not quite grasp what I was doing. Children especially, though at first suspicious, very quickly got used to my presence, and many of them talked to me and played with me during breaks. Some of them offered me food. All of my interviews in schools, with principals, teachers, food supervisors, cooks and children, were casual conversations. I did not record them, only made field notes during and afterwards. I discuss the school food rhythms in more detail in Chapter 4.



INTRODUCTION 

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Though my experience in schools was rewarding, it was also very challenging. Talking to children and positioning myself among them was only one of the difficulties. There were many others I did not anticipate, for example being knocked out with balls flying along the corridors, the laughs and inappropriate comments, and overeating in the school canteens because of the large portions I was served. When spending time in the canteen, I was offered a meal. In some of the canteens, I was invited to eat for free and my attempts to pay for the meals were ignored; in others, I was invited to buy myself meals. I did not expect a full bowl of soup and an enormous second dish around noon, on each of the days I was in the ­canteen – ­despite my requests I always received ‘an adult portion’, that is bigger than the portions given to the children. The cooks sometimes joked that I had to give them back an empty plate, although this was not a joke for me. Of course, the generous portions were a gesture of fondness and acceptance on the part of cooks. I was invited to eat what they had prepared as part of a very significant social interaction with important cultural meanings. My role in that interaction was to eat everything and compliment their cooking. That is what a good guest does, and in this scenario I was a guest. So, of course I complied with what was expected from me. But there was a cost. I was not used to eating so much at lunchtime. My stomach bulged and I overate. I found myself assuming the role of a child: I picked at the food, I tried to hide the uneaten pieces of meat under the potatoes, and I strategically chose the best time to return my plate, so that nobody would see which one was mine, and that I had left some of the meal uneaten, for that would be unacceptable. Of course, I would not be sent back to my seat to finish eating, as the children were. Nevertheless, it would be considered rude if I did not eat everything which was so politely offered to me. After eating so much for lunch, I was not able to eat anything substantial for the rest of the day. My whole daily food pattern changed and needed to be adjusted to canteen foodways. At times, when I was not particularly hungry, when I had special dinner plans, or when something I did not like was being served, I strategically avoided the canteen at certain hours, in the same way that some children did. Another challenge was the noise at school, and particularly in the canteen. Around sixty people, the maximum that could fit into a canteen at one time, talked and tried to outshout each other, banged cutlery on the plates. Stacks of plates, large pots and bowls filled with forks and knives were moved around in the kitchen by the cooks. And this lasted for a few hours. The din often rose to almost unbearable levels, and then the teachers imposed order by banging on the table, banging a spoon on a plate ­or – ­in the case of PE ­teachers – w ­ histling. These methods were in themselves quite noisy. A secretary from one of the schools told me that she was astonished how I could

22

FEEDING ANXIETIES

sit in that noise for hours. In response I just nodded my head and smiled. I am still not quite sure how I did it.

Venturing Outside of Home and School The home and school settings were the most important parts of my fieldwork, and most ethnographic ones, but I also researched other spheres. When studying the state, I started with collecting and analysing documents, laws and regulations concerning children and food, some of which were supplied to me by Mr Bronisław. I visited different state institutions all over the city, and conducted interviews with officials from the Warsaw City Council, the National Food and Nutrition Institute, the Sanitary Inspectorate, and the Ministry of Education. The interviews were semi-­structured and recorded, and then transcribed. Talking to nutritionists and administrative officials was sometimes difficult, as I was often scolded for not approaching the issue of children and food in the established, ‘proper’ and expected way. That is, I was not a nutritionist or dietitian, and I was not interested in the nutritional aspect of feeding children, nor was I knowledgeable about it from their perspective. As a result, some of these meetings were not pleasant. Nonetheless, many others were very interesting, helpful and enjoyable. I met a lot of people who were passionate about their work. Another part of my fieldwork included studying the food industry. By the food industry, I understand food producers, food marketers and retailers. My focus was mainly on food companies producing sweets, snacks and other children’s food. And with regard to food retailers, my main focus was on school shops. I gathered and analysed information about the main companies producing food for children. I also conducted interviews with food producers from a few food companies, and with marketers working in marketing companies for various food industry clients. The interviews were semi-­structured, recorded and later transcribed. My interlocutors are ­pseudonymized – ­that is what they have asked ­for – ­and often the companies they work for are pseudonymized as well. Some of the offices I visited were the most guarded parts of my fieldwork, much more than schools. I often had to go through multiple gates, receive name badges, and talk to the guards before being able to talk to my interlocutors from the food industry. In a way, access to children seemed easier. I also conducted a series of expert interviews with nutritionists and organizers of food education programmes for children, or other leading food related initiatives directed at parents or children. This included interviewing people working in many non-­governmental organizations. These interviews were also semi-­structured, recorded and later transcribed. I worked more closely with one of the NGOs, Szkoła na Widelcu (School on the Fork). The



INTRODUCTION 

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founder of this foundation was a cook who proudly assumed the role of the Polish Jamie Oliver. He was a celebrity chef whose aim was to change the ways in which children in Poland eat. I participated as a volunteer in a number of cooking workshops for children organized by that foundation. I also participated in the out of town conference for school principals and food supervisors. During the twelve months of my fieldwork, I not only had to navigate between different field sites and people, but the boundaries between my personal life and my fieldwork were also often blurred. This is a specific feature of doing ‘anthropology at home’ (e.g. Narayan 1993; Peirano 1998). For example, there were various expectations from my family and friends which disturbed my fieldwork. I had some duties as a daughter and a granddaughter, and sometimes I had to choose which obligations I would fulfil: those related to being an anthropologist or those ensuing from family ties. When I ate an enormous meal in the school canteen, I was not able to share a meal with my partner later in the evening. When I was invited to eat with families participating in my research, I often missed meals with my own family, especially during weekends. Because of all the sweets I tried as part of my fieldwork, I had more dental problems than ever before. Food was always present in my research, as a topic and as a tool. Studying different field sites requires a certain split in personality and frequent role switching. I was often a guest in people’s homes, but I was also considered a friend. When in school I was perceived as a researcher, as an evaluator, as an intern, as a teacher, and sometimes as a spy. When doing expert interviews, I was usually given the role of the researcher, and sometimes clearly a researcher with a foreign, UK ­affiliation – ­which often facilitated my access. Overall, I did more than sixty interviews, not counting many more informal conversations and participation in a multitude of events across the city. My relational approach to feeding-­eating and feeding anxieties mirrors my relational ethnography. I described these different field sites I studied to demonstrate how and where I looked for the politics of children’s food, and where I encountered feeding anxieties. I attempted to remain open to all the voices and perspectives I encountered during my fieldwork, and not judge any of them. During conversations with parents, children’s food evoked care and love, but also struggle and worry; for school staff, it was also about care, as well as efficiency; state officials were concerned about children, but more often talked about health and regulations; while food producers and marketers talked more about target consumers, access points and benefits. All of these voices and perspectives fill out the pages of this book.

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RESEARCH WITH CHILDREN The book is also filled with children’s voices and perspectives. My main focus was on children between 6 and 12 years old. At the time of my research, this constituted the age range of primary school children in Poland. This is a group which is considerably understudied ( James, Jenks and Prout 1998: 177). Even though my research was to a large extent focused on adults, I assumed I could not study the politics of children’s food without including children in the research process. My approach builds on childhood studies in recognizing children as independent people, knowledgeable about their own and others’ lives (Mayall 1994; James and Prout 1997; James, Jenks and Prout 1998). While most methodological and ethical matters that arise in work with children are also present in work with adults, there are important differences related to gaining consent and access, reliable methods and power relations (Thomas and O’Kane 1998). Children are similar to adults, but possess different competencies ( James, Jenks and Prout 1998: 189). Therefore, the most effective way to carry out research with children is to combine traditional, ‘adult’ research methods, such as interview or participant observation, with the techniques more suitable for children, such as drawing. Such techniques, however, need critical reflection when used (Punch 2002: 332). The issue of consent is especially problematic during research with children (Alderson and Morrow 2011: 100–22; Maciejewska-­Mroczek and Reimann 2016). I was always put in contact with parents who made the decision on behalf of children, often without asking them, although I did witness some of them being asked. There was no other way for me to contact children; for ethical and practical reasons I had to access them through their parents (Hood, Kelley and Mayall 1996: 122–26). When meeting children for the first time, I explained to them again what I was doing and why we were meeting and asked whether they wanted to participate in my research. Not all of them agreed, or they were clearly asked to do it by their parents, and did not actually want to participate, in which case I did not continue the research. I also asked them if I could record our ­conversations – ­only one of them refused, which in my opinion was an interesting, empowered expression of his agency. I also talked to children, rather informally, in schools. In schools, I often talked to children in the hallways and rarely in the canteens, which had been my initial plan. In the corridors I was always approached by children, while in the canteen I approached them, and it felt as if I was invading their space and taking over the little free time they had, so I retreated (Punch 2002: 329). I stayed in the role of a distant observer; however, many children came up to me and talked to me. Ania and Wojtek, two 8-­year-­olds, followed me throughout the school one day, until they found the courage



INTRODUCTION 

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to approach me during one of the breaks. They were curious about who I was and what I was doing. We ended up chatting often, and they sometimes shared their food with me. Similarly, 11-­year-­old Gosia, a bit of a loner, developed a habit of chatting with me during breaks. Interviewing children required the adoption of a flexible approach, so I took into consideration the fact that they might get bored faster and that they may not be able to concentrate for as long as I can (e.g. Gallagher and Gallagher 2008). I tried to be creative and flexible in my approach to each interview. I treated children as interactional partners (Waksler 2012), although I had limited influence over the interview situation, as in the family setting this was usually decided by the parents or was negotiated by the parents and children before my visit. So, I talked to some children on their own, whilst during my conversations with others parents were present or nearby. If I was offered a choice, I explained that I preferred to talk to children without their parents present. This usually allowed them to talk more freely to me, discuss their transgressions or even take sweets and snacks out of hiding, and share them with me. I used drawings as a method of communicating with younger children and accessing their food worlds ( James 2007; Christensen and James 2008; Punch 2002; O’Kane 2008; O’Connell 2013). I asked them to draw their favourite and least favourite foods, the best and worst possible lunchbox they could ­imagine – ­this was inspired by Dryden et al. (2009), a typical meal, their associations with food, and to fill out a vignette of a shopping basket. I did not focus on drawings as objects in themselves; rather, I was interested in talking about what is drawn, and why. I always brought papers and crayons with me, which I later left as a gift. I usually included the younger siblings of my research participants in this encounter, as they wanted to be included and to draw as well. All the children were clearly familiar with the practice of drawing. They often brought more paper or other colours of crayons, needed for the specific elements of their drawings. The drawings below illustrate the ‘typical meals’ that Zuzia and Sylwia drew. They demonstrate the various ways in which the children presented food. We sat in their rooms or in the living rooms, usually on the floor, drawing and talking at the same time, sometimes for hours. The drawing and talking was usually interspersed with running, jumping, bringing different objects to show me, quarrels with younger siblings and admonitions from parents. We also usually ate snacks prepared by mothers. These were intensive, loud and extremely joyful research encounters. There was, however, a very important difference between doing research with younger and older children. The younger children, 6- to 10-­year-­olds, usually talked a lot, not necessarily about food, but also about their daily life in what sometimes seemed, from my adult perspective, a completely random

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FEEDING ANXIETIES

Figure 0.1  Drawing of a typical meal by 11-year-old Zuzia. Published with permission.

Figure 0.2  Drawing of a typical meal by 8-year-old Sylwia. Published with permission.

way. I found it interesting that during the interviews they often asked me many more questions than adults did, and more personal ones too. They asked where I lived, with whom I lived, how big my apartment was, how old I was, what I liked and disliked to eat, etc. They were keen on playing with



INTRODUCTION 

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the interview situation, and switching the roles. The older children, 11- and 12-­year-­olds, were more distant (Harden et al. 2000). They answered all of my questions, but some of them did not create any kind of narrative, which most adults and the younger children did in different ways. The older children were much more conscious of the interview situation than the younger ones, probably exacerbated by the fact that I talked to them rather than drew with them. When I asked about food, they often talked about what they have learned in school, about 5-­a-day, food pyramids and different nutrients. It was not always the case, but sometimes it did feel as if I was quizzing them, which was certainly not my intention. I dealt with that by repeatedly emphasizing that there were no right and wrong answers, and that I was simply interested in their opinions. Besides methodology, there are other potentially problematic issues regarding research with children related to ethics and positioning oneself as a researcher (Lewis and Lindsay 2000; Fraser et al. 2004; Alderson and Morrow 2011). One issue is the inequality between me as a researcher and my young interlocutors, derived from generational differences and power relations. This was especially difficult to deal with in schools, where the relations between children and adults were very strictly defined. There were, however, several ways to reduce those differences and facilitate research with children. For example, the fact that I look very young could have worked to my advantage, in the same way as my short stature. Throughout my fieldwork, when working with children I tried to become a ‘non-­official adult’ (Mayall 2008: 113) or take ‘the least adult role’ (Mandell 1991: 42). I tried not to exercise adult authority over children, and not to take on disciplinary or caring attitudes, especially in schools. I tried to assume a ‘friend-­like role’. I never broke their trust and did not tell their parents or teachers things told to me in confidence. Still, being like their friend was sometimes a difficult experience, when children laughed at me and teased me, for example about my small speech defect or my height (see Mauthner 1997; Connolly 2008; Corsaro and Molinari 2008). Moreover, it was sometimes challenging to deal with my own assumptions about childhood and children’s culture, especially since I was a child in Warsaw years ago. But the fact that I was a child myself does not mean that I can take children’s experiences and perspectives for granted (Fine and Sandstrom 1988: 35). This experience taught me that doing research with children makes it possible not only to learn more about their social worlds, but also to better understand the worlds of adults. Children indeed are important and knowledgeable actors of social life.

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OUTLINE The rest of the book takes the reader on a journey through different sources, sites and scenes of feeding anxieties. Each chapter focuses on a different field and social ­actors – ­the family, the school, the state and the food ­industry – t­ he contradictions and tensions of each field, their own feeding anxieties and connections between them. This way of organizing the book should make it easier for readers interested in one specific realm of the politics of children’s food, although the chapters are intimately connected with each other. Together they paint a more comprehensive picture of feeding anxieties than each chapter alone could do, as the power struggles and negotiations between these different actors constitute the politics of children’s food. Chapter 1 begins the careful analysis of feeding anxieties by pointing to the connections and tensions between citizenship and consumerism. By analysing the post-­socialist and neoliberal changes that took place in Poland since 1980s, I demonstrate how the shifting ideas about citizenship and consumerism, and expectations put on consumers and citizens, created the politics of children’s food. I study what kinds of meanings have been attached to the changing conceptions of childhood, motherhood, parenting and food in Poland, and how these shape people’s everyday lives. I delve into what constitutes ‘good’ food and feeding, and what informs these normative and moralized assumptions. Chapter 2 studies the food industry and the processes of making and becoming young consumers. It unveils how the food industry, starting in the 1990s, created the family as a new consumption unit and invented children’s food, and how it affects multiple feeding-­eating relationships. The chapter analyses different feeding anxieties that the food industry experiences, and how it adds to and shapes the anxieties about children’s food of other actors, be it families or the state. By focusing on shopping practices, particularly in school shops, the chapter discusses children’s and parents’ engagement with consumer cultures, and the diverse tensions and negotiations that stem from that. In Chapter 3 the focus moves to the family. The chapter studies different expectations about and ideals of family meals, and the realities of such encounters. It discusses how feeding and eating is organized, contested, celebrated and negotiated in the daily lives of parents and children in Warsaw. The chapter analyses the intergenerational power struggles, verbal and non-­verbal negotiations and tensions between and among parents, children and grandparents. It focuses on the gendered and intergenerational physical, mental and emotional foodwork within the domestic sphere, and points to the intermingled relations of care, love, control and discipline that



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characterize family food experiences. It analyses how families in Warsaw deal with and reproduce feeding anxieties. Chapter 4 shifts the focus from home and family to schools. It delves into multiple anxieties around school food which entangle the local and national state institutions and officials, parents and children, non-­governmental workers, and school staff. The chapter unveils the food rhythms of schools in Warsaw, to discuss how adults at home and school negotiate how to feed children through lunchboxes with drugie śniadanie brought from home, and meals served in school canteens. It also demonstrates how children adapt to, affirm, resist and negotiate the many attempts at feeding them with their own eating and non-­eating practices, and how for them food in schools is mainly about sociality with their peers. By ethnographically focusing on home and school, these two chapters show how intense the politics of children’s food gets and how it affects people’s lives on a daily basis. Chapter 5 is about the state’s anxieties with regard to children’s food, their varied sources, including international guidelines and expectations, and the multiple attempts at dealing with them. The chapter studies the dietary politics of nutritional norms and food education programmes, and why drawing food pyramids is a contested issue. It shows why and how the state attempts to raise healthy citizens, who are supposed to be educated consumers making ‘proper’ individual choices, and what that means for children, parents and school staff. The conclusion revisits the main themes of the book and makes connections between the chapters. It unveils the politics of children’s food, the logic of feeding anxieties and their multiple sources. It reflects on how is it that something as social as food becomes so alienating when it takes the form of feeding anxieties. In this book, I try to give as much space as I can to my interlocutors: children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, teachers, principals, cooks, school food supervisors, school shop sellers and owners, food marketers and producers, state officials and civil servants, and nongovernmental workers. It is their time, their experiences and emotions, their devotion and their willingness to share all of that with me that created this book. They accompanied me on this journey over the years, even long after I actually met them for the first time.

NOTES Some of the analysis featured in this chapter was initially introduced in my previously published work (Boni 2018a), but it has been substantially reworked and developed.  1. I was conducting interviews about the intergenerational changes in food practices in

30

 2.

 3.  4.  5.  6.  7.

 8.

 9.

10.

FEEDING ANXIETIES

post-­socialist Poland for my MA thesis, defended later that year in the Department of Sociology, University of Warsaw. There is a lot of anxiety and debate around breastfeeding and feeding infants. A rich body of research uncovers the changing cultural and social norms that guide the politics of breastfeeding (see e.g. Zdrojewska-­Żywiecka 2012; Faircloth 2013; Cassidy and El Tom 2015; Van Esterik and O’Connor 2017). But this book focuses on older children, aged between 6 and 12 years old. I build here on practice theory; see Bourdieu (1977, 1990); de Certeau (1984); ­Ortner (1984, 2006); Reckwitz (2002); Lahire (2011); Warde (2015). Although the situation might be different when considering people fed through tubes for instance (see e.g. Mol 2011; Rajtar 2017). This is not to say that such research could not, or should not be conducted; on the contrary, see e.g. Bowen, Brenton and Elliott 2019. The class consciousness is limited in Poland, though, therefore I use it rather as an etic concept (see Gdula and Sadura 2012). The working class includes blue-­collar workers and most of the farm owners, whereas the upper class consists mainly of wealthy businessmen. The middle class is hugely diversified which often makes it hard to define, so it is often characterized as a social category which is still in the process of formation in Poland after the historical turbulences of two world wars, the socialist system and the post-­socialist transformations. From the occupational perspective, it consists of doctors, lawyers, marketing experts, journalists, artists, teachers, and people working in administrative roles etc. (Domański et al. 2007). There are three types of schools in Poland: public, which are free of charge; private which are usually very expensive; and schools which are owned by an educational trust and in terms of tuition expenses can be placed in between. Usually, children from one area would go to the nearest public school, but this system is often challenged and worked around. In 2014, there were 311 primary schools in Warsaw, 217 of which were public schools (Biuro Edukacji, 2014a, 2014b). The private schools are usually much smaller. I decided to focus only on public schools; however, some of the children I interviewed attended private schools, so I did also study them indirectly. In Poland, there is a specific way of addressing people more formally but when you are already familiar with them, which includes combining the prefix Mr/Mrs with their first name. That is how I addressed my interlocutors in schools and state institutions, and how I was addressed by them. Another term used for this position is intendentka, used in the feminine form since mostly women hold these positions. The food supervisor is responsible for planning the meals in school, organizing the tenders for suppliers, organizing the deliveries, accepting payments for the meals and overseeing the cooks and the canteen. The term I use, food supervisor, is not a direct translation of the Polish term kierownik żywienia. The latter relates to the socialist terminology used when these positions were first created. Elisabeth Dunn has discussed at length the fascinating differences and the juxtaposition between kierownik and manager introduced in Poland in the 1990s, in relation to constructing new persons and new sort of employees under capitalism (2004: 69–75). I have decided to use the term which avoids this symbolic juxtaposition, and which sounds more familiar to the English-­speaking audience.

CHAPTE R 1

EAT IN CONTEXT On Post-Socialist Transformations, Mothering and Making Citizen-Consumers with Food



one soup can change the fate of the world!’ shouted an actress ‘Preparing in a one-­person play entitled Matka-Polka Terrorystka (Polish Mother

Terrorist). The play was a hyperbolic representation of the struggles related to being a mother in Poland. I was only a few weeks into my fieldwork when I attended the play in Warsaw on a cold autumn evening. But I quickly realized that it resonated well with what mothers were telling me about their worries and anxieties related to feeding their children. ‘If I don’t prepare organic soup for my child, and he becomes a murderer instead of a genius, whose fault would it be?’ – the heroine continued. Can one soup, or lack thereof, really change the fate of the world? The audience reacted with a familiar laughter to these statements. Although clearly an exaggeration, the play illustrated well what an important role food is considered to have in shaping children’s characters and their futures, and what an essential role mothers play in this process. What does it feel like to live with the weight of the world on your shoulders, and on a daily basis to have to deal with the responsibility of shaping either the future geniuses or murderers with your feeding practices? The heroine from the play becomes so frustrated and so tired of the expectations and demands placed on her, without receiving any kind of support or help, that she decides to resort to bombs. Hence the title. Are mothers living in Warsaw really so frustrated and desperate? How do their daily experiences correspond to this evocative cultural representation of them? Why is food at the core of these anxieties? These questions remained with me throughout my fieldwork.

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Feeding anxieties arise from different kinds of tensions and power struggles: tensions that emerge between children and mothers, or parents and schools, but also between families, the state and the food market. This chapter delves into the changing connections and disconnections between citizenship and consumerism, and their role in shaping feeding anxieties. It offers more of a historical analysis of the politics of children’s food to provide the context for the ethnography that unfolds in the following chapters. Elspeth Probyn (1998) argued that family is the privatized bedrock of citizenship, and pointed out the connections that food forges between the family, the nation and the citizenship (see also Avieli 2018; Prieto Piastro 2021). She claimed that ‘food and eating may serve to embody and render fleshy the neat abstraction of the citizen’ (Probyn 1998: 161). People relate to the state and the public sphere through their private consumption, and it is difficult to separate the processes of becoming and being citizens and consumers (e.g. Fontenelle and Pozzebon 2018). Julie Guthman and Melanie DuPuis (2006) demonstrated that in neoliberal societies there is in fact a shift from being a citizen to being a consumer, which encourages (over)eating, on the one hand, and expects discipline and self-­control on the other hand. Citizens are political subjects of the state, willing to serve the ‘common good’ and embody the collective responsibility for the ‘future good’. Consumers strive to find individual pleasure. Consumers are encouraged by the market and by the state institutions to exercise their ability to choose. Guthman and DuPuis (2006) argued that obesity is a way of embodying these contradictions embedded in contemporary global capitalism by temporarily resolving them not only in the sphere of surplus distribution, but also in the body. Consumers are supposed to have insatiate appetites, while citizens need, as Annemarie Mol put it, to ‘prevail over residual bodily desires to consume’ (2009: 274). The citizen-­consumer is supposed to make responsible choices with regard to social and ecological commons while participating in the consumer culture, which forces people to deal with and embody multiple contradictions, both as feeders and as eaters. The concept of citizen-­consumer is usually employed to understand adults’ relationships with consumer cultures, and their responsibilities for the ‘common good’. Children have been so far less of a focus of these academic debates.1 And yet they are certainly the focus of both the state and the market. As Daniel Cook (2009a, 2009b) pointed out, children are not separated from consumer culture, but rather are its active participants and creators. In the same way, they are citizens. But many social actors, including the state institutions, perceive children as citizens-­in-­the-­making and consumers-­to-­be, as still in the process of formation and more susceptible to influence and guidance than adults might be, and therefore a focus of many citizen-­consumer making projects. These are primarily political projects at



POST-SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATIONS, MOTHERING AND MAKING CITIZEN-CONSUMERS 

33

their core. These citizen-­consumer making projects are based on different ideas of what a ‘proper citizen’ and a ‘proper consumer’ does. And food is often used as a tool in pedagogy of ­citizenship – ­as Charlotte Biltekoff (2013) poignantly ­noticed – ­and in the pedagogy of consumerism. Citizen-­consumer making projects that utilize food are based on particular ideas about what constitutes a ‘good’ eater. And ideas about ‘proper’ food, feeding and eating are based on different registers of valuing food, as Frank Heuts and Annemarie Mol (2013) called it. When attaching value to a particular food, a dish or a practice of eating, people and institutions relate to particular perspectives on whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’; they register the value of this food or food occasion in a specific way. This happens on a daily basis and to a large extent might be habitual, rather than reflexive. In Poland, some of the registers of valuing food fall along the lines of health and pleasure, tradition and modernity, local and global, Polish and foreign, convenience and taste, organic and mass produced, conviviality and sustenance (see e.g. Kopczyńska 2017; Kopczyńska and Zielińska 2016; Bachórz and Parasecoli 2021). They relate to different aspects of food and are not necessarily always dichotomous. Through their daily food practices, people establish particular hierarchies of food values; for some health becomes most important, while for others convenience is valued more. This fluctuates, changes depending on the context and situation. And it usually changes when feeding children. Health and nutrition have become the dominating values attached to children’s food. Nonetheless, this is only one of the multiple ways of valuing food; there are many others. The tensions between these different registers of valuing food, which occur within families between adults and children, as well as between families, schools, the state and the food industry, are at the core of many feeding anxieties. Charlotte Biltekoff (2013) and Melanie DuPuis (2015) both critically engaged with the hierarchies of food values and dominating ideas about ‘proper’ food in the US. They demonstrated how such conceptions were created in different moments in time, and guided by the very specific politics of these historical periods, and how particular groups of people shaped how others should eat. These dietary politics have been enmeshed with race, ethnicity, gender and class politics and inequalities, as it has been usually the upper middle white classes dominating the perspectives on ‘proper’ food, and dictating how and what others should eat. There is one more dimension worth exploring: age. Adults dictate what children are supposed to eat. Various citizen-­consumer making projects are fuelled by different conceptions of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food, and embedded in the politics of children’s food, which has seen intense change in Poland. This chapter investigates these tensions by analysing the changing conceptions of citizenship and consumerism, motherhood, childhood and food,

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in order to better understand the politics of children’s food and the rise of feeding anxieties in Poland. The chapter analyses how the global processes connected to changing family relations, the commercialization of childhood and new parenting models, the domination of healthism in regards to food, and the legacies of the socialist past and post-­socialist transformations have unfolded in Warsaw.

FEEDING AND EATING IN THE ECONOMY OF SHORTAGE In order to better understand the situation today, it is worth going back to the Polish People’s Republic. Although a lot of literature on the socialist period, and in fact the post-­socialist period as well, might not be immediately identifiable as pertaining to the studies of food, motherhood or childhood, I read this material anew as very rich in the political and cultural explorations of those issues. It is important to recognize that the Polish People’s Republic was not a homogenous period, but one filled with tensions, contradictions and ambiguities. It lasted more than forty years, from 1944 to 1989, and during that time, a number of important changes occurred, concerning the freedom of speech and expression, as well as the methods of food production, the modernization of preparation and storage of food, and the development of nutrition science. In individual and collective memories and popular representations, this period is often connected to the experiences of queuing, food shortage and rationing, and to adapting various strategies based on informal exchange networks (Wedel 1986; Kurczewski 2004; Mazurek 2010; Stańczak-­Wiślicz 2014). Shopping required various skills because the availability of and access to goods were unpredictable and uncertain. Food was procured (zdobywane) and not simply bought. People implemented diverse strategies to reach and accumulate necessary goods, which were often embedded in the black market economy and facilitated by informal networks or family connections with the countryside. Food that was outside the control of the state, produced on the family plots for example, was especially perceived as ‘pure’, ‘ours’ and essentially good (Haukanes and Pine 2003: 108). It was often an unattainable dream for those living in Warsaw. People had to be very inventive in their shopping and cooking practices. Poland was a country of ersatz: the unavailable products were substituted with creative replacements, both by producers and consumers. Coffee was made from chicory, chocolate was substituted with the produkt czekoladopodobny (chocolate-­like product), and Polo-Cockta, which was a cheap substitute for Coca-Cola sold in Poland from the 1970s, was invented. I often



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heard from my interlocutors how difficult it used to be to organize feeding and eating, that it was always a struggle due to the uncertainty in procuring food. Seventy-­five-­year-­old Hanna, Tomek’s mother and Julia and Kasia’s grandmother, told me: In my generation it was important that children were not hungry, that they had a soup or could eat something sweet. Now they are much more rational about feeding children. First of all, they can afford it. And second, they can actually plan things. For us that was not possible, there was no time for planning, and no such option.

Hanna points out what she considers a modern rationality connected to feeding children, but it seems that it has become a much more emotional process as well. She recognizes that there was much more uncertainty with regard to feeding children in the past; it was not something a mother carefully planned, as many do today. Simultaneously, many of my interlocutors claimed that food was better in the past, that it was not filled with artificial additives and was more natural in comparison to contemporary food. Joanna talked about this a lot. She was in her late thirties, an accountant, and a mother of two. We met in her flat near one of the schools where I did research and where Joanna’s daughter, 6-­year-­old Marta, went. We sat in the living room, shared tea and chatted for a few hours. She told me: There were fewer chemicals in food, you knew where these products were coming from. And they were appreciated more, both the food products and the food celebrations. Now everything is available all year round, there is no difference between a Monday, a Sunday and a Christmas Eve. And there used to be a difference!

As Joanna notices, the shortages in food led to a more celebratory character of special food products and special food occasions, an approach she recognizes as missing in the contemporary context of food abundance. The narratives that food used to be better in quality and more natural are quite common (e.g. Caldwell 2007; Mincyte 2012; Mroczkowska 2019). Such a perspective, however, romanticizes the uncertainty about and difficult access to food during the socialist period. According to the ideal propaganda vision, the state authorities promoted a unified model of consumption of a classless society (Brzostek 2010). In reality, however, people affiliated with the government or the Party had easier access to a greater range of goods. Also, people working in trade (handel) were lucky due to their easier access to goods. Food, as everything else, was politicized. In fact, many protests and riots against the government, such as those which happened at the beginning of the 1970s in Łódź, for instance, were directly caused by food scarcity or exorbitant prices. Food was in many

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ways the medium through which the socialist ideology was implemented; and by controlling food the state held the regulatory power over its citizens. It was mostly manifested in ­production – a­ s this was the main focus of the socialist ­state – b ­ ut consequently also in consumption.2 In the state ideological discourses family and the domestic domain were associated with corruption, nonconformity and anti-­social individualism. Frances Pine recognized such an approach as ‘amoral familism’ (2007: 186). Many efforts were made to move eating and cooking practices from the domestic to the public sphere, which was easier to control. Making feeding and eating public enabled the state to control that intimate sphere, and, in so doing, position itself as a parental figure. This was manifested for example in how houses were constructed. The kitchen space was significantly reduced, and it was often built without windows (Malicka 1975: 190). Many workers’ families did not have their own kitchens at all. Such an approach was supposed to constrain ‘kitchen talk’ which, it was presumed, facilitated a sense of privacy and encouraged free expression (Ries 1997: 10–12). The state institutions attempted to control food and cooking as a way of cultivating particular socialist values, such as community and equality, but also of monitoring and regulating citizens, and diminishing the role of the family. This trend was linked to and influenced by a new branch of science: collective feeding (zbiorowe żywienie) (Brzostek 2010: 196–205; see also Caldwell 2009: 1–28). The ‘modern’ attitude to feeding and eating was exemplified in nutrition science which had been developing since the 1950s (see Stańczak-­Wiślicz 2020). Separate nutritional guidelines were created for different groups: women, pregnant and lactating women, blue- and white-­ collar male workers, and children. The newly created nutritional guidelines were carefully implemented in canteens: adults were fed in work canteens and children in school canteens. Not only was it supposed to provide them with the nutritional elements they needed; the goal was also to bind workers to their workplace and raise young socialist citizens in schools. The state not only supplied people with food (or when it failed at that, it distributed carefully prepared food rations), it also literally positioned itself in a parental-­ like role as feeding its nation. Despite the government’s attempts, in everyday life collective feeding did not become popular. What work and school canteens offered was in fact quite limited and often perceived as bad by consumers. Moreover, in society at large, eating was strongly associated with the domestic sphere, where women were supposed to prepare meals for their families (Szpakowska 2008: 327; Brzostek 2010: 214–18; see also Haukanes 2007). There was a paradox and a contradiction embedded in the socialist-­era gender norms (Gal and Kligman 2000). On the one hand, in the name of emancipation and egalitarianism, the state promoted the de-­gendering of housework, and any kind of



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work for that matter. On the other hand, there was a reinforcement of traditional gender roles, such as mothering. Although the model of the egalitarian ­family – i­ n which women share housework with men, and boys and girls are socialized to help with domestic tasks in the same ­way – ­was promoted by state propaganda, and though men did cook occasionally as women were often at work, feeding the family remained the responsibility of women. Nevertheless, the state claimed it took care of its citizens by feeding them properly. This is well illustrated with the example of food shortages and food rations. Nutritionists from the National Food and Nutrition Institute, whom I interviewed, told me how well the food rations were calculated in the 1980s, especially for children. While the results of food shortages are still visible and have had an effect on people’s health in other formerly socialist countries in Central-Eastern Europe, in ­Poland – ­I was ­told – ­nutritionists contained this crisis and its long-­term health consequences, because the state has taken care of its future citizens. The food r­ ations – ­that have many negative connotations in individual and collective memories, and remain as a symbol of the Polish People’s Republic’s economy of ­shortage – ­are also framed as the state’s attempt to care for its citizens, and particularly for the health of children.

IN SEARCH OF ‘NORMALITY’ As Zuzsa Gille (2010) argued, post-­socialism is a certain global condition, a historical moment which characterizes not only formerly socialist countries, but broader international relations. The post-­socialist transformations in Poland started in fact in the 1970s with the initial alleviation of private trade initiatives and developing consumer cultures. The transformation processes, which intensified at the end of the 1980s, involved changes in the economy, the political system, governance, freedom of speech and gathering, media, social policies, and memberships in international alliances.3 The 1990s have not only witnessed a change from the socialist state planned markets to the capitalist market economy and neoliberal policies. Poland has also been a part of the broader fluctuations taking place all over the world, which are often characterized by the concepts of globalization and post-­modernity. The changes that have been occurring in many Global North societies since the 1970s and 1­ 980s – c­ hanges in family lives, parenting styles and consumer ­cultures – ­have also been happening in Poland, but at a much faster and more intense pace. Consumption patterns and everyday practices changed when the socialist system, with a centrally planned economy, transformed into a capitalist system, with deregulated markets. The symbolic empty shelves were

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filled with thousands of goods and surrounded by fierce marketing, in the place of socialist propaganda campaigns. State-­owned companies were privatized and many Western companies entered Poland. But, as Yuson Jung demonstrates through her ethnographic study of the relationships between citizen-­consumers, the market and the state in Bulgaria, ‘consumer society was not automatically created from increased access to material abundance after living through socialism’s deficit economy’ (2019: 7). It took time and work, which I explore more in Chapter 2. Poles have experienced a change from officially promoted self-­sacrifice and collectivism to the promotion of individualism and self-­realization through consumption (Klein, Jung and Caldwell 2014: 10). Tomek reflected on the changes which have happened in Poland by telling me ‘The choice was limited then. It was really difficult to procure different products. The diet wasn’t ­diversified – ­we ate the same all the time. But also, it was easier, you didn’t have to choose, worry or restrict yourself, there was less temptation’. As Tomek noticed, people used to have very limited choices about what they ate and fed their children, because supply and access to food was very limited and intermittent. Too little choice is bad, but too much ­choice – w ­ hich has happened since the ­1990s – d ­ oes not seem to be good either. Moreover, the responsibility for making these choices has completely shifted from the state to individual citizen-­consumers (see Jung 2019). Many of my interlocutors working in the food industry told me that in the 1990s Poles bought absolutely everything that was sold as a product from the West. Here is how Marcin, working in market research, described this: In the 1990s, Western food producers, whose food is normally sold to children, in Poland they advertised their food products to adults. People were hungry for new products, and it was possible to sell anything to them. So they started with adults, because it was so easy. And when they have saturated that sphere, they started looking for new ­niches … ­the focus on children came later.

‘Western’ affiliation for a long time identified what was considered good, modern and proper. This attitude is still present today. During one of my interviews I found out that a food company was considering purchasing one of their ingredients abroad, just so that the product could be advertised as coming ‘from the West’, which would raise interest in this product and increase the company’s sales and revenues. The consumption of Western goods symbolized the fulfilment of aspirations and the return to ‘normality’ (see e.g. Fehervary 2002; Rausing 2002; Drazin 2002). This was also reflected in food.4 Polish dishes and food habits were, at that time, perceived as backwards and shameful, while Western products were appropriated and celebrated. The eagerness to eat ‘normally’, to be ‘Western’ and ‘modern’ is perhaps best symbolized by the opening of the first McDonald’s restaurant in



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Warsaw in June 1992 (see also Czeglédy 2002; Caldwell 2004). Not only was the priest present to bless the new venture, but also representatives from politics (Minister of Labour and Social Policies Jacek Kuroń), culture (famous writer Agnieszka Osiecka) and sport (coach Kazimierz Górski). The opening of the first McDonald’s was an extremely important socio-­cultural event. Poland has gone through what Barry Popkin (1993) termed nutrition transition. This is connected to economic development, urbanization, and post-­modern lifestyle changes, and characterized by a move towards ‘Western’ diets rich in fats, sugars, meat and highly processed foods. Although meat has always been highly valued in Polish culture, its increased availability and cheap price has made it the major component of Polish diets. Moreover, convenience and fast foods have become more available and popular (e.g. Domański et al. 2015). The processes of ‘becoming modern’ and becoming a fully-­fledged part of the capitalist, global world have been filled with tensions and ambivalences. These tensions are caused by societal changes, such as privatization processes or revisions of the welfare systems, and protests against them (e.g. Pine 1996; Leyk and Wawrzyniak 2020), as well as by the EU negotiations and the processes of joining the European Union, which happened in 2004.5 Not only were there different ideas of what ‘normality’ might mean, but these were also not attainable for all. For families with lower socio-­economic status, who often lost employment and support due to the economic and structural fluctuations in Poland, the new expectations were often impossible to fulfil. Meanwhile, the emerging middle class was more able and willing to accept and embody the discourse of individualism and the increasing emphasis on personal growth and career. From the early 1990s the difficulty was not in figuring out how to procure food or how to prepare ‘something from nothing’, but rather how to manage to feed the family with limited financial resources, or how to deal with the temptations and newly fashioned aspirations, and ever-­increasing expectations regarding lifestyles and conspicuous consumption. After the initial enthusiasm, many people were quickly disillusioned once they experienced the reality that came with the promise of capitalism (Palska 2000; Dunn 2004; also Jung 2019). Parents could no longer count on the state’s control over the market, its care and support, however limited and intermittent it had actually been in the past; they had become individually responsible for their own and their children’s choices. People were expected to become and raise new kinds of citizens and new kinds of consumers, with completely new skills, related for instance to making ‘educated’ consumer ­choices – ­something I explore more in Chapter 5.

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MOTHERING AND FEEDING IN POLAND During socialism women were defined in two ways in public discourse: as ­workers – ­who supplemented the family income and supported the development of the country; and as m ­ others – w ­ ho produced respectable citizens for the state (Marody and Giza-­Poleszczuk 2000: 156). In theory, the state institutions supported women in combining those two roles by introducing maternity leave, developing pro-­natal policies and opening nurseries and kindergartens. In fact, the state was not as focused on welfare as it claimed, and it has mythologized its generosity (Nash 2003: 211). During socialism, Western capitalism promised not only ‘normal’ life in terms of consumer cultures, which in this case meant the availability and diversity of products, but also with regard to family life and gender roles. As Frances Pine (1994) demonstrated, women in Poland idealized the lives of women in the West, not realizing that under capitalism women also had to deal with many daily oppressions and structural disadvantages. In the 1990s many women in Poland were forced to retreat from the workforce and focus only on the family and domestic sphere of life, which was one of the government’s ways of dealing with growing unemployment (Pine 2002).6 This was an important reason for women’s disappointment with the new capitalist economy. During post-­socialist transformations there was a continuity in disparities between symbolic ideals and actual gender roles, just as there were varying differences between the official ideological discourses and daily practices. With the cuts to the welfare system, many pro-­natal policies were withdrawn. Even if for many they were not sufficient during the Polish People’s Republic in the first place, they almost completely disappeared during the post-­socialist transformation (see Gal and Kligman 2000). Raising (and feeding) children was still the sole responsibility of the mother. The fact that families had to look out for themselves and that mothers had to take care of their children was nothing new, as they had already been doing this throughout the socialist era. Nevertheless, the context has changed. There was a shift in responsibilities from ‘our state’ to ‘your family’, from the emphasis on communal to individual/family units (Nash 2003: 219). As Renata Hryciuk and Elżbieta Korolczuk noticed, a process of privatization of care and parenthood occurred in Poland (2015: 13). The state withdrew from feeding its nation. Feeding became the individual responsibility of the mother, who in theory had an unlimited access to and free choice of food, but in reality, often had many, especially financial, constraints. The expectations with regard to motherhood and parenting have been changing since the 1990s as the entire model of modern personhood has changed in Poland. Elizabeth Dunn (2004) explained how new conceptions of workers, and with that the conceptions of being new kinds of people,



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have been created in post-­socialist Poland, in the same way that the ideas about raising children have changed. Sylwia Urbańska (2012) pointed out that a parent from the 1970s would be very surprised when reading current magazines devoted to raising children. Increasing emphasis has been placed on children’s psychological wellbeing in contrast to an earlier focus on their physical and material needs. During socialism, politeness and diligence were the desired qualities of children, whereas since the 1990s, developing children’s creativity and individuality has become important. In the socialist period the discourse was focused on the ethical upbringing of a social child and promoted an egalitarian vision of a person. Since the 1990s, the medico-­ therapeutic discourse promoting individualistic models of raising children has dominated. Raising children has become a project that needs to be managed by a mother, and she is to be blamed for all the failures of her child (Urbańska 2012: 65). Simultaneously, a mother’s knowledge about her children has been undermined by expert advice. Dunn (2004) showed how the US-­based baby food company ­Gerber – ­which in the process of privatization acquired the Polish company Alima producing fruit and vegetable p ­ reserves – ­has promoted new ways of feeding children: Part of Gerber’s strategy for appropriating the qualities of knowledge and safety is to assert explicitly that mothers who rely on their own judgement, production methods, and labour may engender their children’s lives. This approach reverses the whole meaning of feeding in Polish culture. Rather than the mother’s work of selecting, cooking, grinding, and feeding baby food to her infant being an expression of maternal love and nurture, it is presented as a form of ignorance that may poison the child. (Dunn 2004: 103)

The entry of Gerber and other Western products into Poland influenced the definitions of motherhood and food which is good for babies, and subsequently changed mothers’ views on themselves and feeding their children (see also Bentley 2014). This is a good example of how feeding anxieties are produced. Undermining mothers’ knowledge and trust, and even suggesting that with their own feeding practices they might be endangering their children’s wellbeing, is at the root of feeding anxieties. And it provides profits for the food industry. Women have been advised on how to feed their children not only by food producers and marketers, but also by an increasing number of expert parenting books, TV programmes and magazines. Mothers were also advised by nutritionists and other experts during socialism. But the emerging medicalized discourse of the 1970s was less significant than the traditional knowledge about raising and feeding children passed between generations, whereas in the 1990s the number of those recommendations and their influences have

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changed significantly (Urbańska 2012: 53). The model of intensive parenting has emerged in Poland (Hays 1996). This leads to what Frank Furedi (2002) called paranoid parenting. Mothers have been bombarded with a multitude of ideas on how to raise and feed their children, while their own knowledge and intuition have been questioned, which exacerbates their anxiety, and sometimes even paranoia, about raising children. Moreover, as Nikolas Rose (2001) noticed, in neoliberal societies we tend to see the merging of political directives and personal aspirations to be well. Mothers have been expected by the state and the public to take on themselves the whole responsibility for feeding and raising their children ‘properly’, ­and – ­as my research s­ hows – t­ hey wanted to do it. They wanted to do it, however, due to the cultural ideas about and social pressures regarding mothering and feeding in Poland. The expectations with regard to women and mothers have been affected not only by the economy of shortage and socialist ideology, and later by the post-­socialist and neoliberal transformations and EU accession, but also by older traditions rooted in Catholicism, which both preceded and survived the socialist period. Titkov (1995) introduced the concept of ‘managerial matriarchy’ to refer to many responsibilities that women in Poland have taken on themselves, which relates to their need to be needed and committed to fulfilling their duties. In Poland, the notion of womanhood, inextricably connected with motherhood, is influenced by the idea of Matka-Polka (Polish Mother) who devotes herself to and sacrifices everything for the family and the country. The cultural concept of Matka-Polka has been very influential for the representations and practices of femininity in Poland (Budrowska 2000; Hryciuk and Korolczuk 2012; Urbańska 2015). It is connected to Catholicism, especially the Virgin Mary, and the symbolic link between the family and the nation, which was supposed to be sustained by women. Polish women were expected to devote their lives to patriotic acts: raising children, sustaining Polish culture during the Partition period, and supporting soldiers. They were supposed to sacrifice themselves for the country, family and the nation. This concept was strengthened during the nineteenth century, and persistent during both world wars. During the Polish People’s Republic, the idea of Matka-Polka was further reinforced, but directed towards building a strong socialist country. Women were supposed to contribute to the workforce, as well as raise socialist citizens who support the Party, are diligent and polite, and believe in socialist ideals. Today, although it seems that this concept has become less influential, for many women sacrifice and devotion still seem to be the only way of being a part of the community and the nation. This dedication is usually directed towards family and home, and indeed food and feeding. And it remains a surprisingly strong cultural role that women are expected to fulfil (Urbańska



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2015), as if their main focus, and the main part of their identity, had to do with feeding their families and children. Despite new trends in family life, such as fathers’ involvement, and the promotion of equal division of housework, Polish society remains deeply patriarchal, and women experience a double or triple burden and a second shift (Hochschild and Machung 1990; Pine 1994; Titkov and Domański 1995; Titkov 2007). That is, they often have responsibilities related to their paid work and employment, as well as conducting the unpaid labour of caring for the house and the family, and for the children. These burdens lead our heroine, the Polish Mother we have met in the play, to become a terrorist. Not only are women expected to participate in the workforce and be successful at that, they are also supposed to take care of their home, feed their husbands and children, and do it in the ‘right’ way. To this double or triple burden, if we distinguish between housework and childcare, we can add others: the emphasis on looks and appearance, for instance, or the expectation that all of the above will be implemented and enacted with a smile on one’s face and in a relaxed manner. And they all add to the anxieties women experience. Yet, food does seem to play a special role in this process. Food has a special, important place in these changing social relationships. This is partly because the conceptualizations of femininity and motherhood in Poland have for a long time been deeply connected to food, caring about food when eating and especially when feeding others (see Urbańska 2015, 2020; see also Cairns and Johnston 2015). Culturally, women in Poland express their love and affection through food and feeding. It remains their domain, one in which they possess actual power, while they might have limited power in other spheres of life (Walczewska 2008). And many approach it in a slightly obsessive way. The stereotypical grandmother, for instance, would not allow anyone to enter the kitchen and help with any food preparations. She would spend days preparing food, would be exhausted, and expect everyone to eat and enjoy everything she so carefully prepared. And many women still enact such cooking and feeding rituals, particularly around holidays. They cherish being the sole and best feeders, expressing their love and care through food, not seeing how oppressive this might be for themselves and others. Such a patriarchal perspective on women’s role in society has been only exacerbated by the right-­wing government and politics that came to power after my fieldwork ended. Recent laws and regulations, as well as discourses promoted by the ruling party, constituted an attack on women’s reproductive rights. They envision women’s role to be one of giving birth to and raising ‘proper’ Polish, Catholic, traditional citizens. Women are redelegated to the sphere of home and family, and seen as incubators of the future generation, rather than people with their own needs and rights (see e.g. Mishtal 2015; Król and Pustułka 2018).

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CHANGING CHILDHOODS During the Polish People’s Republic, many ­children – ­me ­included – ­had to sit at the table until everything from their plates was eaten; sometimes this lasted for a couple of hours. Food was often so difficult to procure, especially in the urban context, and the memory of even worse food shortages from during and shortly after the war was so strong, that children were expected to eat everything they were given. They were expected to listen unconditionally to their parents. Some of them were smacked, either at home or at school, for not eating properly. The strong and often disturbing memories of being forced to eat seem to be shared by at least two generations of Poles. Many parents mentioned to me that this is one of the mistakes of their parents they do not want to repeat when feeding their own children today. ‘When I was a child nobody cared about us, not like today, now it is all about children!’ noticed 40-­year-­old Monika. Monika was a nurse, a widowed mother of three children. We met for the first time at her job, before her shift started. She often reflected on the changing role and place of children in Polish society. Poland is becoming a neontocracy, a society focused on children, which accords children a great deal of social capital and adjusts to them in many ways (Lancy 2008: 12–26). As Viviana Zelizer (1994) noticed, children have become economically useless, but emotionally priceless. The role of children in families, and in society, has changed with demographic decline and the growing number of only children (GUS 2014; Kotowska 2014; see also Jing 2000 for comparison). Children’s lives have become busier and they have more extra curricula activities, which I have experienced first-­hand during my fieldwork. Children’s lives and their position within the family and society have also been influenced by changing consumer cultures. Before the 1990s, children ate the same food as adults did, but in smaller portions. They consumed more milk (Dembińska 1980; Chwalba 2004; Łozińscy 2012). Sweets and also fruits, which were often difficult to procure in the city, were often saved for children as special treats. But in general children ate the same food that adults consumed. With the change from a socialist system and controlled markets to a capitalist system and deregulated markets, and with the influences of Western management and marketing strategies, children’s position in Poland has been transformed because they have been increasingly treated as consumers. Children, as James McNeal (1999) showed, constitute three types of markets: (1) primary market (they have purchase power); (2) influence market (they have the power to influence their parents); and (3) future market (they have the potential to be consumers in the future). Since the 1990s all of these markets have been growing in Poland. Products intended only for children were created and introduced.



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Kinder Surprise was introduced in Poland in 1992, Nutella followed in 1995. Nestlé started selling its cereals in 1993, and the first yogurts intended for children, so called Danonki, have been sold by Danone since 1992. Children started exerting pressure on their parents to buy food products and gained what is often described as pester power, not known before. Their purchase power increased as well.7 I discuss these changes in more detail in Chapter 2. The changes in the food industry and consumer cultures have influenced what childhoods in Poland are about. Children’s lives have also, at least in theory, been changed by legal reforms. In the Constitution from 1952, children were mentioned three times, in relation to providing care for a mother and her baby; financial support for children in need; and that being born outside of marriage would not impair the rights of a child. Additionally, there is a separate article declaring that the state ‘shall devote special attention to the education of young people [teenagers] and provide them with the widest possible opportunities for development’ (1952: art 68). Children were mainly seen as future citizens. Since the 1990s children have been recognized as people in their own rights. In 1991, Poland ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child from 1990, which accords protections and rights to children. In 2000, the position of a child’s ombudsman, who is supposed to represent and protect children’s rights in the government, was established. Children have been increasingly treated as independent people with their own rights and privileges, at least in laws and declarations. They are increasingly perceived as consumers and citizens in their own rights, and not solely as future citizens as was the case in the past. The realities of daily life have been slowly following the legal changes which is well reflected in the changing attitudes towards violence to children. Parents, teachers and caretakers for a long time considered and used smacking as a common way of punishing misbehaving children. Since the 1990s, such an attitude has been changing, but only in 2010 did violence against children become illegal. Nevertheless, according to public opinion research, 70 per cent of Poles did not realize that such an injunction existed and 60 per cent perceived slaps as an acceptable method of scolding children ( Jarosz 2013). The same research showed that around 35 per cent of respondents claimed that raising children is the sole responsibility of parents and that nobody else should have a say or influence on it. In fact, according to the current Polish Constitution, ‘parents have the right to raise their children according to their own convictions’ (1997: art. 48). They also have some obligations, for example concerning compulsory schooling that their children have to undertake. The state offers children protection ‘against violence, cruelty, exploitation and demoralization’ (ibid.). The education system, through schools, is supposed to provide ‘assistance to parents

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educating and raising their children’ (Act on the Education System 1991: art.1). The post-­socialist state, in contrast to the socialist period, is supposed to only provide assistance to parents, whose responsibility is to raise proper citizens. The tensions between state institutions, such as schools, and parents often revolve around crossing the boundaries of this assistance. This frequently becomes a matter of invading what are considered to be personal freedoms and rights, and creates tensions and ambivalences about who is responsible for children, who has the authority and the right to raise them, and who knows how to do it best. The new perception of children as fully-­fledged members of the society has also been reflected in the increasing concern for children’s space in Warsaw. On the one hand, there have been more places designed with children and their parents in mind. Special highchairs and other facilities for children are more widely available in restaurants and cafés. Some places have arranged indoor or outdoor playgrounds. When I arrived to start my fieldwork, I was told about a couple of new cafés intended primarily for children and their parents. Families with children have become a new type of consumer. On the other hand, just when my fieldwork began, one highly critical article about mothers with prams taking over the space of the city had caused a huge debate concerning mothers’ rights, or rather lack thereof (Mikołejko 2012; Trawińska 2015). The discussion circled around mothers’ space in the city and their rights to that space. More symbolically, it was about women’s conflicted and limited place in Polish society. Despite the rising recognition of children’s rights and presence, in those ­discussions – ­as in many ­others – ­children were in fact absent. There are tensions around whose ‘property’ children are: whether they ‘belong’ more to the family or to the state. Who has the rights and the responsibilities to raise them? Such discourses demonstrate that children are in fact rarely treated as independent actors, with their own opinions and rights, and rather are still seen mainly through the prism of becoming particular people, citizens and consumers, in the future. While Polish society seems to be increasingly focused on children, sometimes even obsessed with them, it does not seem to be more attentive to their voices and opinions. Moreover, what we have witnessed happening since 2015 is a backlash against these trends. The right-­wing state is attempting to re-­take control over children, dictating what they read, learn about, do. Children have been placed at the centre of ideological wars in Poland, as the right-­wing state attempts to shape them into particular people according to very traditional, patriarchal, Catholic norms. Simultaneously, children are not treated as independent people, as citizens, but rather as completely malleable subjects to be shaped into future citizens, as a property of the state. The tensions between the state institutions and families over who has the right and the



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responsibility to raise children, and in what way, have become even more exacerbated since I finished my fieldwork.

MAKING PARTICULAR CITIZEN-­C ONSUMERS WITH FOOD The post-­socialist and neoliberal transformations have brought new kinds of pressures and responsibilities, and at the same time the recognition of new rights. For example, the notion of consumer rights and the concept of children’s rights are relatively new in Poland.8 This is also true of the increasing emphasis on parental rights to raise their children in whatever way they want to, combined with very powerful and demanding ideals of what parenthood and parenting should look like. Krzysztof, working in a company producing sweets, pointed out: ‘Once [in the 1990s] anything was bought for children! Until 1998 children were given anything they wanted, parents bought and children were allowed to buy anything they wanted! There were no limits whatsoever, parents were not aware that they should limit something’. In many narratives and personal accounts, the 1990s were presented by my interlocutors as this wild period when seemingly everything was allowed and everything was available. With time, however, parents were taught and learned that control and limitation are expected features of modern parenting, expected from people in modern capitalism (Guthman and DuPuis 2006; see also Lupton 1996). I conducted my research over a dozen years later, when it seemed that the tensions between people’s rights and responsibilities as citizens and consumers, the emphasis on ‘proper’ parenting and healthy diet, and the increasing politicization of issues related to children and food had almost reached its peak in Poland, and certainly in Warsaw. The longed for freedom of choice became problematic when the choices were unlimited and the pressure on making the ‘right’ choices was growing. The desire to become Western and ‘normal’, still shared by some, has in other cases been increasingly replaced with fears of becoming like ‘the West’. ‘The West’ here is most often connected to the stereotypes about the United States: replacing traditional food cultures and home cooked meals with ready-­made processed food and becoming a society with high obesity rates. Grzegorz, a celebrity chef who created a foundation focused on children’s food education, told me the following when I asked him the reasons behind his work: Ten years ago I was sitting at a couch in the US and talking to a 13-­year-­old boy. When we talked, he was snacking on untoasted white bread. He liked it a lot, and I couldn’t understand how he could like and eat it. I started asking him about the real bread, what for me was the real bread, and he looked at me as if I was crazy, he didn’t understand what I was talking about. And that’s when I understood that there might be a

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society where people don’t know what is good and real food. Food can be synthetic and taste horribly, and they will accept it. … I realized that we may have the same problem in Poland. Ten years and three months have passed since I was sitting on that couch and talking to that boy, and basically, we have a situation like that in Poland: children don’t know what is real and proper food, their parents do not cultivate culinary traditions and culinary culture as an important element of building family ties.

According to Grzegorz, and many others, the food cultures and practices of feeding and eating have been changing in Poland in the wrong direction. Poles have been losing the culinary traditions and what is considered real and good food. Like other moral entrepreneurs, such as Jamie Olivier who, as Hollows and Jones (2010) demonstrated, represents Britain as a broken society in need of political and social ‘healing’, Grzegorz places parents at the core of the problem. Although, much like Jamie Olivier, through his foundation he is focused on school food and changing how children eat in schools. As Charlotte Biltekoff (2013) demonstrated, it is worth carefully analysing any and all food reform movements to unpack the scientific moralization they offer. She noticed, based on her analysis of dietary politics in the US, that ‘While its primary aim may be to improve health, the process of teaching people “to eat right” inevitably involves shaping certain kinds of subjects, and citizens, and shoring up the identity and social boundaries of the ever-­threatened American middle class’ (2013: 4). Many actors treat food as a way of building a particular kind of society, as a tool in the pedagogy of citizenship and consumerism. Both adults and children are shaped into certain kinds of people with the means of food, preferably responsible citizens who are also engaged and educated consumers. Such perspectives, as John Coveney (2006) and Charlotte Biltekoff (2013) demonstrated, are highly moralized. Eating ‘right’ is about becoming ‘good’ people. Particular ways of feeding and eating correspond with building in children a certain character, instilling in them particular values, such as being a good worker, being responsible, being healthy and taking care of their own body, enjoying the pleasures and tastes food can provide, being open to the world and to its differences, or caring for their bodies and environments by eating organic. These are all unattainable ideals. During the Polish People’s Republic, mothers, with the help of the state, were supposed to raise and feed good and strong future citizens of the socialist country: citizens who value socialist ideals and the country above all, who are diligent, hardworking, devoted to the community. Since the 1990s, parents have been expected to teach their children how to make good individual choices, move knowingly within the consumer culture, and develop in them what Sylwia Urbańska (2012) called a ‘neoliberal personality’, characterized by individual responsibility, participation in consumer culture and



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‘empowerment’ to make free (but right) choices. In other words, parents have to teach their children something they have had to learn themselves as adults. On a daily basis, they have to resolve the continuous tensions embedded in fulfilling the expectations related to being good citizens and good consumers, and teach their children how to do it as well. I discuss and analyse these processes with more ethnographic detail in the next chapters. But I would like to make the references to ‘particular’ and ‘proper’ feeding and eating less abstract here, and begin unpacking the multiple conceptions of what is ‘good food’. The acts of balancing feeding and eating, making relational decisions about food, and attempting to have particular kinds of diets, are based on combining different registers of valuing food. These perspectives are based on varied expectations towards and meanings ascribed to food, for instance treating it solely in a physiological and nutritional way or recognizing its social and cultural roles. There are many perspectives and registers of valuing food that define in public debates and individual practice what is proper or not: health and pleasure; tradition and modernity; organic or ethical and mass produced; popular and elite; Polish and foreign; local and global; adults’ and children’s food. ­People – ­as well as i­nstitutions – ­have their own hierarchies of food values which they relate to on a daily basis. Parents might perceive what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ about food in a different way to their children, or the school or state. These perspectives on food are relational and contextual, that is they change over time and depending on the situation. Eating a cake might be considered ‘good’ during a birthday party, but ‘bad’ as breakfast. Eating a homemade cake might be considered ‘better’ than eating a shop-­bought one. The differences between these hierarchies of food values, different registers of valuing food, and the meanings attached to food, are often at the root of power struggles and negotiations between diverse actors involved with children’s food, and indeed of feeding anxieties. Take healthy food for instance. Almost every article, piece of information or news which I have encountered over the twelve months of my fieldwork that mentioned food utilized a health perspective usually based on nutrition ­science – ­discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. The books, TV programmes, online blogs and newspaper articles I read or watched almost always focused on health and nutrition. During all of my interviews with adults and children, they referred to a certain idea of health and healthy feeding-­eating. Seven-­year-­old Tosia admitted that she does not eat enough raw vegetables, and when I asked why she thinks she should eat them, she replied: ‘well, that’s what my mom says, that I should eat them, because it’s healthy’. The concept of healthy food is ubiquitous. The perspectives on what constitutes the ‘right’ food choices are currently to a great extent shaped by healthism, a term used by Robert Crawford (1980,

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2006) to describe the dominance of health perspectives in people’s and government’s approach to life. He explained healthism as a political ideology that accords health a desired status and situates the concern and responsibility for health or disease at the level of the individual. Health is not an objective fact, it is a cultural concept. Health is socially constructed and conceived as the highest value while being deeply individualized, rather than considered through the lens of the public or communities, as a structural issue. Different conceptions of health and fears of the lack of health dictate how families feed and eat. Limiting sweets consumption to one or two days per week would be one example. Eating larger quantities of wholegrain products would be another. When I asked parents why they introduced changes like that to their family diets when children were born, they replied that it was because of health reasons. They adjust their ways of eating to make and keep their children healthy. Nikolas Rose (1996) noticed that in neoliberal societies we are seeing the development of various techniques that aim to govern without governing society. Individuals are supposed to govern themselves with the regulated choices made in the context of their commitment to a healthy family and community. He added that such processes produce a field characterized by uncertainty and anxiety, which is certainly the case with regard to feeding in Warsaw. Adults, and to some extent children as well, internalize the messages about health and the aspirations to be healthy, and therefore they themselves aim to fulfil the expectations of health which are also desired by the state. And they are expected to take the responsibility and the blame when they fail at that. In the case of children, this responsibilization concerns mothers in particular. Health, however, means different things to different people. For some it is about balancing fruits, vegetables and sweets, and including wholegrain products in children’s diets. It might also be about not going to McDonald’s too often. It might be related to food-­borne disease ( Jackson 2015), although that was rarely mentioned during my research. For the older generation, the grandparents, healthy food is more often about large quantities of food and eating meat, and for the younger generation it is more about vegetables and wholegrains. For others it is connected to environmental issues and providing children only with organic food: keeping children’s bodies and minds clean and pure by creating and sustaining an ‘organic child’ (Cairns, Johnston and MacKendrick 2013). I will be unpacking these varied conceptions about what is ‘good food’ and ‘healthy food’ for children throughout the remaining part of the book.



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CONCLUDING REMARKS This chapter demonstrated how the socialist past and neoliberal transformations shaped the politics of children’s food in Poland. The move from an economy of shortage to an economy of abundance changed not only access to and availability of food products, but also the meanings and values attached to food. It shaped the new moral economy of food (Boni 2021). And the shift from a rhetoric of the state caring for its citizens to a rhetoric of consumers’ individual responsibility and choice re-­shaped social relationships and contributed to the rise of feeding anxieties. Food is used as a tool in the pedagogy of citizenship and consumerism. Various conceptions about what constitutes ‘good’ food are intertwined with the ideas about being ‘good’ people. Good citizens take care of their individual health and with their practices embody the responsibility for the common good and the future of the country. Good consumers strive to find individual pleasure and are supposed to have insatiate appetites. Navigating between these different expectations and pressures is an extremely difficult process, causing tension and anxiety. And children, as well as their mothers, are the focus of multiple consumer-­citizen making projects. Mothers have become more anxious about feeding children properly, not only because their knowledge has been undermined by expert advice and there has been a growing amount of advice they have to sort through. There has also been increasing pressure to do it right, and a growing number of influences, for example from the food industry, which mothers have to contend with when feeding their children. The appreciation of children’s preferences makes feeding them more complicated. It has become more problematic to make the ‘right’ choices concerning ‘proper’ food and to restrain and control oneself and one’s family when so many products are available. The changes in Poland which have given children more freedom and greater choice and influence with regard to their eating practices have, at the same time, made feeding them more difficult. Simultaneously, the responsibility for the ‘proper’ choices is highly individualized. This individualization process, which places the responsibility for the future, as well as for the health of individuals and whole communities, on particular food choices, contributes both to the tensions felt, and to making feeding anxieties an alienating experience. The Matka-Polka from the play, which opened this chapter, is after all alone on the stage. The next chapter delves into the issues of control and responsibility through a focus on the food industry and on children’s and parents’ engagements with consumer cultures.

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NOTES  1. But see e.g. Banet-­Weiser (2007) for a focus on media; and Davis and Francis (2015) in relation to the environment.  2. Although in Poland, contrary to the situation in other socialist countries, agriculture was not entirely collectivized and over 85 per cent of farm land was privately owned (Pine 1994: 24). Food was only partly produced by the state owned farms; however, (official) food imports and (official) food distribution were organized by the state.  3. Ethnographies that analysed different aspects of these transformations in Poland include Dunn 2004; Rakowski 2016; Buchowski 2017; Murawski 2019; Leyk and Wawrzyniak 2020.  4. For a different ethnographic context, see how ‘normal’ food is constructed and practised among Bengali Hindus and Muslims ( Janeja 2010).  5. See e.g. Matijevic and Boni 2019, and Gille (2016) for a great analysis of the EU application process within Hungary.  6. Another ‘move backwards’ was the limitation of reproductive rights (see e.g. Pine 1994; Zielińska 2000).  7. In 1987 only 25 per cent of parents declared that they gave their children pocket money, whereas in 2008 that number increased to 67 per cent (see Sikorska 2009: 240).  8. For an analysis of the field of consumer rights in Bulgaria, see Jung 2019.

CHAPTE R 2

EAT AND HAVE SOME FUN On New Consumers and How the Food Industry Creates Children’s Food

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would you like to buy?’, Mrs Teresa asked two 8-­year-­old girls ‘What when it was their turn to approach the counter in the school shop.

They climbed the stairs to the top floor of the school and stood in the queue for most of the ten-­minute break. The line was quite long, as it usually was during the first half of the day. It was noisy, children were running along the corridors, bumping into the queue, which with new children continuously joining seemed never to end. The two girls counted how much money they had to­gether and tried to decide what to buy. When it was their turn, they put all the coins on the counter and asked Mrs Teresa what they could buy for that amount. Mrs Teresa counted how much money they had given her and said that they could buy either three bigger pieces of chewing gum, or one lollipop, two gummy spiders, three worms, or six little pieces of lemon chewing gum. The girls discussed with each other what to buy and then told the seller their decision. She gave them one worm wrapped in a napkin and four lemons in a small plastic bag. The girls grabbed it and moved away with smiles on their faces. Right away they split the gummy sweets and while one of them ate her half of the worm, the other one reached for the lemon chewing gum. This encounter is but one among multiple interactions that children, and their families, have with the food industry on a daily basis. Many parents, when asked about the changes in Poland, told me that it is amazing how many things one can buy today, how colourful and playful childhood can be compared to their memories of their childhoods. They argued that there is more knowledge about raising and feeding children today and that they will not repeat their parents’ mistakes, for example of overfeeding or force-­feeding

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their children. But they also explained how difficult it is, because they have to constantly control what their children do and eat. As 37-­year-­old Joanna put it, when we were talking about sweets, ‘Once you had to stand in line for these products. I mean there were candies and biscuits, but it wasn’t as available as it is today! Today children can buy one out of a thousand different chocolate bars on their way to school, and you cannot control it!’ Even though, as the above vignette illustrates, children sometimes have to queue for a short time to get food, the availability and access to food is incomparable to their parents’ childhood experiences. Also, it is a different kind of food: gummy worms and spiders, or little sweet and sour lemons one can chew on. As discussed in the previous chapter, the consumption cultures have changed immensely in Poland. Children seem to be tempted on every corner, and parents cannot seem to catch up with controlling what their children eat, while being expected to do so. Controlling what children eat, as Joanna and many others explained to me, is the main feature of feeding practices, and indeed of feeding anxieties that mothers experience. This chapter looks at the food industry, at how it interacts with children and parents, influences their consumption practices, and adds to feeding anxieties. The chocolate bars that children buy on their way to school, or sometimes in school, that Joanna was so worried about, are developed, produced, distributed and marketed by the food industry. Juices and sodas, breakfast cereals, marshmallows and chocolate treats, as well as fruits, vegetables and dairy products, in very tangible and symbolic ways form feeding-­ eating relationships across Warsaw. In media debates and private conversations, the food industry is often featured as manipulative and exploitative, and is accused of creating an obesogenic environment and leading to children’s ‘bad’ eating habits. And yet, most of the public actors assume that the industry cannot be controlled, and expect instead the family to control children and their consumption practices. The responsibility for children’s food is not placed on the side of food producers, and to a very limited extent on the state, but instead is placed on individual consumers. These tensions around children’s food and the food industry, around who controls whom, for what reason, and in what way, are at the source of the politics of children’s food in Poland, and lead to many feeding anxieties. The food industry, and the many companies, institutions and people who create it, are also anxious about feeding children. Their feeding anxieties are not aligned with what mothers, school teachers or state officials might experience, because they position children and food differently and usually have other ideas about what might be problematic, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ with regard to children’s eating. Nonetheless, the anxieties are there, stemming for instance from different and often contradictory responsibilities to and



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expectations from the public, the consumers and the shareholders (see Lien 1997). When in the spring of 2013 I met with Sara, a marketing researcher, she explained that her clients are usually interested not only in the child, but in the whole family configuration. It was one of the first moments warm enough to sit outside, so we enjoyed our coffees, sitting at a table outside at a local café, when she explained that families with children are a special consumption unit. She continued: Children’s motivations are always the same, but parents’ motivations and anxieties are varied. … There are different kinds of families and different trends, there is this eco trend now or a developmental one [and they are reflected in food practices]. Parents often design their children’s future through and with food. … Currently everything is child-­centred, family life is child-­centred. And marketers and producers, they follow it, they also started focusing on these anxieties connected to child-­centred lifestyles.

I was often surprised at how quickly market researchers identified and influenced social processes around them. The food industry, having its own anxieties, certainly also focuses on and contributes to the worries experienced by consumers. As Sara remarked, food marketers and producers notice, respond to and create parental concerns about their children. They identify and influence existing trends, such as ‘anxieties connected to child-­centred lifestyles’ that they might profit from. The food market not only follows, but also creates expectations of family life. Daniel Cook (2004) showed, using the case of the US clothing industry, that historically we have been witnessing not merely a democratization of children’s desires, but a privileging of them. He traced the process of the commodification of childhood by showing how in the early twentieth century, the industry started promoting clothes for children, and then for the increasingly segmented age and gender groups of children. Cook argued that children are not at some point socialized into being consumers, but they grow up with and within consumption as a necessary and indispensable context. ‘Markets have not invaded childhood’, he pointed out, ‘either now or over the last century. They provide rather indispensable and unavoidable means by which class specific, historically situated childhoods are made material and tangible’ (Cook 2004: 144). This chapter looks at how a similar process has occurred in Poland. It studies how the industry have used food to make childhoods in Poland tangible and material in a very specific way. It is not that consumption practices and the food industry did not exist before 1989 and then magically appeared overnight. But the availability, materiality and symbolic meanings attached to food and childhood have changed immensely since the 1990s. The marshmallows and chocolate not only became available at every corner, but also

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came in varied shapes and sizes, with different flavours, and added collectables. Growing up in Warsaw in the 1990s, I remember it myself. It was like a sudden eruption of advertisements and colourfully packaged foods. We knew them before, but rather as distant and exotic treats brought from foreign travels or sent by family and friends from abroad. And there it w ­ as – ­on a shelf in a local grocery store or in the first Western supermarkets: the sheer abundance of everything. Children’s desires have not only been accepted but, with time, privileged. The food industry has been one of the initial actors to recognize children as independent eaters and consumers. Elizabeth Dunn (2004) illustrated this process well, when in her book she recounted a moment from 1996 when the new line of fruit juices, called Frugo, was introduced by Gerber (former Alima company): Surprisingly, the bright, colourful drinks in large glass bottles with a jazzy black label were not for babies. ‘Frugo!’ announced the marketer, who showed us that the brand came in four colours, not flavours. He explained that red, orange, green and yellow Frugo juices were destined to be the hit product of the year: they were developed on the basis of niche marketing, a form of marketing that had never been used in Poland before. ‘A product for everybody is a product for nobody. Nobody identifies with it’ he said. ‘That’s why Frugo is aimed especially at youth. Frugo will be a part of the young world like no other brand. It will be a fragment of their culture.’ (Dunn 2004: 58)

And indeed it was. I was among those young people who drunk Frugo in the 1990s. The food industry created and responded to the needs people did not know they have. Sara mentioned that in the 1990s adolescents became new consumers, while advertisements and marketing to younger children followed in the 2000s. ‘The new consumer has been born, and he or she has not remembered the bad [socialist] times, it’s a different, a new kind of a consumer’, she told me over coffee that warm spring afternoon.

CHILDREN’S FOOD What has been happening in the global food market is a growing segmentation of food products according to more and more narrow expectations and wants from more and more specific groups of consumers. Part of that process has been the creation of children’s food. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. More than forty years ago, Allison James (1979) wrote about kets, sweets in crazy colours and shapes, producing surprising sensations in one’s mouth, designed specifically for children. This division between adults’ and children’s food seems to be only increasing in Poland, as well as in other places (e.g. Jing 2000). The concept of a children’s menu is a good example of that. In many places in the world, one can now encounter a children’s menu



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in restaurants, usually consisting of pizza, spaghetti with tomato sauce, meatballs, some form of chicken nuggets or chicken cutlets. Is that a democratization of children’s desires, a recognition of how their needs and wants differ from those of adults, or is that a way to create a separate segment of consumers, in the long run creating additional revenues? As Ludvigsen and Scott (2009) demonstrated based on research in France, children are expected, both by adults and other children, to prefer children’s food and dislike adults’ food. In fact, children’s food is a broad category that contains various subgroups of food products and meals with varied connotations. One group consists of adult, ‘normal’ food, which are typically part of children’s diets: dairy, particularly milk, fruits, little carrots and tomatoes, as well as everything from a children’s menu – ‘normal’ food that is widely perceived by adults and children, by the food industry and by families, to be preferred by children. Children, especially younger ones, might play with such food when eating, but in principle it is part of adults’ food as well, often just presented differently. The second group consists of sweets and snacks created with children in mind, designed as products with which children can also play. These would be the worms, lemon chewing gum, lollipops, crisps, etc. This would include the kets James (1979) wrote about. They come in crazy colours and shapes, induce various sensations in one’s mouth, have humorous names, are usually very cheap and often unwrapped, and provide ­fun – ­they are in strong contrast to ‘real’ and boring adults’ food. In fact, they might not even be categorized as food, as these are snacks and sweets with artificial colouring and no nutritional value. They rather seem to be non-­food, the direct antithesis to real food and what is considered healthy food ( James 1979; Elliott 2009; Ludvigsen and Scott 2009). But since they can be consumed, and since children refer to these snacks and sweets as food, I will continue to do so as well. Children eat these gummy spiders and worms, as well as play with them. I ate an abundance of food like that throughout my fieldwork. For me they have a very distinctive taste: extreme sugariness, many surprising flavours which do not resemble any known foods, the unexpected combinations of sweet and sour enriched by the sensations of dissolving in one’s mouth, the distinctive aftertaste of chemicals and sugar. Krzysztof, who works in a chocolate company, characterized this food as ‘short-­term joy, cheap price and bad quality’. The important characteristic of these foods is that they enable the bending and breaking of adults’ rules. As Elliott (2009) noticed, you cannot be expected to adhere to table manners, and for instance use a spoon, while consuming a yoghurt which squirts straight into your mouth. They are fun, and have been designed with fun and play in mind. Charlene Elliott (2009) argued that children’s foods are characterized by eatertainment: they promote food as fun and eating as entertainment. Food

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manufacturers make products specifically because of the idea that children’s food is supposed to be fun. One of the most common ways to achieve this is to add a toy to a food product, the best examples of which are McDonald’s Happy Meals and Kinder Surprise. But there are also many other ways of providing fun with food. Bartek, who worked in marketing research, told me: Children just want to have fun! They use these products in a different way, for example with these foams [marshmallows], they grill them, they build small people out of them and in general play with them before eating them. The food producers know this. … When they [a certain food company] were introducing new ice-­cream they did their research and have found out such a simple thing that for children ice-­cream is not only about taste, but also about fun and playing with it, and so they created an ice-­lolly which bends and with which one can play.

As Bartek noticed, food producers and marketers recognize and respond to what are considered to be children’s desires and needs, simultaneously creating them. So there are these two kinds of foods for children: ‘fun foods’, designed specifically to play with, and more ‘serious’ food, but still served with children in mind, which children often turn into play objects, for instance meatballs or spaghetti. Children, however, as was often explained to me, constitute a very difficult and diversified group of consumers. They are certainly not a homogenous group. Ten-­year-­olds do not want to consume something that 7 and 8-­year-­olds are eating. They often lose interest and are not very loyal to specific brands, with only few exceptions including Kinder products by Ferrero or some cereal brands such as Nesquick by Nestlé. Children usually quickly move on to new products, which is a source of anxiety for food producers and marketers who are repeatedly faced with disloyal customers. As Krzysztof told me: Every company that produces sweets knows that their products might be for children. But everyone also knows that children are the most difficult client. They are very susceptible to change. They are not loyal at all. Some products might be in fashion, but max for one year, and then it changes. Many companies tried entering this market, but it’s really difficult.

The industry constantly has to change and adjust to children, and diversify according to narrow age categories, and, when it comes to older children, also to gender categories. So certain food brands grow up with children. This, for example, has happened with one brand of juices, promoted by a bear named Kubuś. Sara pointed out its history: Kubuś used to be a chubby bear, and now he is sporty. It used to be a thick juice, sold in glass bottles. But children went to school, that was no longer good, so now there is



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Kubuś Play and Kubuś Water [in plastic bottles]. Kubuś grew up with children. Children’s expectations and desires and their daily lives change, and they had to follow that.

The food industry attempts to follow children and grow up with them, responding to their changing needs and desires. The transformation of a chubby bear and juice sold in glass bottles into a thin and sporty bear and flavoured water sold in bigger, plastic bottles illustrates this well.

Sweets Sweets are probably the most important part of what I defined as a broad category of children’s food. In following and predicting children’s desires, the food industry very early on turned to sweets, since it is generally recognized that humans, and especially children, have an innate preference for sweetness (Dobbing 1987). But there is a moral ambivalence associated with sugar and sweets (Mintz 1986). They inhabit an interesting moral space because, as Allison James (1990) noticed, they are nutritionally ‘bad for you’, but conceptually ‘good for you’, they are ‘naughty, but nice’. Sweets are seen as nutritionally bad, contributing to obesity, diabetes and dental caries. They do not provide any necessary nutrients, while consisting of sugar, and as such they are often treated not only as not healthy, but as unhealthy. They might also cause frenzy in children. But they are also tasty, pleasurable and fun. And culturally, they are recognized as an important part of children’s experiences of childhood. Many parents attempt not only to limit children’s consumption of sweets, but to delay the moment of introducing a taste of sweetness and sugar to children. Weronika and Piotr for instance mentioned that they tried to delay the introduction of sweet tasting food to Gosia when she was a toddler, but they could not avoid family meetings where their daughter always received something sweet from aunts and grandparents. ‘There was always a dessert’, Piotr explained, ‘and it would be cruel if everyone was eating while Gosia would not, so we allowed it’. Various intergenerational differences related to raising children and to approaches to food clash when it comes to sweets. I delve more deeply into that in the next chapter when discussing family relations. This plan of delaying the introduction of sweet tasting food became even more difficult when it came to feeding Gosia’s younger sister, Monika. Weronika and Piotr recognized that when Gosia was already eating sweets, they could not deny them to Monika. Nevertheless, they continued to hide from their children that they ate sweets, and consumed them only at night, when Gosia and Monika were already asleep. Many parents are anxious about their children eating too many sweets and they establish various strategies to limit their consumption. Paweł and

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Paulina Marciniak allow their children to eat sweets only on weekends. Paulina explained: We made that decision when Adam was small. It is easier to control his diet in that way. Because it is a nightmare when you enter a shop with a 3-­year-­old, and he constantly wants to eat this or that. And every day you have to decide what you will allow; so it is better to allow everything once a week, and then forbid it the rest of the week.

Both sweets and a child who demands them are seen as a problem here. But Paulina and Paweł could not control the sweets, that is the food industry and retailers, while they can and attempt to control Adam, and his younger sister, Basia. Many families introduced some kind of rules related to sweets, although they were rarely as restrictive as in the Marciniak family. And parental stories about controlling and limiting sweets consumption were often combined with accounts of children being completely out of control with regard to sweets. Małgosia Podolska for instance told me about a situation that happened during a work event, a family picnic organized with her co-­ workers. There was a sugar bowl there to use for teas and coffees, and Bartek and Zuzia, as well as some other children, started eating spoonfuls of sugar out of the bowl. This was something they were not used to having at home, Małogosia noticed. And Natalia Szymańska recounted a different situation when her younger daughter, Kasia, lost control around sweets. She attended a friend’s birthday party at a children’s amusement centre. While playing, sliding and running around, she also ate a lot of sweets available there as part of the birthday celebration: different kinds of cakes, cookies and sweets. As a result, as Natalia said, she ended up throwing up in the amusement centre. Both examples demonstrate how children lose control when allowed to eat unlimited amounts of sweets. They go crazy or throw up. And both accounts were used by Małgosia and Natalia to argue for the need to limit and control their children’s sweets consumption. Few other parents mentioned, however, that some children seem out of control when having access to sweets, exactly because they are not used to having them around. As they argued, rather than limiting children’s sweets consumption to one or two days per week, it is better to allow it even on a daily basis, but teach children to be temperate about it. Although there might be different strategies of doing it, everyone agreed that children’s sweets consumption needed to be in some way limited and controlled. Doing it was a different matter. The general perception of sugar and sweets, and consequently the related consumption practices, have been increasingly deemed improper by nutrition and health experts, the media and the public. Sweets have become a symbol of children’s ‘bad’ and ‘improper’ eating habits in Poland. Krzysztof,



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who at the time of my fieldwork worked in a company producing chocolate sweets, explained to me: Children used to eat Snickers and Mars bars and now it’s considered too heavy and not good for them. They used to eat everything! In the 1990s nobody cared what they ate, everyone was excited that these things were available, and everyone ate everything. … Now, there is a growing awareness that sweets in large quantities are not healthy. Children used to mostly eat hard candies, and now this market is dying. … The same goes for gummy sweets. There were scandals that those gummy sweets produced with gelatine are so unhealthy, so now everyone adds pectin, which is a fruit gelatine. Parents really pay attention to these things.1

‘These things’ mean healthy diets, normalized bodies and ‘proper’ food habits. And children pay increasing attention to them as well. I met Małgosia, another marketing researcher, in one of her companies’ research labs. We sat in a professional focus room setting, with snacks on the table, when she told me: People have diverse ideas about where the chemical components and preservatives are. And we have noticed that children absorb this. They say ‘oh, this is chemical’, or ‘that has preservatives!’ Five years ago nobody talked like that. People are paying more and more attention to these things. … Now [during a focus group] there will always be one boy who would say ‘oh, this is surely unhealthy, my mum would not buy this product!’, and it wasn’t like that before!

The changing, and it seems increasing, demands from urban consumers, both parents and children, are a source of many anxieties for food producers and marketers. The food industry, its institutions and people, need to react quickly to the changing trends and expectations, often even predicating them. In the 1990s the food products simply needed to be there, available for purchase. Both adults and children were captivated by the diversity of foods and consumer cultures; the notion of health did not play such an important role in people’s perspectives on food. Then the food products needed to be tasty. Now, it is no longer enough for the food products to be tasty, they increasingly need to be healthy as well, and also environmentally friendly and consciously produced. Combining these seemingly contradictory expectations, and moreover dealing with the increasingly critical views on marketing campaigns and the food industry in general, causes many tensions and concerns within the food industry (Moss 2013). The conferences and meetings organized by the food producers or marketers in P ­ oland – ­few of which I a­ ttended – u ­ sually include panels and discussions on the conundrums of ‘healthy food’. ‘We’re trying to disenchant sweets’, Ania who worked in one of the food companies explained to me, ‘My son gets a candy in his lunchbox every day.

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Sweets can be a part of a balanced diet!’ In response to the increasing dominance of healthism, the producers of sweets and snacks introduce sugar-­ less products or products with added vitamins and other nutrients, such as magnesium. They also defend themselves and explain that their products are not unhealthy. Małgosia noticed: ‘It is crazy, because sweet products, both chocolate and not chocolate, are in fact healthier than soft drinks or crisps, which are carcinogenic. Though of course, it all needs to be balanced’. The social actors from the food industry increasingly talk about balance when it comes to food and diets. Everyone I talked to emphasized that their food products can and should be part of a balanced diet. But the balancing act falls onto the consumers. Making sweets part of a balanced diet is what many parents strive for, as it allows the combining of plural and sometimes contradictory registers of valuing food. Sweets are fun and good in some respects after all. Balancing between such diverse influences and foods on a daily basis is in itself a source of many anxieties, which I explore more in the next chapter. There are in fact sweets that are produced purposely for children and perceived by many adults as good for them, for instance Kinder products produced by Ferrero. They contain milk and chocolate and are thus treated as good for children; they are perceived as both healthy and providing fun and pleasure. As one of the mothers, 30-­year-­old Marysia, told me: ‘I would like to buy these Kinder products for her, they are better, they have milk and chocolate inside, but it is just too expensive, so I buy it only occasionally’. Kinder Surprise cost more than 3 zł (around 1$ at the time of my fieldwork) and, as all Kinder products, was considered rather expensive. Nevertheless, many parents would buy them because they are perceived to be in many ways good for their children. They do not have very strong or surprising flavours, they are just very sweet. Their packaging has changed very little in thirty years, which makes them a very recognizable brand. And they are advertised as containing milk which is supposed to be good for children. Kinder products are recognized by many as acceptable, better kinds of sweets. But Małgosia, a marketing researcher, challenged this view: This is amazing what they have done with Mleczna Kanapka [Ferrero’s Kinder Milk Slice]! There is milk, chocolate and nuts, [ironically] well great! Mothers are totally fooled by this message about milk and chocolate, it’s crazy! If there is a little bit of milk in this chocolate product, it’s nothing, really! … Chocolate has a great PR, and they were building this for years!

Małgosia’s comment illustrates well the internal power struggles and ‘blame games’ within the food industry. Although to families or other social actors the food industry might seem like a homogenous monolith, it is definitely a diversified field with not only very different food products, but also internal politics, tensions and rivalry. In her frustration about successful marketing



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campaigns of ‘improper’ foods, Małgosia presents and perceives mothers as fools who do not see through a ‘great public relations’ campaign, and take the messages about particular sweets and their health attributes at face value. She is saying that advertisements and marketing campaigns cannot be fully trusted, even though she works in that field. Sweets consumption, as all of the feeding and eating practices, are inextricably connected to social positioning and class. While working-­class parents might aspire to buy such ‘better’ kind of products for their children, and many middle-­class families consume them, although not everyone is able to afford them, some upper middle-­class parents restrain from doing so. In fact, some mothers consider Kinder and other sweet products to be very unhealthy. They encourage their children to rather eat homemade sweets. As Marta, a businesswoman in her mid-­forties, mother of two daughters, told me during our first meeting in a local café for parents and children: ‘If there’s no pie at home, they want these hard candies, chocolates, gummy sweets. So I prefer to make a pie than buy these things, which is uneconomical and unhealthy! It is better to eat a homemade pie than some candies!’ Marta’s positionality, for instance her flexible work schedule and very good economic situation, enables her to discourage her children, 12-­year-­old Zosia and her younger sister, 5-­year-­old Ola, from eating what she considers ‘unhealthy’ products, and to prepare homemade pies, from wholegrain flour and brown sugar, on a weekly or even daily basis. At the same time, Marta recognizes why they like these sweets. She recounted how she and her daughters ate warm buns with Nutella spread the other day, and how pleasant and tasty it was. ‘I’m not surprised they like it! It’s so incredibly delicious. I like to have such a warm bun with Nutella myself from time to time’. Although, she added, snacks and sweets like that should not be a daily or even weekly treat. They need to be balanced.

Junk Food Next to sweets, or in fact partly encompassing them, the category of junk food is also often considered part of children’s food. Junk food literally means something not pure, unclean and dangerous if eaten. It is dirt, something out of place, something that does not fit into the existing system of food classifications; in this sense it is non-­food and evokes a lot of anxiety (Douglas 1966). It signifies food high in calories, in sugar and fat, but low in nutritional value, with few minerals or vitamins, and includes, for example, sodas, crisps and gummy sweets. Food in this case is reduced to its nutritional components, as if the role of food was only physiological, to provide people with necessary nutrients. Food which does not fulfil this role is basically rubbish; it is like eating junk.

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The health experts and journalists often criticize the food industry for creating such foods and advertising their consumption to children. One of the food education campaigns introduced in 2007 in Warsaw was called Dzieci nie jedzą śmieci [Children do not eat junk/rubbish], and it was probably one of the first moments when the English phrase ‘junk food’ was translated into Polish as śmieciowe jedzenie, and disseminated in the media. Later in 2010, a non-­governmental foundation promoted the phrase To śmieci tuczą dzieci [It is rubbish/junk that makes children fat] with a billboard campaign depicting a fat child surrounded by piles of junk food, and eating it. Both campaigns were meant to alert people, especially parents, to what their children eat. The phrasing was so s­ trong – a­ s the organizers of the campaign explained to ­me – ­in order to get people’s attention and emphasize the importance of this issue. The suggestions such campaigns and slogans make, that some parents feed their children rubbish, are in fact a powerful and political, as well as incredibly moralizing, statement. For years now in Poland the phrases junk food or śmieciowe jedzenie have been used interchangeably. They connote a very strong moral judgement. They are often used by the media to highlight what are considered the bad eating habits of children in Poland, and to frame this as an important social problem. But they are also used by people in daily conversations. Forty-­five-­ year-­old Dorota told me: My niece is obese, and I am sure it is caused by her lifestyle; she started to eat śmieciowe jedzenie very early. She was eating crisps when she was still in a pram! … So my daughter has this negative example, because my niece, she is.. well, she is fat! So Hania has this negative example and controls herself, she knows that if she will eat so much bad food, she will get fat just as her cousin did.

Dorota makes the connection between her niece’s fat body and her junk food consumption, and uses that to scare and discipline her own daughter, Hania who was 12. Children who have overweight or obesity are very often used as such reference points. This could be someone familiar, a friend or family member, or a random fat child, often depicted as faceless in the media as an illustration of children’s bad food habits (see e.g. Boero 2010, 2012). Stories about these often nameless c­ hildren – ­treated more as tokens than actual ­people – ­are then often repeated in private and public conversations as a kind of scary reference point. I have often heard such stories about a toddler eating inappropriate sweets or crisps, or eating in front a TV, during my fieldwork. As most of the parents in such situations, in this case above Dorota combines two positionalities, as she is both a feeder and a judger. Eating what are considered by some bad foods creates ‘bad’ eaters. Some food products or categories of food transfer their negative perception onto people who feed



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and eat them. Junk food belongs to such a category. Those who produce it, those who feed it to their children, and those who eat it are often seen as ‘bad’ people because they engage in ‘improper’ practices, and because the ‘bad’ innate characteristics of the food and what it represents are embodied. Because products such as crisps, sodas, gummy sweets are categorized as bad and improper by the dominating healthism perspective, it becomes rather easy to moralize and judge people who consume them, even more often that those who produce them. Such perspectives are not only guided by health and nutrition, but also by cultural ideals of ‘proper’ eating and dietary politics (Biltekoff 2013). And such moralized and normative judgements most often fall along the social class lines (see Wright, Maher and Tanner 2015; Brenton 2017), as it is more often middle-­class families who limit their junk food consumption and judge working-­class families for consuming it. For many children though, junk food, and particularly fast food places, are considered good. Putting aside the taste of such food, which is by many considered to be great, there are many socio-­cultural reasons for eating fast food. This is largely due to the fact that they are affordable and welcome children and youth. There are not many restaurants where young people can go and be accepted, where they might sit for hours ordering only one milkshake or a packet of fries. They were also considered great for birthday celebrations in the 1990s (see also Lozada 2000; Watson 2006), back when places like McDonald’s were a symbol of modernity and aspiration, and not of ‘improper’ food choices and subjectivities. And as such, they have been among the few children-­friendly restaurants for a long time. Most of the families participating in my research ate in fast food joints rarely or never, and considered this a source of pride, while others enjoyed eating there from time to time, and considered it part of a balanced diet. As Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston and Merin Oleschuk noticed: While taking children to McDonald’s is a hallmark of ‘bad’ mothering practices, total rejection of this experience is also stigmatized. At this end of the spectrum sits the Organic Mom, whose rigid feeding practices prevent children from experiencing the quintessential treats of childhood. Achieving a ‘moderate’ position between these two stigmatized extremes requires endless calibration, as well as the cultural and economic capital to precisely moderate children’s exposure to ‘junky’ treats. (2018: 186)

This calibrating and balancing between being a ‘health obsessed mum’ and a ‘junk food mum’ is a never-­ending process women experience and have to deal with on a daily basis (see also Cairns and Johnston 2015). And as Cairns, Johnston and Oleschuk notice, one needs cultural and economic c­ apital – ­time, money and ­access – ­to exactly and fully monitor children’s experiences of consuming junk food and sweets.

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SHOPPING Parents want to buy the best products for their children and what ‘the best’ entails might differ according to their values and class dispositions to food, their financial constraints, time pressures, and their particular situation. Thirty-­seven-­year-­old Kasia mentioned shopping with her 11-­year-­old son, Maciek: He has his favourite foods. It is not that he is in control when we are out in a shop together, but, well, I do what he wants. He likes ptasie mleczko2 and this one kind of bars of chocolate, so these are always in the shopping basket. He exhorts things from us.

Although Kasia begins her statement by saying that Maciek is not fully in control when they do the shopping together, indicating that in fact she has control over the shopping process, she very quickly admits that not only does Maciek actually get what he wants, but even that he exhorts things from her and her husband. The question remains who controls whom in fact. Different registers of valuing food, as well as power struggles, are at play here. While Kasia might be more inclined to enact the health perspective on food, and would like to limit and influence what her son eats in order to make it healthier, Maciek is more interested in the taste he likes and pleasure that food provides, as he told me. Krzysztof explained to me: There is a difference between a shopper and a consumer. Children become shoppers around second-­third grade [when they are 8–9 years old]. They start receiving money then. Before they are only consumers. And it’s more difficult to influence them before. It comes down to dirty marketing: placing the food products at the level of their eyes in shops, or near the cash registers where they might easily grab stuff. … There is a trend now that parents don’t take their children shopping, to avoid such situations when children would say ‘I want this!’ or put products into a shopping basket. But most Poles cannot afford it, cannot organize it in such a way, they have to take their children shopping.

Indeed, one of the most common parental tactics of dealing with shopping anxieties is to not take children shopping at all. Many of my interlocutors, both mothers and fathers, mentioned that it is better, faster and less stressful to shop without children. Children often exercise pester power over their parents and want them to buy certain foodstuffs, and consequently shopping turns into an event filled with difficult negotiations or experiences of failure on the parents’ side, as in Kasia’s story above. And as Krzysztof confirmed, the food industry profits from that. Another tactic implemented when shopping is to discourage children from choosing ‘bad’ snacks, and encourage them to choose ‘good’ ones, or



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teach them to restrain themselves when they are allowed to choose only one ‘bad’ snack. Eleven-­year-­old Kamila told me: ‘Recently I wanted a chocolate bar, but my mum said that I can’t have it, because it’s not healthy, so I took a fruit juice, and she agreed’. And 12-­year-­old Hania mentioned that she often finds herself in a predicament: ‘they tell me I can take only one thing, and sometimes suggest what would be better, the healthier option, but I can choose myself. And I have a dilemma’. Although a difficult experience, shopping is often considered a teachable moment in making ‘proper’ consumer choices. Parents, mainly mothers, also control what children eat by buying particular foods for them, by being the gatekeepers of food that enters home and family life and their children’s bodies (see McIntosh and Zey 1989; Anving and Thorsted 2010). A mother attempts to both meet children’s wants and desires and to control their eating by putting up barriers, and providing healthy food alongside the wanted, often considered unhealthy food. This for instance happens when preparing children’s lunchboxes, where they have two sandwiches: a savoury one, considered to be healthier, and a sweet one. Children’s food is not only those advertised and marketed to children and bought by them, but also advertised and marketed to mothers, and bought by them for their children. Food producers not only respond to or create children’s needs, but also respond to and use parental expectations and desires to, on the one hand, feed their children healthily and ‘right’, and, on the other, provide them with fun and pleasure. They have to sell their food not only to children, but to mothers as well. As Sara told me: It used to be enough to say that something is healthy to convince mothers, and now we really have to search for what to say to mothers, to find out what they want. It is a nightmare, looking for consumer insights! But the producers, they follow children; everyone knows that if a child wants something, parents will buy it.

As Sara notices, it is becoming more and more difficult to convince mothers to buy particular food products for their children. What happens, as Krzysztof pointed out to me, is ‘advertising to mothers by advertising healthy aspects of particular food products, or at least defending themselves that the products are not unhealthy’. What still seems to work is focusing on children, and using their influence over their parents to get the particular products. Food producers and marketers attempt to address these different registers of valuing food by creating food products that can be characterized as edutainment or what Richard Wilk (2012) called nutritainment: combining the mother’s wish for nutritious food and child’s development and education, with the child’s desire for fun and entertainment. This happens for instance through adding alphabet letters to products, which are collected in

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Figure 2.1  Chocolate cereals in a pink bowl, 6-year-old Marta’s drawing of her favourite food. Published with permission.

order for the child to build the whole alphabet, and presumably learn it (see also Nestle 2002). Many decisions about feeding-­eating are made in a shop, when for instance buying breakfast cereals. They are, next to sandwiches, one of the most common breakfast foods in Warsaw. In general, sweet cereals are recognized as children’s food both by children and their parents. Children often drew cereals as their favourite food. They were among the first products designed for and advertised to children (Robinson 2000; Elliott 2009: 35). Some parents try to convince their children to eat porridge (owsianka), an especially popular breakfast among the more health-­obsessed upper middle-­class families, or muesli or cornflakes, considered healthier than the sugary cereals; however, in the end they usually comply with children’s choices on this matter. For many others, this is a proper breakfast for their children. Children have their favourite brands, and they know them so well that they can tell if their parents bought the particular brand of cereals. Nine-­year-­old Julia, Natalia and Tomek’s daughter, told me: ‘My dad bought the fake chocolate balls, the fake Nesquick cereals. It was horrible. Maybe it was not that horrible, but no, bleh, horrible. [How could you tell?] They taste and smell differently, but mostly because of the packaging, it was different, I recognized that it was forged’. Food companies advertise sweet cereals as children’s perfect breakfast. They are a great example of nutritainment: sweet, colourful and playful, promoted by funny characters, which convinces children; and with added vitamins and minerals, reduced sugar content, eaten with milk, which convinces parents. They claim to combine both the health and nutrition as well as the fun and pleasure register of valuing food. One of my interlocutors who worked in a company producing children’s cereals told me: Parents perceive these as products for children. They connect it with cacao, with milk and so all the associations are good, they like it. And children love these products, these ­characters – t­ hey buy them with their eyes. [In the shops] they wallow on the floor in front of the shelves with these products. So we know that whatever we produce as a part of this brand, people will buy it.



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Success stories like that were often a source of anxiety for other food producers and marketers, attempting to create such popular brands and products. Children also shop on their own. As Krzysztof noticed, they become shoppers at the age of 8 or 9 years old. In Warsaw, many children receive pocket money from their parents or grandparents. They also tend to keep the change after doing shopping their parents asked for, and often collect coins found around a flat. Julia for instance looks for change around her flat, to get more money to spend in the school shop. As research shows, children spend their pocket money mostly on sweets and snacks, on ice-­cream, chocolate bars, chewing gum, crisps and soft drinks (UKOiK 2006). But they are not only interested in the fun and pleasure food can provide; most of them also highly value the social aspect of food. Twelve-­year-­old Zosia told me: My mum sometimes sends me out for shopping, and if I have enough money left, I can buy a chocolate bar. I right away think of my sister, so I usually buy cheaper ones, so that I can buy two. Then I feel sorry for my dad, so I buy even cheaper ones, so that there are three. And when I’m at my mum’s, I buy dark chocolate for her, because she is always on a diet.

Many children I have met, like Zosia, move knowingly around shops and make knowledgeable choices about what to buy. They are savvy consumers and economic agents. M ­ oreover – c­ ontrary to common b ­ eliefs – t­hey not only think of themselves and their own wants, but often consider others when buying and consuming food. Either in school or outside of it, children often share food with others, and highly value its social aspect.

SCHOOL SHOP (SKLEPIK SZKOLNY) One of the spaces where children interact most directly and independently with the food industry are school shops. The name sklepik szkolny in Polish is the diminutive version of the noun ‘shop’ (sklep), meaning a tiny shop, and usually signifies a shop run on school premises. School shops often take the form of rather small cubicles, square or rectangular, between three and four square metres in size. The walls are built from wood or plywood construction, and there are glass windows where the items for sale are displayed. There is also a counter where transactions take place. Inside there are shelves filled with products: foods, beverages and stationery. Usually, one person fits into this space, and sells the products; school shops are not self-­service spaces. School shops exist in the majority of primary schools in Warsaw.3 A school shop can be organized through the school, by teachers, students or parents; however, the most popular form since the 1990s, when the number of school

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Figure 2.2  A school shop, photographed by the author, 2013.

shops increased, has been to sublet the space to an outside entrepreneur, who opens the small shop. This provides one of the few ways for schools to earn additional money, as they receive the rent paid by the school shop owners. The principal, sometimes in collaboration with parents, can then dictate in the contract what can and what cannot be sold in a school shop. Children usually come to school shops in pairs or small groups. Twelve-­ year-­old Hania explained: ‘We always go together, as a group, I and my best friends, there are five of us. And we share everything we buy, or one person buys and treats others’. Children either share the ­ex­penses – t­ hey count how much money they have altogether and decide what to buy and then share ­it – o ­ r they reciprocate gifts: ‘so you will buy something for me today, and I will buy something for you tomorrow’, as I overheard one of the girls explaining to her friend. It is often more about the ritual and the experience of ‘going to the school shop’, than about eating itself. Twelve-­year-­old Agnieszka complained, ‘there is nothing I can buy there, only unhealthy things! But I still go there sometimes, with my friends, when they want to buy something’. I met with one of the school shop owners, Mr Kowalski, a man in his sixties, in a high school where he had his office. We talked for hours, during



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which I was invited to eat in a school café he also ran. We had coffee and naleśniki (pancakes), while he told me how he has built many of the shops from scratch. He had eighteen school shops when he started, and they were very popular. The schools were bigger, so there were more customers. ‘The 1990s were crazy’ – he told me – ‘and everyone was do­ing what they wanted. Everyone ate everything. Nobody heard about healthy food, nobody cared. It was like the Wild Wild West’. Healthy food was a recurring issue in my discussions with the school shop owners, brought up every time by my interlocutors. They felt they were under attack and before I had even asked about it, they defended themselves. Mr Kowalski pointed out to me: School shops became the scapegoat, they are perceived as evil and blamed for making children fat! But someone allowed these foods for consumption. And even if you control the school shops, the kids can always buy these products on their way to or from school. The school shops are needed, because small children have to eat and drink [during the school day]. I do not buy any of these ‘Chinese foods’.4 These shops are much safer than the corner shops, because you think of children when you buy the products, you select what’s good. … They are not looking in the right place for the guilty party. It is the parents’ responsibility, a child should learn how and what to eat at home.

Mr Kowalski argues that he is taking care of children, because he makes sure that they have something to eat and drink during their school day, and he takes special care to buy ‘good’ products. At the same time, he perceives it to be the parental responsibility to teach children to make the right food choices, not his. In fact, he provides healthy food in his shops because of the pressure which, according to him, comes both from the school and the government. But these ‘healthy food products’ – such as oat bars, ready-­made crisp sandwiches, corn wafers, w ­ ater – a­ re too expensive for most children. Mr Kowalski told me: ‘I would be happy selling only healthy food. I can start tomorrow, if anyone would buy it!’ One of his associ­ates participated in part of our meeting, and she commented by asking: ‘What does “healthy food” really mean?’ She explained that there is no clear definition of what healthy food means, and nobody wants to face it: ‘Maybe the chocolate bars that everyone gets so worked up about are actually not that bad?’ In her opinion, if things are allowed to be sold then they cannot be unhealthy; otherwise it is the fault and the responsibility of the state agencies. And that is in fact true: none of the food products allowed to be sold can legally be framed as unhealthy. School shops have drawn the attention of and have become a cause of many anxieties for various social actors interested in children’s current and future appetites, including parents, the media and the state. They illustrate well what I call the politics of responsibility and blame (Boni 2014). For parents, school shops have been problematic for some time. Many parents

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I talked to were concerned with the quality and unhealthiness of food available in school shops. It is one of the spaces where mothers cannot control what their children eat. Sometimes they can only detect what their children have been eating by finding sweet wrappers or food remains, such as lollipop sticks, in their backpacks or pockets. At the time of my fieldwork, school shops had become publicly contested places, often criticized in the media. MPs were working in parliament on a bill which was supposed to limit and define what could be sold in school shops, and prepared in school canteens, and clearly the school shop owners felt that they were under a lot of scrutiny. One of the nutritionists from the National Food and Nutrition Institute working on the new version of the bill warned me that ‘everyone knows that the food industry is powerful, and they will lobby. They are already getting ready, they have excellent lawyers and they already say that this [law] is discriminatory’. And they did lobby, as some of my interlocutors from the food industry confirmed. These amendments have indeed been criticized by food producers who described the first version as inconsistent and factually wrong, and accused the authors of a lack of consultation and cooperation with the food industry.5 They explained that the aim of food producers is not to make society fat, and that responsibility for children’s health should not be placed on them, as the greatest responsibility lies with parents.6 Others argued that it is a violation of consumer and trade rights. Mrs Szostek, another school shop owner, commented that the state cannot forbid something which parents agree to: ‘surely this must be a violation of parents and children’s rights!’, she told me, outraged. The questions of whose right and responsibility it is to feed children ‘well’, and to teach them to make the ‘right’ food choices, remained the focus of heated debates. The wider public shared the perception of school shops and their owners as evil and harmful to children. But Mrs Szostek thinks of economically deprived children when on a daily basis she brings all the unsold sandwiches to the after school common room, where a teacher distributes them among children who might be hungry, but do not have money to buy an­ything. Mr Kowalski takes special care to supply very cheap products so that all the children can buy something and do not feel excluded when their friends do their shopping. Nonetheless, it is often those cheap, but rather ‘bad’ quality products, including sweets, lollipops and gummy sweets, that cause so much concern among parents. People who work in school ­shops – ­at least those I was in contact ­with – ­care a lot about what children buy and eat. They often know children’s names and establish certain relationships with them, either based on friendship and famili­arity, or sometimes dislike and animosity. They take upon themselves a role of gatekeepers and often control what children buy, even if that means



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smaller profits. Mrs Teresa, a 65-­year-­old school shop seller, told me this story for example: ‘One boy wanted to buy so many Mr Snacks [crisps], that I asked him if he thinks that his mum would agree to that, and he reluctantly admitted that probably she would not, and bought less’. This was not the only time Mrs Teresa was worried about what children eat. Another time, when she asked a girl who wanted to buy fifteen gummy sweets whether she would get a stomach ache, the girl replied that she was accumulating the sweets for the coming holiday period, when the school would be closed. Mrs Teresa never denied children anything, but often asked or suggested that what they wanted was not such a good idea, and reflected on what their parents would say. Many of them complied with her suggestions. Mrs Szostek told me another story: There were these two boys, who bought a lot of sweets, crazy amounts. So I asked them to bring to me the information from their parents, that they allow it, and their mother signed a document in which she explained that she allows her children to eat as many sweets as they want. So I always had it in the school shop, just in case.

It is not clear in case of what, but she was probably referring to teachers who might worry that she sells too many sweets to children. As long as parents agree, this has to be accepted in school, even if teachers disagree, because in Poland parents are considered to be responsible for their children’s eating practices, and have the right to make decisions about them. And these rights sometimes materialize in the form of notes passed between home and school. Such informal bureaucracy seems to guide many of the school-­family relationships, which I explore more in Chapter 4. School shops might challenge this hierarchy and power relations, since children in fact make the decisions. And that is why for many adults, parents, politicians and non-­governmental workers, it is so problematic. The worries about children’s food decisions are also connected to their economic choices and their relationships with money (see Zelizer 2002). It is assumed that children cannot make the ‘right’ choices with regard to food, because they are not knowledgeable and do not yet possess the ‘proper’ dispositions to food. They are not ‘proper’ consumers yet. Children are perceived as malleable, which allows many adults to influence them in a ‘good’ way and teach them to become ‘proper’ consumers and make ‘proper’ food choices. But it also enables the ‘bad’ influences that many are so worried about. Children do make knowledgeable choices and decisions in school shops. The older children usually know exactly what they want to buy and have their favourites foods. They also have larger sums of money. The younger children often come to the counter, put all the coins they have there, and ask the sellers working in the school shop what they can buy with these amounts of money. It is often just nickels and dimes, so they usually buy the smallest and the

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Figure 2.3  Sweets bought in a school shop. Photographed by Katarzyna Boni.

cheapest foodstuffs, something they can share, such as chewing gum lemons and gummy worms. For children, eating products from school shops is an important social experience. What is important is the rite of passage, as children often have to be a bit older in order to go to the school shop independently from their teacher. It is about going to the school shop together and sharing food, rather than about the food itself. Even though the feeding in the case of school shops might seem reduced to the economic transaction, for the owners of the shops and the sellers it is often more. They do care in a certain way about what they feed to children, they do care about what children eat. At the same time school shops are business ventures with the goal of making money. Parents, state officials and others are concerned with this contradiction: if somebody wants to earn money by selling food to children, they will sell to children what they want (unhealthy, not ‘good’ food) rather than what they should eat (healthy and ‘proper’ food). Children, however, are not a unified and homogenous group of consumers. They choose different food. Nevertheless, there are implicit assumptions about what children would like and prefer, which in fact reaffirms their preferences. Many adults recognize children’s preferences to be a problem. Children cannot be trusted. Because of this school shops and school shop owners have been presented in public debates as bad and harmful to children. Simultaneously, while some argue that it is parents’ responsibility to teach children to make ‘good’ choices



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regarding their eating, others say that it is the responsibility of food producers and the state which controls the food industry to organize these feeding-­ eating interactions so that they are not harmful. Everyone engaged in these politics of responsibility and blame evidently has a different view of what ‘good food’ is, what can cause harm and what ‘proper’ eating should look like.

AMBIVALENT FUN The food industry is perceived by many people as bad, exploitative and immoral because it focuses only on gaining money and is willing to manipulate people in order to do that (Nestle 2002; Moss 2013). And the manipulation of children is seen as especially wrong. Małgosia, who worked in market research, told me about one of her clients, a company producing food intended for children: ‘let’s face it, they think about how to earn money. Children are customers, so they try to sell to them as much as possible’. In contrast to that, the dominating view in Poland is that children are innocent, naive and vulnerable, and either because of manipulation by the market, or because of not being knowledgeable, they are perceived as poor decision makers. That is why adults want to influence children’s choices, for instance in school shops, because they perceive themselves as better decision makers on behalf of children; they know better what is ‘good’ for them. Adults do not trust children to make ‘good’ food choices. And hence, they rarely give them the right to make their own choices. The food industry is clearly anxious about being blamed for making children’s food habits ‘bad’ and making children fat. Many initiatives are introduced to counter and sway this opinion. Since 2006 the Polish Federation of Food Industry (PFPŻ), an umbrella lobbying organization that represents the food sector in Poland, has organized a programme implemented in schools, which aims to educate children about the importance of a healthy diet and physical activity, which I delve into in Chapter 5. And there are many more food education programmes sponsored by food companies. These kinds of initiatives are often health-­washing campaigns, whereby references to health and nutrition are misleadingly used to promote the view of an organization’s products, aims or policies as healthy and health-­oriented. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns are one thing, adding ‘healthy’ components, such as vitamins or nutrients, to different products is another. Flavours of fruits or vegetables or nutrients such as vitamins are added to products to enhance their perception as healthy foodstuffs. It is not necessarily always a health-­washing practice; after all, food producers do respond to the increasing societal concerns with health. A few of the

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food marketers told me that the companies they work for genuinely care about the ingredients of their products, especially if they are designated for children. They respond to consumers’ expectations, by limiting sugar, salt or fat in their products.7 Certain gummy sweets are perceived as better than others, because they contain pectin instead of gelatine, and added vitamins. Vegetable crisps, created for example from beetroot or carrots, are considered a ‘healthy snack’, even though crisps in general are perceived as unhealthy ‘junk food’. There are more and more such healthy snacks available in Poland. Another argument I heard voiced within the food industry is that it is not the food market’s fault that parents allow their children to eat more than one portion of a certain product. It all comes back to the act of balancing diets and foods, to balancing feeding and eating. ‘Bags of crisps or packs of gummy candies consist of around five food portions, and they are not supposed to be eaten all at once’, Kasia, who worked for a food company, explained to me, as if it was easy to consume just one-­fifth of a bag of gummy sweets. In this case the balancing of children’s food is translated into exact food portions, exact calculated amounts of particular nutrients or calories, which in fact mirrors the nutritional obsession with counting food components. For parents and for children, their feeding and eating, their food and searching for balanced diets, is rarely about counting calories, food servings and food components. Hardly anyone engages in such a way with food on a daily basis. But they are being encouraged more and more by diverse state actors and health educators to read food labels and decipher the lists of food ingredients; to indeed engage with food through labels, measures and calculations. And this seems to be the language, the way of framing food, also used by the food market. Many food producers have also often argued, in my interviews with them, that they do not advertise food products to children under the age of 12, and in that sense they do not manipulate or exploit young children. In 2010, the Polish Federation of Food Industry (PFPŻ) created a code of conduct with regard to advertising and marketing food products to children under 12 years old. It is assumed that younger children might have problems with distinguishing between the advertisement or marketing strategy and factual information, and therefore are extremely susceptible to suggestions. The code disapproves of such practices by, for example, prohibiting advertising and marketing of food products in primary schools. This code was based on the EU Pledge, which was signed by many European companies in 2008. The code of conduct has been often pointed out to me by food producers as proving that the food industry imposes strict rules on itself so that it would not destroy children’s childhoods. But such an approach seems to assume that children under the age of 12 live in a social vacuum, that they do not have older siblings, friends in school, that since the ad is not strictly targeted



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at them, but to their older siblings or mothers, they will not watch it and incorporate its messaging, that they do not go to shops. What is more, there are many other marketing strategies, such as adding toys or collectables to food products or setting up bouncy castles at children’s events, that provide ways for the food industry to influence children’s food choices. I met Krzysztof, who has already featured in this chapter, early in my fieldwork. He worked for a chocolate company, was in his mid-­fifties and had two young daughters. We met for a coffee and he very openly talked about his work, his views and the food industry: Everyone will tell you that they emphasize quality, particularly when making food for children. But in fact they care about production optimization, to get as much from it as they c­ an – ­that’s capitalism. And the basis of capitalism is to produce as much as possible as cheaply as possible, and sell it to make a profit. … Food lobbyists now have such a problem that the legalization is going in the direction of limiting people’s choices. This is done in two ways. By limiting advertisements and marketing to children, which in fact won’t change much in consumption cultures. People smoke not because cigarettes are widely advertised, and it’s similar with food. The ads in children’s tv channels, places like that, should be limited. I agree with that. As a father, I really see that this is a problem. Although children make their food choices not necessarily based on ads. … The other thing they are trying to do is to limit the sale of some products in particular places, near schools or playgrounds. But tell me, is pańska skórka8 bought near the cemetery or during some festivities better than a good quality chocolate you might buy in a local shop? I don’t think so! … These two approaches to limiting people’s food choices are discussed now. I’m liberal, I think we should not have many limitations and regulations in capitalism, but we should have some.

This long quote from Krzysztof identifies well the attempts that are made by some activists and state and government officials to control the food industry. They are framed, however, as a way of limiting consumer choices rather than controlling the food producers, marketers and retailers. The individual food choices of older and younger consumers are particularly cherished and emphasized by the food industry for political reasons. It enables placing all responsibility for ‘proper’ feeding and eating, and balanced diets, on individual consumers and families. Particular foods, such as sweets, can in fact empower children. They might provide children with power, even the authority and the competence that many adults may be lacking. And it is the food industry that provides this empowerment and independence for children, for instance in school shops. They create something that becomes an important material and symbolic part of children’s food experiences, but also makes their presence more influential in the domestic foodscape (Elliott 2009: 38). As Buckingham and Tingstad (2014) show, both perspectives are in fact too limited to reflect the reality of children’s multiple engagements with

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consumer culture. Children go through ‘commercial enculturation’ as Cook (2014) named it: they come to know and participate in commercial life in many ways. It is not that they are only exploited and manipulated, nor is it that they are solely empowered by the food industry. They appropriate the messages from advertisements and the meanings proposed by food marketers in multiple ways. Some of the jingles might be sung by a group of friends, but the foods they promote are not eaten. Children share products which are meant for individual consumption, or invent ways to play with them before actually eating them. Moreover, children differ in their ways of engaging with consumer culture, just as they differ in their approaches and taste for sweets and other foods. Some for instance can eat an unlimited amount of sweets, while others do not enjoy them as much or limit their consumption of them because they are much more health conscious. Twelve-­year-­old Zosia pointed out: With the sweets, it is like that, that my sister consumes them very fast, and I save them for later, for instance I still have sweets from Christmas two years ago. When we both receive a box of sweets, she eats hers right away, and I eat half of mine and give the rest to her, sometimes in hiding, because sometimes mum does not allow her to eat sweets. So she eats a box and a half, while I eat half of it. It just seems I receive sweets more often than she does, so it evens out.

Indeed, Marta, Zosia and Ola’s mum, told me that Ola is a bit too chubby, so she controls and limits more what she eats than her older sister, Zosia. Parents were mainly concerned about sweets because they were perceived as causing dental caries and making children fat, but also because ‘proper people’ should limit their consumption, and discipline and restrict themselves with regard to ‘bad’ food such as sweets or junk food. These concerns about sweets are not only about health, but also about aesthetics and what are considered ‘proper’ slim bodies, and what ‘proper’ people do. As such, they are fuelled by upper middle-­class ideals about modern personhood (see Boero 2012; Biltekoff 2013). Children today seem to be much more proficient in their engagement with consumer cultures than their parents used to be at their age. In fact, in the 1990s, parents had to learn how to be a part of a new kind of consumer culture together with their children. Małgosia, one of the researchers working in marketing, argued that the mother’s age has a greater influence on what children eat and what the family buys than a child’s age. She told me: I myself remember eating gummy sweets and crisps in school. I have a different attitude to that of other mothers who are older. And we [market researchers] see the difference. If a mother snacks on children’s food, if she is familiar with it, it makes a difference. The generation of mothers who know these kinds of foods from their own experiences, from their own childhoods, are more inclined to buy it for their children today.



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The food industry is in itself often conflicted and anxious about feeding-­ eating relationships. Different companies compete with and are often critical of each other. Also, food marketers I talked to were often critical of their clients, some of the food companies they worked for. They were disillusioned about the fact that the goal of food producers is to create profits, and if convincing children or their parents to buy their food products provides these profits, then this is what they would do. Since food producers and marketers are often parents themselves, they have ambiguous relationships with the food industry. Bartek, although convincingly arguing that the company he works for takes health and wellness very seriously, buys different, more healthy food products from a different brand for his daughter. In fact, his daughter was present during our interview. We were sitting in a shared open space at his work, and while he was telling me about his clients who supposedly take great care of children’s needs and wants when producing and advertising foods to them, he was simultaneously giving his daughter dried fruits and nuts as snacks, which were not produced by his client-­companies. And Krzysztof admitted that ‘the snacking trend, promoted by food producers, is something that is bothering me as a parent, but is helpful for me as a food producer’. This ambivalence and need to deal with various contradictions arising from consumer cultures characterizes well people’s daily engagement with the food industry.

CONCLUDING REMARKS This chapter focused on children as young consumers. The food industry was one of the first social actors to acknowledge children’s subjectivity, agency and independence, and recognize them as c­ onsumers – ­consumers with increasing purchase and influence powers due to the changing parenting styles and family models. Since the 1990s the market for children’s food has been steadily growing in Poland. Parents, as well as their children, have had to learn how to navigate these changing consumer cultures. Different food market actors are well aware of the needs and desires that children express towards and through food. In fact, they create many of them. This is the industry’s response to its own anxieties about children’s food. The food industry struggles to keep up with what they perceive as children’s rapidly changing preferences, their lack of brand loyalty, increasing parental interest in healthy food and limiting the consumption of products considered ‘unhealthy’. Particular food companies, marketers or retailers are also worried about competition and profit margins. While they are often rivals, they are collectively concerned about how the food industry is presented in the media, regulated by the state and perceived by public

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opinion. Although they take completely different shapes, the food industry also experiences feeding anxieties. And this certainly feeds the anxieties of other actors, particularly families. Many parents I spoke to treated some parts of the food industry as an enemy and a source of risk. They felt that sweets and snacks, their multitude and availability, the appeal to children of their funny names, flavours and sensations, and collectables, are a threat. These foods tempt children and challenge parental values and ideas about ‘proper’ feeding. They are what makes children out of control. And it falls upon parents, mothers in particular, to continuously restore control over their children, their food and their bodies, as well as to teach children to make their own ‘proper’ decisions when it comes to food, and to learn to discipline and control themselves. At the same time, parents want their children to enjoy food, to have fun with it, to connect it with pleasure. And children certainly are very keen on the fun and pleasure food might provide. They also enjoy the sociality that often comes with it, sharing food with peers and family. The relationships within consumer cultures are always ambiguous. Balancing between different registers of valuing food, between healthy food and sweets, between fun and nutrition, between control and pleasure, is a daily struggle. The food industry attempts to deal with it by creating products characterized by edutainment or nutritainment. And families, as the next chapter further demonstrates, find their own ways of dealing with feeding anxieties.

NOTES Some of the analysis featured in this chapter was initially introduced in my previously published work (Boni 2014), but it has been substantially reworked and developed.  1. The consumption of sweets in Poland has in fact steadily increased since 2004, when Poland entered the European Union and the sweets industry was restructured. 91% of Poles buy sweets on a daily basis and the industry’s worth is estimated at 12.7 billion PLN ($3,6 billion) (KPMG 2014).  2. A typical Polish sweet treat: a sweet foam, a kind of marshmallow, covered in chocolate.  3. Research conducted in 2013 in 167 primary schools in Warsaw demonstrated that there were school shops in 102 of them (Czarniecka-­Skubina 2013).  4. ‘Chinese foods’ is a Polish expression, a term used by many of my interlocutors to describe foodstuffs with unknown origins and unknown content, generally unsafe and untrustworthy.  5. Another version of this law was implemented in 2015. It was contested and criticized by many actors, and the new government introduced a more relaxed version of the law in 2016 (Boni 2022b).



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 6. Written down in personal notes shared with me by an activist who attended the conference Sklepiki szkolne – zmiany w drodze ewolucji czy rewolucji (School ­shops – ­changes through evolution or revolution?), organized in Warsaw.  7. Although, as Michael Moss (2013) shows, this usually means that they have to balance the taste of the product by adding other additives.  8. Pańska skórka is a sweet treat, made from egg whites, sugar, water and rose or raspberry juice, which is sold mainly in Warsaw, typically on All Saints Day or during other festivities.

CHAPTE R 3

EAT JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE On Family Meals, Balancing Acts and Intergenerational Negotiations

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I

t was an early November, just after All Saints Day. I was eating my first dinner with the Szymańscy family, Tomek and Natalia in their early forties and their two daughters, 9-­year-­old Julia and 5-­year-­old Kasia. It was cold and dark outside, but warm and cosy inside. We were sitting at the table in their dining room, connected to an open kitchen. We were eating fried fish fillets, baked vegetables and barley prepared by Tomek, while chatting and getting to know each other. At some point Kasia stopped eating and got up from the table. She came back with a sweet treat, pańska skórka.1 Natalia told Kasia to leave it and sit back at the table with all of us. Kasia argued that they had told her before that she could eat it today after dinner, even though it was not a ‘sweet day’, and she was now done with her dinner so she wanted to eat it. Her mum started saying that she never agreed to that and that anyway she should come back to the table and eat like a proper person. ‘There’s this delicious fish, come back and finish eating it’, she added. Then Tomek said that he had told Kasia that she could eat her pańska skórka today, and that Natalia should let her have it. ‘She will not finish the dinner anyway now’, he argued. At this point Natalia looked at me with a particular intensity. Probably because I was there, she decided not to argue anymore. Kasia started unwrapping her pańska skórka, when her sister took it from her hands saying that she wanted one as well. Tomek explained that she had eaten hers the day before and that this was her sister’s. Julia gave it back to Kasia. Natalia commented that she could only imagine what I was thinking just then about their parental practices, implying that I disapproved, and we all laughed a bit nervously. Natalia and Tomek, as parents usually do, have particular ideas about feeding their children. They might or might not agree on some things. But



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their ideas, plans and practices of feeding are tempered by their daughters’ ideas about and practices of eating. Kasia had different plans than her parents. The family meal, filled with love and care, is also a space of power struggles and negotiations. Parents and children negotiate their feeding-­eating relationships on a daily basis. Natalia at some point acknowledged that her daughter had eaten a little bit of fish and vegetables, so even if she ate something sweet now, her diet would still be balanced. These ideas of a ‘balanced diet’ and ‘sweet days’ already emerged in the previous chapter, and I come back to it later in this chapter. Natalia also commented ironically that what I had witnessed that evening was an example of ‘bad’ feeding practices. It seemed she felt guilty and judged, even though I was far from judging her in any way or considering this situation a ‘bad’ example of anything. I think she judged herself, something I encountered in many homes across Warsaw. There are particular food rhythms at home that organize family meals. The practices of feeding and eating follow a certain logic and rules, they are embedded in what Goffman called (1983) an interaction order, specific to a particular socio-­cultural moment and place, and to a particular family. One of the currently shared assumptions in Poland is that adults feed children, and not the other way around. Another one is that children are supposed to eat what adults feed them, although it is increasingly acknowledged that adults should not force children to eat. Also, the dominating health perspective on food is one of the shared presuppositions guiding many feeding and eating interactions, as is the gendered division of foodwork, and the particular order of meals. As Goffman explained, however, ‘what is desirable order from the perspective of some can be sensed as exclusion and repression from the point of view of others’ (1983: 5). This resonates well with children’s experiences. Most of the feeding-­eating interactions I encountered in Warsaw were organized, controlled and coordinated by adults, and imposed on children. ‘Eat just a little bit more’; ‘eat at least few more bites of meat and veggies’; ‘when I was your age we did not have such great selection of food’; ‘do not be picky’; ‘eat, or you won’t get dessert’; ‘don’t eat sweets’ – these are just some of the most common phrases children hear on a daily basis. The children who participated in my research did not eat only for biological survival, but were encouraged to eat in a particular way that fulfilled their parents’ expectations, and demands placed on them, about family meals: eating ‘right’, eating ‘healthily’, eating in a ‘civilized’ manner and developing the ‘proper’ food habits that manifest ‘proper’ bodies and characters. This chapter further unpacks what these adjectives mean in practice. Family is at the centre of multiple feeding anxieties. Families in Poland have been recognized by many social actors, politicians and civil servants,

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nutrition and health experts, school employees and journalists, as failing in the ‘proper’ feeding of children. One dietician, when we discussed food education, told me: Parents and grandparents are the problem, families are the problem. It is still a common belief that a healthy child is a chubby and pink child, who has a great appetite and always takes a second serving; while a child who does not want to eat, who eats as much as she feels she needs, she would be perceived as an unhealthy child, a neglected child… This is a problem, because children feel how much they want to and need to eat, not everyone has to eat as much as a grandma wants him to!

Parents and grandparents are presented in many private and public conversations as the main ‘problem’ when it comes to children’s food. They either do not feed children ‘proper’ food, or they overfeed them, as in the quote above. The practice of overfeeding is strongly connected with the cultural meanings ascribed to feeding and care, and more traditional understandings of health, common in Poland, which I discussed in Chapter 1. There is a special public interest in and lament about the decline of family meals. Family meals are an ideal everyone should strive for. They are often correlated with better health outcomes (e.g. Hammons and Fiese 2011). They are for instance connected to lower rates of childhood obesity. Such information was often promoted through media outlets at the time of my fieldwork. Nonetheless, correlation is not causation. As Anne Murcott (1997, 2012, 2019) repeatedly argued, there is very limited scientific evidence supporting the claims about the decline of family meals and their supposedly negative consequences. It just might happen that families who exercise more and practice more healthy diets also eat meals together, and that families where parents work on shifts, who are in more difficult financial situations, might find it more difficult to consume meals together. Nevertheless, in Poland as in other countries (e.g. Bugge and Almas 2006; Wilk 2010), family meals are ascribed magic-­like powers and are expected to work their magic when it comes to feeding children. But these ideal visions and expectations are far from reality. Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton and Sinikka Elliott (2019) demonstrated how such normative assumptions and expectations about family meals and home cooking in the US are particularly difficult for working-­class mothers, and how they in fact exacerbate the problem. Family is at the centre of feeding anxieties, stemming both from within and from outside family life. That November evening, after having dinner with the Szymańscy family, I spent some time with Julia and Kasia in their room. We were sitting on the floor surrounded by toys, school books and notebooks. We were drawing and talking. At some point Julia stopped our conversation, made sure that the doors were closed and put her forefinger on her lips indicating that this



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would be our secret. She fished out two small Kinder chocolate bars hidden in her drawer. She gave one to me and shared the other one with her younger sister, Kasia. While enjoying the chocolate, I asked where she got it from. I learnt that Julia often receives sweets from her grandparents. And since sweets consumption is limited in the Szymańscy home, she eats them in hiding from her parents. The fact that we were eating in hiding certainly added special value to this encounter, as well as to the food we consumed. Many children engage in such illicit practices, either at home or at school, which I explore more in the next chapter. Amongst the many rules adults set up for them, children carve out their own eating practices. Children resist and challenge parental feeding with their own eating and non-­eating practices. Through that they not only shape what sort of eaters they are, but also what kind of feeders their parents might be. This chapter delves into these multiple intergenerational and gendered negotiations and power struggles around feeding and eating. Building on the experiences I had with families across Warsaw, this chapter is about how families come together to deal with, but in fact end up reproducing, feeding anxieties.

GENDERED FOODWORK Feeding children is a highly gendered domain, with most of responsibility and blame falling in Poland on women. Women are socialized to be feeding mothers through anxiety. The notion that feeding is a woman’s job, that women are ‘natural’ and ‘instinctual’ feeders is so widespread and strongly internalized by Poles that even women who are not responsible for foodwork at home and who do not like to cook often take on the responsibility of feeding the family when their children are born. There are also often practical reasons for such decisions. Nevertheless, placing the child at the centre of societal interests often comes at the expense of mothers, and adds to their unpaid and unrecognized work (e.g. DeVault 1991; Rosen and Twamley 2018). Indeed, foodwork is not only about consumption, but about actual mental, physical and emotional labour. The coordination of feeding and eating involves finding out what different members of the family like and dislike and how their tastes change. It encompasses planning meals, shopping for products and preparing food, anticipating the plans, wants and needs of the different members of the family and adjusting to them, while dealing with financial and time constraints, as well as other family and work responsibilities. As many researchers demonstrated, feeding involves continuous insecurity and anxiety in dealing with daily food situations, demands, needs and

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wants (e.g. Bugge and Almäs 2006; Anving and Thorsted 2010; Anving and Sellerberg 2010). This is how 30-­year-­old Marysia described her typical day to me: I wake up around 6 am and prepare breakfast for my husband. I also prepare a sandwich for him to take to work. Then my children get up, so I prepare breakfast for Sylwia, usually a milk soup. … She gets sandwiches or a sweet bun and something to drink to consume at school. During winter I prepare tea with lemon or raspberry juice, and I give it to her cooled. She goes to school at 8 am. [This is followed by a long description of what her 2-­year-­old son eats throughout the day and what kind of chores she does at home.] I collect her around 4 o’clock, and there is always a soup waiting, so she usually eats it. Then they eat a second dish. Sometimes she waits for my husband, and they eat it together as a supper. Or he eats a second dish, and she eats a normal supper, such as sandwiches or toast. My husband doesn’t like to eat the same food two days in a row, so I prepare something different on a daily basis, and try to make sure that each of them eats something. If Sylwia doesn’t want to eat what I’ve prepared, I would prepare something different just for her. So sometimes I end up making two or three dishes one day.

I asked her when she eats herself, upon hearing which she started laughing, and replied: I eat breakfast on the run and obiad [dinner] usually when she is back from school. We eat together. Unless I do not manage, because I have to feed them and prepare something else, then I eat with my husband in the evening. Unless I am putting children to bed or something, then I will again eat on the move.

Marysia puts a great deal of energy, time and knowledge into foodwork at home, which, as DeVault (1991) noticed, is largely invisible to her family members and the society at large. As a typical Matka-Polka (Polish Mother), she is expected to juggle multiple roles and responsibilities at the same time, and to sacrifice her own needs and wants, including eating (see Titkov 1995; Thompson 1996; Murcott 2000). When I asked another mother, Magda, about her ideal meal, she started daydreaming about a meal not eaten as a mother, but calmly, slowly, at the table and not running around it after kids. Anna shared with me that she sometimes feels like a dumpster: ‘I just eat what they have left; otherwise we would throw it away. It’s not nice though, to eat such a half-­eaten, tossed on the plate meal’. Mothers often adjust, or even to some extent sacrifice, their own eating, their own needs and wants, in order to feed their family. And while in poor families this might literally mean not eating so that children could eat (Pugh 2009), in families in better socio-­economic situations it is about likes and dislikes, food preferences and who eats last. While a mother’s focus is on her individual children, as a group, society expects that mothers will raise a future generation that eats properly and



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healthily. The societal concerns about ‘bad’ feeding are exemplified in the figure of a ubiquitous child who snacks on junk food in front of a TV. During one of my conversations with Tomek, he recounted a situation he recently witnessed: When I was at the food market the other day, I’ve seen a mother with her 2-­year-­old child in a stroller, and that child was holding in her hand a huge Snickers bar and eating it. A 2-­year-­old child! It’s sometimes outrageous what people give their children to eat, how they feed them!

Tomek considers himself to be more relaxed about food than his wife, and yet ­he – ­as do many ­others – ­critically scrutinizes people based on what they feed their children. Almost all of the parents I talked to, who were mainly mothers, while themselves anxious about feeding their children, judged and critically commented on the behaviour of other parents. Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston and Merin Oleschuk (2018) demonstrated that such a figure of ‘the other’ mother who feeds her children in a ‘bad’ way is often used as a negative example by parents to position themselves as ‘not so bad’ or even ‘good’ feeders. While sometimes the judgement of parental feeding practices concerns particular situations and particular mothers one might know, quite often it also concerns random people on the street. Often such normative and disapproving statements become more generalized, expressed privately and publicly, extending to all parents, no matter what their actual practices might be. In public debates or media representations mothers, in particular, are presented as an almost homogenous group. Since it has been recognized by the government and supranational experts, such as the WHO or European ­Commission – ­which I discuss in Chapter ­5 – t­ hat children’s eating is a problem in Poland, all mothers are held responsible for that, no matter how their children in fact eat. There is a collective responsibility and collective blame assigned to all mothers. So while a mother might engage in ‘proper’ feeding practices, according to her, she often feels personally offended when observing the ‘improper’ feeding practices of other mothers, because of that sense of ‘collective’ responsibility. The ‘bad’ feeding practices of other parents are perceived as an actual and more abstract threat that might undermine their own ‘good’ feeding practices. Because of that, parents, or more specifically and more often mothers, do not constitute a supportive collective, but rather a judgemental and alienating one. Mothers discipline themselves and others to become proper feeding figures. Everyone feels judged and judges others. They feel continuously on display, so they continuously have to perform ‘good mothering’ and ‘proper’ feeding. And this exacerbates the feeding anxieties they might experience. The expectation that mothers should feed is so deeply rooted in Poland, that fathers who feed their children are often met with surprise and disbelief

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and are even taunted. Tomek, Mikołaj and Piotr, who are just as engaged as their wives in feeding their children, mentioned that some of their friends were surprised to learn that they cook for their families; they were even laughed at. At the time of my fieldwork, it was still very rare for fathers to be involved in feeding their children. Many arguments are used to rationalize feeding as women’s responsibility, starting from biological ­ones – ­women are ‘naturally’ more prone to be ­feeders – ­to the issues of knowledge, skill, time schedules, concern for the family health (Beagan et al. 2008). It is often especially difficult for the older generation to accept. Natalia’s father told me how Tomek and his way of cooking dominates in his daughter’s home. He thinks that Natalia, his daughter, would feed his granddaughters better than Tomek, his son-­in-­law. He cannot fully accept the ‘switched’ gender roles, as he put it, in his daughter’s household. This cultural and social division of foodwork is reinforced and reproduced in many ways. Husbands, for instance, are often prevented by their wives from engaging in feeding practices. Joanna was getting up around 5am, and preparing both breakfast and lunchboxes for her children before she went to work, because she did not trust her husband to do it properly. Many women told me that they would deal with feeding quicker and better, that it is easier for them. As Brenda Beagan et al. (2008) argued, such implicit gender assumptions are very difficult to challenge because they become an important part of the cultural coding and social order. Then again, this gives women a certain authority and power in their family relations, power they might not possess in other spheres of life (Walczewska 2008). It is rarely recognized that such a division of foodwork, like the highly gendered division of housework in general, forces women to stay at home and is the result of a particular patriarchal social order. Fathers are often not only considered useless, but they are also seen as challenging the maternal feeding practices (see Curtis, James and Ellis 2009; Metcalfe et al. 2009). Eight-­year-­old Sylwia agreed: ‘It is so much easier to convince my dad to eat sweets than my mum!’ Fathers more often get to be the fun parents who break the rules, while mothers remain the more strict and responsible ones. Twelve-­year-­old Zosia noticed these differences: ‘My mum takes care that we eat healthy and right, while my dad is much more relaxed about it, but I eat there every two weeks, so it can’t be too bad for me, can it?’ Children learn their parents’ different feeding styles, and often use this to their advantage. They know it might be easier to convince their dad to eat something sweet than their mum, although Zosia here seemed a little concerned about her dad’s feeding. Such shared assumptions about the gendered division of foodwork put incredible pressure on mothers. They are most often the ones who have to conduct the daily physical, mental and emotional foodwork. They have to



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plan and control their children’s food, and are responsibilized for their children’s health, while dealing with the multiple challenges stemming from the food industry, from other parents and schools, or their own family members. This experience has been shared by all the mothers I talked to, no matter what their socio-­economic situation was. Natalia feels responsible for taking care of her daughters ‘proper’ eating, even though it is Tomek who cooks for the whole family. The social and cultural assumptions about the gendered division of foodwork are deeply internalized and reproduced through family life.

CHANGING FAMILY FOODWAYS Having children changes the way in which people think about food and the values they might attach to food. They approach its quality, the balance of a diet, the concept of nourishment differently. The meal patterns and family foodways change significantly when children are born. The family food rhythms are often adjusted to children’s needs and preferences. My interlocutors mentioned that their food habits became much more structured, organized and conservative, in comparison with their chaotic, but also more experimental, food habits from before having children. They no longer prepare seafood, more spicy meals, for instance from South-­East Asian cuisine, or more elaborate dishes. They all have a routine family menu, that they repeat over and over again. As they explained, it is easier both for them and for their children to have such an established food routine. I noticed a visible turn to more typically Polish cuisine when cooking for children: soups, schabowy (a breaded schnitzel) or kotlety mielone (larger meatballs) with potatoes and surówka (salad from raw vegetables), pancakes, pierogi (dumplings), kopytka (a sort of gnocchi) – these are widely seen as child-­friendly meals. Parents mentioned that they had rarely prepared anything like that before, and switched to these more typical Polish meals when feeding ­children – ­these are the dishes they ate and liked in their childhood. Moreover, most of the meals are homemade. Homemade meals are still most common in Poland (Domański et al. 2015), particularly when it comes to feeding children. This is partly because such food is considered better quality and healthier, and there are strong cultural expectations about making homemade food for children (Bugge and Almäs 2006). But this is partly due to financial reasons. Many parents told me that they could not afford to eat out with children. Having children changes the family foodwork and family foodways, and demands careful coordination and planning. In the Podolscy family, Mikołaj does a large grocery shop during the weekend, and then on Mondays,

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Wednesdays and Fridays, Małgosia leaves work early to pick up 7-­year-­old Bartek from school and 4-­year-­old Zuzia from the kindergarten, and she cooks obiad (the main meal) and prepares supper for them. On those days Mikołaj prepares their breakfast. On Tuesdays and Thursdays Mikołaj goes to work at 4am, while Małgosia prepares breakfast for their children. He leaves work early to pick the children up, take care of them and prepare food for them on these days. During weekends they try to repeat the same food pattern, since, as Małgosia said, ‘children are already used to eating at this time, so we try to follow the school rhythms, and we eat an early obiad’. Mikołaj and Małgosia, both in their late thirties, implement this elaborate plan in order to coordinate feeding and eating at their home. Many parents I talked to create similar rotas in order to coordinate their many obligations and responsibilities, their own feeding and their children’s eating, although in most households, feeding was solely the responsibility of women. Małgosia and Mikołaj were not only both engaged in careful coordination of feeding and eating, they also seemed very synched in their feeding styles. They both mentioned they had talked a lot about it, and agreed on almost everything. Małgosia described their family feeding style as follows: We are not obsessed with food, and healthy food, but we care about it. For instance when choosing yogurt, we will choose one with less sugar, or a wholegrain bread, but we are not obsessing about it. We also take into account the financial aspect of food. … In general, I think that my children have good taste. They would not eat a fake, chocolate-­like product, they would not like its taste. And they both enjoy eating dark chocolate. Same with salt. We do not use much salt, and when they eat somewhere else, they often say it’s too salty. They are used to particular flavours. … We do not plan or strategize how we will feed them. It just works out somehow. We might be lacking such an organizational thinking, and from time to time, such a controller appears in my head, ‘let’s start thinking more and planning what children will eat’. Yeah, I would like to plan their diet better. I don’t like to cook, and I sometimes think with fondness about the baby food jars. You just got them out, fed them to your child, and you knew that they received everything they need from their food. And now… It’s much more tricky! But I’m happy that they eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, a lot of nuts or sunflower seeds, things like that.

Małgosia clearly cares about how and what her children eat, and makes sure that it is healthy, but she does not obsess about it, as she claimed a few times. The more she talked about it, though, the more Małgosia commented that feeding her children could and should be organized in a ‘better’ way. Nevertheless, she was fairly content with how things were. This did come, however, with an incredible physical, emotional and mental foodwork conducted on a daily basis by both of them. In the Szymańscy family, it is Tomek who is responsible for foodwork at home, for shopping, planning the meals, preparing and serving them. But



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Natalia has her own ideas about how her family should eat, which are often different from Tomek’s. Tomek is much more interested in the taste and pleasure that comes with food; he wants to expand his daughters’ food horizons, teach them to appreciate diverse flavours, and most of all, for them to enjoy eating. Whereas Natalia would like her daughters to eat in a healthy way; she puts a lot of emphasis on including vegetables and grains in their diet, and limiting their sweets consumption. She often suggests to Tomek what can or should be prepared, even though he is the one who is actually doing the foodwork. Tomek summed this up by saying: ‘My wife tells me what they should eat, and I remake it into what they will actually eat, and this is how it works’. Moreover, maternal and paternal grandparents are highly involved as they take care of Julia and Kasia on a weekly basis. Even though Tomek is responsible for foodwork at home, Natalia engages in the mental work of feeding her children, is much more anxious about it and attempts to control and discipline both her husband, her children and the grandparents in how they feed and eat. Paweł and Paulina Marciniak are separated and share the custody of their children. Adam and Basia spend around eleven days per month at their dad’s place, and the rest of the month with their mum. This situation dictates and demands sharing and coordination of feeding and eating. Even though before they split up Paulina was more responsible for foodwork at home, they share it now and are generally in agreement when it comes to the feeding rules, the main one being that Adam and Basia eat sweets only during the weekend. Paulina cooks according to the Chinese Wuxing Five Elements approach to diet. But, as she said: I am not orthodox about it. I was trying to lose weight for a long time, and it didn’t work, and I got frustrated and found out this approach to dieting, which is less about losing weight, and more about the quality of food, and it works really well for me, and my children. … I don’t use a microwave. I don’t freeze food. I won’t use readymade meals, or any processed powders, just herbs and salt. But if you talked with other parents from Basia’s [private] kindergarten, they would probably be much more restrictive about all these rules. They wouldn’t eat a gingerbread with white sugar for supper [she said laughing, when we were both snacking on such a treat she offered]. I think our diet is going in the right direction, although my children do not eat in a way I would wish for. I wish that they would eat oatmeal for breakfast. But when I prepare sandwiches for them, I make sure that they are not from a wheat flour with gluten, but rather spelt or wholemeal flour. I make my own bread every other week. So it’s not too bad. I hope.

Paulina, like other parents I talked to, cares deeply about feeding her children well. But it is still not fully according to her ideal visions, and she often mentioned that she knows many other parents who do it better. While parents often judge others about their feeding practices, they also aspire to the

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food practices that they have seen in other ­families – ­or that they imagine other families ­have – ­which they consider better. When I asked Paweł whether he cooks in a similar way to Paulina, he replied: I guess so. I know they eat more soups there. But I just bought a book about soups. I am not the best at cooking, and when I learn something I do it over and over again. … When my children have met my current girlfriend, Adam asked ‘Ola, but I hope you don’t cook according to the 5 Elements Diet? That would be too much, I could not handle that!’ Their mum cooks in such a way, you need to get used to it. I do a lot of fairly typical Polish stuff, and Ola loves preparing Italian dishes, so this is more or less how my children eat when they’re at my place, and I think it’s a very good diet.

Paulina and Paweł exchange information about food in their children’s school and kindergarten, or any new food preferences, their changing likes and dislikes. But in general they trust each other to uphold the feeding rules they have agreed upon, particularly the one concerning sweets consumption. The confidence of Paweł and Tomek was striking in comparison to how anxious their wives were about feeding their children. It is not that they do not care, but as men they were not socialized through anxiety into being feeding figures. Even though mothers, and, in some of the families, fathers, are the main gatekeepers their decisions are to a large extent influenced by the children. Parents do the shopping and plan the meals with their children in mind. Eleven-­year-­old Kamila told me: ‘My mum buys only things which I will eat. It’s not that she’ll buy whatever I want, no, but in general she chooses things I like’. Parents think about what their children have eaten last week or this week, and therefore what they would enjoy in the near future. They check what their children eat in school, so as not to repeat it at home. They try to predict when children will be hungry, and plan meals in such a way to adapt to children’s needs. In many homes in Warsaw children, often without even being aware, affect the family foodways, and dictate the family menus. But children are also often intentional in their influences. They often request particular dishes. They also suggest new dishes, which they have tried elsewhere. Kasia’s older son for example asked his mum to prepare a chicken baked with apples and plums which he had tried at his friend’s home, and this meal has since entered the routine family menu. The feeding practices are often dictated by the eating practices, as parents regularly, albeit reluctantly, give in to their children’s wants. As 30-­year-­old Weronika explained: We try to be liberal in the boundaries and limits we set up, to adjust to them, talk with them, and give them what they like, what they are in the mood ­for … ­I have already



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learned what they don’t eat, and I try to avoid these things, because this was like a ­suicide – p ­ reparing something for half a day, so that later they don’t even touch it.

Weronika mentions here how annoying and frustrating it might be to prepare food for children which is not accepted and consumed by them. It is simply easier and quicker to prepare what she knows they would eat. All parents I talked to adjusted their family foodways to their children’s tastes, while simultaneously attempting to shape and guide these tastes. Parents’ ideas about feeding might not be the same, and often differ from their children’s ideas about what they want to eat, so there is a need for negotiations and compromises. The constant negotiations and power struggles cause anxiety. They also occur because there are so many tensions and expectations about how children should eat. Family negotiations and power struggles are the result and at the root of feeding anxieties.

BREAKFAST: WEEKDAY AND WEEKEND FOOD RHYTHMS The family lives are to a large extent shaped by the different rhythms of weekdays and weekends. Here is how breakfast during the week was described to me on varied occasions by different members of the Szymańscy family: During the week, in the morning the alarm rings, and I keep switching it off and on, Tomek gets annoyed, he hates these naps. So he gets up and wakes up the children, I need more time to wake up myself. And then, you know how it is, the discussion about what will be eaten for breakfast begins. They love sweet cereals, which I hate. I hate when they eat it, but we negotiated Wednesday as a sweet ­day … ­so they always eat these sweet cereals on Wednesdays. And on other days we negotiate, for example I would like them to eat something healthy and warm, but my husband does not share my vision, and my children do not necessarily like what I offer them as healthy and warm, for example oatmeal porridge with raisins. And very often he prepares toasts: bread sautéed on a pan. It is usually a wholemeal bread, I promote it, but Tomek sometimes runs out for the white bread rolls, it annoys me, but ok. … So children eat while I try to take a bite of a sandwich, and at the same time I am looking for my shoes and keys and Tomek is standing and serving these toasts. I try to sit with them, but just when I sit I instantly remember that I should pack something else in their backpacks, or prepare winter hats, because it is getting cold, so it rarely works like that, that we all eat together. But they eat breakfast every day. (Natalia) I wake up angry, because Natalia sets an alarm for 6.25am, and we get up at 7am! She falls asleep, but I can’t. So I get up and prepare breakfast for kids. Today was the best ­day – ­a sweet day, so they get up gladly, because I say that if they won’t get up, they won’t eat the sweet breakfast. But it is quite funny, they are so worked up about this sweet breakfast, and then they don’t eat so much of it, I think Julia doesn’t feel well after milk so early in the ­morning … ­On other days I make sandwiches for them, or toast: butter on the pan and I throw old bread in and sauté it, they like it! It is usually a

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wholemeal bread, but I try to smuggle in white bread rolls, I know children like ­them … ­Sometimes I ask them what they want, other times not. I often give them a choice between two things and they choose [Do you eat with them?] No, I make everything ready for them. I might just drink coffee. (Tomek) [What is important in food?] Breakfast! It is the most important meal of the day! [Ok, so what do you eat for breakfast?] Toast, sandwiches or cereals with milk, but that only on Wednesdays, and dad recently bought the wrong cereals … [Would you want to eat these cereals more often?] No, I am often in a hurry in the morning, and then I feel sick after having milk. ( Julia)

As these quotes show, different members of the family might view and experience the same situation differently. Natalia would like her daughters to eat a ‘proper’ warm breakfast. But she is in a hurry and is dealing with other morning chores. Tomek wants to feed them something tasty, something they enjoy eating. He often gives them a choice to make sure that he serves something his daughters will in fact eat. Julia and Kasia, though they are in a hurry in the morning, recognize that this is an important meal and that they should eat something. There is a common expression in Poland that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. All of the children I talked to identified breakfast as an extremely important meal that should be eaten in the morning. ­Similarly – w ­ hich is not surprising since children to some extent reproduce their parents’ o ­ pinions – a­ ll of the parents also recognized that breakfast is an important meal. Dorota told me that breakfast is the only time when she makes compromises with her 12-­year-­old daughter, Hania, just to make sure that she eats something: This is the only thing we negotiate, that she eats breakfast, whatever really, even a piece of a yogurt ­pie – ­I prefer that she eats a piece of a yogurt pie with honey, than not eat at all. I don’t want her to start a day with an empty stomach, especially since it takes her twenty minutes to walk to school. Sometimes I buy her a croissant, she likes it, so we’re making concessions when it comes to breakfast.

Dorota is ready to compromise when it comes to breakfast and feed Hania something she does not normally consider ‘good’, just to make sure that Hania eats something in the morning. During my fieldwork one of the often repeated and debated media scares concerned the fact that children in Poland do not eat breakfast. Suddenly, people’s private morning routines become of public interest, because they concern children and are considered ‘not proper’. Alarming numbers were presented and later repeated: ‘60% of Polish students do not eat breakfast before going to school!’, ‘the culture of eating breakfast does not exist anymore!’. Nutritionists and dieticians commented on these alarming messages, explaining how important it is for children to eat breakfast before school,



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how it allows them to study better and enhances their concentration abilities. Food companies implemented programmes promoting breakfast for children. It has been recognized in public debates that children are supposed to eat breakfast, and that it is their parents’ responsibility to feed it to them. Parents are disciplined into preparing breakfast for their children and those who do not fulfil this obligation are not considered to be proper parents. When a politician commented on this media debate, saying that she understood that children might not be hungry in the morning and might not want to eat breakfast, she was forcefully criticized for not caring about children and disregarding this important social issue; she was even accused of mocking undernourished children (Wprost 2013). Multiple social actors, including nutrition experts, state agencies, the media, food companies, discipline families to feed and eat breakfast, despite their individual preferences. Parents often commented that their children’s breakfast is usually not organized in the way they would like it to be, though they often said that about the whole feeding process. The properness in this case relates on the one hand to providing children with necessary nutrients and a good, wholemeal start to the day; and on the other hand to civilizing them into ‘proper’ eaters who recognize the importance and develop a habit of eating breakfast. The first unreachable ideal concerns what is eaten. The second relates to eating calmly together, as a family. Many parents mentioned warm oatmeal porridge with dried fruits and nuts as a perfect winter breakfast. Some parents served it to their children and they praised its protective properties. They recommended it so much that I tried preparing a similar breakfast for myself during the winter months when doing my fieldwork. For other parents this was an unattainable ideal. These negotiations about breakfast do not only take place every morning in the kitchen, but often begin in the bedroom or bathroom, or the evening before when parents start asking their children what they want for breakfast the next day. Moreover, they often extend outside the home setting, for example when shopping together and when children indicate which cereals they want to eat. Breakfast is negotiated not only among parents and between parents and children, but also between parents, children and food ­producers – ­as discussed in the previous chapter, with the influence of nutritionists, journalists and politicians. On weekends, the experience of feeding and eating breakfast changes. On Saturdays and Sundays everyone usually sleeps for longer and many families enjoyed a calm, lazy breakfast that became a family ritual. Almost everyone in my research, parents and children, pointed out how important that moment is for them. Weekend breakfast often becomes a special family time, and also in some families it is one of the rare moments when fathers prepare the meal (Adler 1981). Diverse foodstuffs are put on the table and everyone

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chooses what they want. Usually eggs are eaten and the decision about how to prepare them is often based on the democratic vote: the majority of the family members decide on a way of preparing eggs. At other times all the family members eat different things, but what is considered very important for them is that they sit around the table and calmly eat together. While weekday breakfast are more about functionality and efficiency, weekend breakfasts are about conviviality and pleasure. On a lazy spring Saturday morning I arrived at around 10am at the Szymańscy home. Julia and Kasia were still in their pyjamas. Tomek laughed that they had thought of dressing very formally especially for me, but in the end decided not to. The girls were setting the table, but Natalia pointed out that they had to correct it because it was not proper (the plates were out of line). Tomek asked what kind of eggs everyone wanted and Julia shouted out ‘hard-­boiled’. After a minute, she asked if there was any of the mayonnaise that her dad makes, and upon learning that there was not, she said that she preferred soft-­boiled eggs then. Tomek asked me how many I wanted, but when I replied ‘one’, his facial expression showed such surprise and disbelief that I added: ‘maybe more’. I sat at the table and chatted with Julia and Kasia, while their parents prepared everything for us: drinks (coffee for me, tea for them); eggs, prepared by Tomek; and the rest –bread, tomatoes, cucumbers and radishes which I brought, peppers, wędliny (cold meat cuts) and hard ­cheese – ­cut and arranged on the table by Natalia. There was also a small plate with a marinated herring, leftovers from the previous day. When Tomek added a pot filled with around eight or nine soft-­boiled eggs, we started eating. We talked about their plans for this weekend, and they asked me how my research was going. We also talked about Kasia: they had to make a decision about whether she would stay for one more year in the pre-­school or start school already. After eating two eggs, a piece of bread and a little bit of herring, Julia asked to be excused and left the table. Natalia asked her to take her plate with her, and later to put it into the dishwasher, and after doing this Julia went upstairs to her room. Although Julia’s and Kasia’s behaviour was still regulated and corrected occasionally, by reminding them to clean their plates for instance, the whole event was very relaxed. I was often struck by this difference between weekday and weekend food rhythms, which are particularly visible when it comes to breakfast.

OBIAD: FAMILY MEALS AS STRATEGIC BATTLEFIELDS In order to analyse various power relations at different feeding-­eating scales, including within and involving the family, I borrow the concepts of strategies



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and tactics from Michel de Certeau (1984). Strategies are implemented by institutions and structures of power, for instance parents. They have the status of the dominant order and attempt to set certain behaviours and courses of action. Serving meals at the table is one of the feeding strategies. Tactics are much more flexible and are employed by p ­ eople – f­ or instance c­ hildren – ­acting in the environment defined by strategies. Tactics are developed to evade or negotiate strategies towards their own purposes and desires. This could include getting up from the table during a meal. Both strategies and tactics are embedded in everyday life and are not necessarily conscious; they do not necessarily follow an intentional, goal-­oriented logic, but can be habitual, following the logic of everyday practice. There are state actors and experts who employ many strategies, including nutritional guidelines or food education programmes, to guide people’s behaviour with regard to feeding and eating, which I explore in Chapter 5. And people, both adults and children, respond to these disciplining strategies with their own tactics, appropriating the norms in diverse ways.2 Similar power configurations repeat themselves on different scales. There are always those who tell others how to eat from the position of power and knowledge, and those who appropriate these guidelines in their own ways. Parents tactfully engage with the nutritional guidelines, expert advice and public opinion in order to strategically shape how and what their children eat. Parents discipline both themselves and their children, and use multiple strategies to organize meals according to a particular order and in a particular way.3 As mentioned above, there are many expectations with regard to family meals, which concentrate in particular on breakfast, as recounted above, and on obiad – the main meal of the day. Monika, a widow in her mid-­ forties, and mother of three children who works three jobs to make ends meet, can rarely arrange a meal situation in a way which brings everyone together to the table. She explained to me: I would like to provide them with the good habit of eating together, sitting calmly together, without the TV on, and without rushing our meal. It can be so nice, when you set the table etc. I really enjoy it. We try to organize it in that way from time to time, especially if there is an occasion for celebration, somebody’s birthday for example. I would say we try to do this at least once a month.

Monika expressed sadness that her family does not eat family meals together more often. She perceived such practices as an ideal to follow. But with juggling different jobs, and her children being teenagers, with the youngest being 12-­year-­old Zuzia, she finds this ideal too difficult to organize on a daily basis. The older children are, the more difficult it becomes to gather the whole family at the table. When children are younger, eating meals together at the table is an important strategy which enables parents to control exactly

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what and how children eat. It is also what children should be taught, in a somewhat tautological and highly normative way: meals are eaten at the table because it is a proper way to eat meals. Natalia told me how she loves eating obiad sitting on the couch in front of the TV, but she and Tomek rarely do this with their children as they need to show Julia and Kasia examples of good behaviour to socialize them ‘properly’. So they have to hide their own ‘improper’ practices. This rule not only means eating at the table, but also involves table manners (Elias 2000: 79–102; Albon and Hellman 2018). A child needs to sit up straight, properly on the chair, and not for example leaning on the table. She is supposed to eat with cutlery, sometimes just a fork or a spoon. He should eat what is on the plate, and not eat from others’ plates. The food should not be thrown. Mikołaj explained to me: If I were to say that we constantly remind them to sit up straight, I would be lying; but if I said that we allow complete chaos and running around the table, that would also not be true. Sadly, we are often tired and lose common sense, and they, because of their childish curiosity, they move around. If something falls on the floor, sometimes it’s funny and we joke about it, sometimes we use it as a starting point for a constructive remark, and sometimes we would just harshly say ‘stop it!’.

Mikołaj describes here how during family meals he and Małgosia attempt to teach Bartek and Zuzia how to behave when eating. Parents weave a difficult path of making family meals friendly and nice events, while regulating children in their eating practices. These rules set up during meals are disciplining techniques through which children, their bodies and their characters, are controlled and regulated. They are moulded into what Michel Foucault (1982, 1988, 1997) would call certain types of self-­governing eaters. Children learn these social rules through the constant repetition of disciplinary ­comments – ­both at home and at school. When children are younger they resist it, and resort to diverse tactics, such as standing up, demanding to change seats, dancing around the table, eating with their hands, taking food from other people’s plates, leaving the table without being excused. They push the boundaries of appropriate social behaviour to test how far they can take it and they exercise their powerful resistance to re-­negotiate these rules. With time, however, through constant repetition, they acknowledge that these are the social rules that need to be followed. They might even start reprimanding younger siblings or their own toys if they do not behave ‘properly’ at the table. On a few occasions I have witnessed a stuffed rabbit or bear being reprimanded by a child to sit up straight and behave properly at the table. Moving onto another meal strategy relates to what and how much is eaten. Many parents referred to horrible childhood memories when they



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had to sit at the table until everything on their plate was eaten. Because of that, they told me they did not want to force their children to eat. But they did recognize how important it is that their children eat what they need for proper development and what the parents spend time preparing. Cooking what children like usually solves this challenging issue. Family diets are often planned with children in mind. Monika, who has three children, can rarely prepare something separate for each of them, so she has a food routine instead, comprising of a set menu for each week, so that each of her children can eat something they like every couple of days. If she can, she tries to prepare two different dishes, so for example both the mielone and the chicken breast cutlets, so that her children are all happy with what she served, but this happens rarely due to financial and time constraints. Many parents talked about a similar kind of menu, an offer or repertoire of f­ oods – ­from their point of view very ­limited – ­which is prepared for their children. If a child does not want to eat, mothers sometimes prepare something completely different to what the rest of the family is eating just for them, to make sure that they eat something. As Marysia told me: I frequently indulge her. I allow her to eat whatever she wants. If she doesn’t want to eat obiad, because there are vegetables in it, I am able to get up from the table and cook something just for her. Because she is so stubborn, when she doesn’t want to eat something, she won’t eat it. If I tell her that she has to eat it, she will not eat for the rest of the day, and I feel sorry for her.

Marysia, as she says, indulges Sylwia’s food preferences. She is worried that her daughter does not eat enough, and might be hungry, so she is ready to prepare something from scratch just for her, to give Sylwia what she wants, just so that she eats something. By not forcing children to eat, parents put themselves in a difficult position, as at the same time they want their children to eat something. This causes a lot of anxiety about children’s eating and their own parental feeding, as expressed by Paulina Marciniak: I know that people have diverse strategies, and some force their children to eat, sadly I sometimes do this as well. It is in the maternal instinct: this need to feed! And there is a scene sometimes because he [Adam] has not finished his meal. Sometimes I’m mad at myself, how could I have led to such a situation that I force him to eat! But it is difficult when I think that he prefers to eat just bread rolls and apples, and that can be all of his diet. Not to mention the fact that I have cooked that soup or a delicious cutlet, and he sees one vein and does not want to eat ­it … ­then I enforce the strategy of ­ten – ­fifteen spoons, and he eats it. But this is not how I would like it to be!

Paulina critically reflects on her own feeding, and is not happy with how she reacts and what she sometimes does as a mother. But in the heat of the moment she gets frustrated that her son does not want to eat what she has spent time preparing, and what she considers would be good for him. This

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leads to negotiations and discussion with Adam. She explains this behaviour by referring to the maternal instinct to feed, which at times dominates her practices and careful reflection about how she would like to organize the feeding-­eating situation. Eleven-­year-­old Adam commented, certainly less emotionally than his mother, ‘If I like it, I will eat everything [and if not?] then I will not. My mum complains, but I always manage to leave something’. There is another side to this as well. While parents are sad and frustrated when children do not want to eat what they prepared, they are also very happy when their food is enjoyed and appreciated. Paweł mentioned, ‘Adam likes mielone (larger meatballs) only when his dad, that is I, make it. He wouldn’t eat it when other people prepare it. This makes me really happy, I won’t lie. So I prepare them every other two or three weeks’. Food after all is often an expression of parental love. Many mothers mentioned how happy it made them to see and hear their children enjoying their cooking, or how painful it has been to hear that their children prefer someone else’s cooking, for instance in school. At the table, there is often a need for flexibility and encouragement strategies. Because of their childhood memories, parents usually do not force feed their children, do not expect them to eat everything, but they use diverse strategies to persuade them to eat. The most common strategies include such phrases as: eat just five more spoonfuls of soup and you will be done; eat just a small part of your meat and vegetables. The meat and vegetables are considered the most important part of the meal. Children are often tricked into eating vegetables; when they are grated finely, put into pierogi (dumplings) or whizzed in a soup, they cannot recognize them or pick them out. Parents also indicate what on children’s plates should be eaten. Thirty-­five-­year-­old Piotr, Weronika’s husband, explained: ‘It is not about her eating absolutely everything, we set the border: either on the plate, or in the amount of spoons or bites she needs to eat. It all depends on the likelihood of success’. A child dictates this ‘likelihood of success’ at a particular time and situation. Parents have to find the balance between what will satisfy them, i.e. how much food and what food ingredients are enough to count as a proper meal, with their feeling that their child has eaten enough, and with the probability that she will in fact eat it. They often engage in this kind of negotiation. Children do the same when deciding whether to eat more or refuse to eat. They learn to recognize how far they can push their parents on a certain occasion and to know how to negotiate, proposing to eat something that will satisfy their parents (e.g. vegetables), while avoiding eating something they do not want to eat (e.g. meat). Children use diverse verbal and non-­verbal tactics to avoid eating what they do not want to eat or not in the way they are supposed to eat. Children’s tactics include bluntly refusing to eat, pursing their lips, whining, tossing food to somebody’s else’s plate or throwing it on



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the floor, crying. They also play one parent off against the other, and complain to one parent that they do not want to eat and that the other parent is forcing them. They stall in the hope that the adults will give up before they do. Children resist and influence parental feeding practices with their own non-­eating practices. Dessert is often promised as a reward for complying with parents’ decisions. Similarly, the refusal of dessert is treated as a way of persuading children to eat. Piotr explained that if Gosia is not eating her meal, they usually tell her she will not move to the next stage: the dessert. Conditional promises and negotiations are the one way of persuading children. Parents also use emotional pressure. Joanna mentioned: ‘If she doesn’t want to eat I will coax her, and tell her how it was when my parents worked in the field, and if my grandmother was not around, there was no obiad at all. I tell them they would understand and see how it is, if I stop cooking for a week’. In their attempts to feed their children, parents, as Joanna mentioned, sometimes resolve to emotional pressure as a way of convincing, or perhaps even threatening, their children into eating. Parents’ ­obligation – ­their responsibility and their ­right – ­is to feed their children. But as Goffman explained, ‘what is one man’s obligation will often be another’s expectation’ (1967: 49). In this case children expect that they will be cared for and fed by their parents, and taking that expectation away, threatening to deliberately fail in fulfilling that obligation becomes one of the ways to persuade children to appreciate that they are fed and cared for, and encourage them to eat. Feeding children is indeed physical, mental and emotional work. But engaging in feeding-­eating relationships is also work for children. They are usually very active agents in this relationship, challenging their parents’ feeding ideals and practices in multiple ways. Family meals, as an ideal everyone is supposed to strive for, in reality are filled with difficult verbal and non-­ verbal power struggles. These discrepancies and unfulfilled expectations exacerbate feeding anxieties.

CHILDREN’S FOODWORK Children might be asked to set up or clean the table, to take out the rubbish, to run for groceries, to help with meal preparation, although the latter is treated as a form of play rather than a household chore. In the families participating in my research, children were not involved to any large extent in food preparations. Thirty-­three-­year-­old Anna mentioned that she should ask more of her children, as did other parents. When she was her daughter’s age, she helped much more at home. Basia, her 7-­year-­old daughter, is drawn to cooking, she wants to try it out in the kitchen, but Anna is worried

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that she always makes a big mess when helping. Even though parents recognize that it would be good to involve children in foodwork at home, because they need to learn how to do things and because they are keen to try, parents are hesitant to fit the messiness and chaos this would entail into an already full and carefully planned day. At the same time, many non-­governmental workers and state officials mentioned when talking to me the loss of cooking skills among children. They noticed that nowadays children rarely learn at school how to cook, which used to be a part of school curricula, and they do not learn cooking at home. A few activists I worked with during the food education workshops noticed that children do not know how to hold a knife and cut something simple. Children lacked the embodied knowledge about cooking. These were recognized as bodily and mental shortcomings, and the fault of children’s parents, that would affect how the whole generation of people will ­cook – o ­ r rather not ­cook – a­ nd hence, eat. Many children, however, are keen to switch the generational positions and roles and feed others (Aronsson and Gottzen 2011). Twelve-­year-­old Zosia told me proudly that when her younger sister is hungry, she prepares something, usually a sandwich for her. Many of them feed, that is both care for and sometimes discipline, their toys or younger siblings. They also attempt to feed adults. Sometimes during weekends Zosia prepares breakfast in bed for her mum. It does not quite come out as she wished it would, scrambled eggs for instance usually become an omelette, but she is proud of caring for her mum in this way. Adam does something similar for his family; however, this is how Paweł, his father, described the breakfast he made: ‘Recently he prepared breakfast in bed for us. There were burned scrambled eggs with raw onion, burned toast and coffee, which was basically just milk. Oh, it was bad. Of course we said that it is wonderful etc., but it was really bad’. Children also put mental, emotional and physical work into their food practices and feeding-­eating relationships. They have to navigate the different expectations of parents and grandparents, teachers and peers, expectations about what it means to be a child or a grandchild in contemporary Warsaw, and what this entails with regard to food. They have to learn to control their own desires and make the ‘right’ choices, to anticipate and understand adults’ intentions, while manoeuvring between the different demands placed on them by both adults and other children. It might be difficult to be the only person who does not go to the school shop, because of financial or dietary restrictions. It might be problematic, as Bernardine Chee (2000) demonstrated, to be the only one who is not familiar with the taste of certain trendy food products. Sylwia was in such a situation. Her mum, Marysia, told me that her daughter sometimes asks for particular sweets; she wants to bring them to school, because all of her friends are bringing them to school,



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and so Marysia gives her money for that. She does not want her daughter to feel excluded from her friends. Children have their own anxieties, worries and frustrations related to food. This might include not wanting to eat certain foods and being forced or persuaded to do so. Twelve-­year-­old Agnieszka explained to me: ‘I don’t like trying new things; I prefer to stick to what I know. And my parents torment me to try new things!’ For 6-­year-­old Gosia, being forced to eat soup at kindergarten became such a problem and such a stressful event, that her parents, Weronika and Piotr, had to change kindergartens. Adam’s parents made a rule that he could eat sweets only during the weekends. So he used to refuse them when one of his classmates celebrated a birthday at school. With tears in his ­eyes – ­as his teacher r­ ecounted – h ­ e put the sweets away for later. The teacher later talked to his parents about this, and they agreed that on special occasions, such as birthday celebrations, Adam can eat sweets. When I talked to him about this, he said that he had got used to it by now. He rarely transgressed this rule, or did not want to tell me about it. But during summer camps he assumed that this rule could be lifted, and without discussing it with his parents, he consumed sweets on a daily basis. Moreover, engaging in various feeding-­eating relationships with different adults, mothers, fathers and grandparents, as well as adults in schools, can become demanding emotional work. Julia and Kasia mentioned that they prefer their dad’s pies, because their mum does not add sugar to hers, which according to them makes them tasteless. But they attempt not to show it to their mum in order not to make her sad. Seven-­year-­old Bartek was worried that his grandmother gave him sweets which he considered a problem, and wanted to talk to her about it, although he was a bit worried how she would react. Children are aware of their influence on family members and use these power relations to their advantage. They know mothers are often much more difficult to persuade than fathers. They are also aware of the influence they have on their grandparents, and they use it. Children tactfully use various emotions during feeding and eating interactions. They might promise a kiss or a hug in exchange for something sweet. As Scheer explained, ‘because people know that emotions do things in social contexts, they use them as means of exchange’ (2012: 214). The exchanges of food and emotions cross intergenerational boundaries and take different directions. Mothers express their love with food by carefully planning and preparing what they consider best for their children. Fathers more often express their love through sweets and fun. Food, particularly sweets or other children’s food, is often used to build relationships with children. Paulina for instance complained to me that Paweł’s new girlfriend was attempting to bribe their children to like her with pastries and sweets, baking muffins during the week when Adam and Basia

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are not allowed to have sweets. In this way, she challenged the rules Paulina and Paweł have been implementing over the years. Children in the families I worked with were rarely involved in the physical foodwork at home, in food preparation chores. But they were in many ways involved in emotional foodwork, and certainly were active agents of the feeding-­eating relationships, including those with grandparents.

GRANDPARENTS BEING NAUGHTY Grandparents play an important role in family life in Poland as they often substitute for the paid care of children. But they often have different ideas about raising children to those of parents, and this is repeatedly exemplified in the feeding process. Parents claim to be more knowledgeable than the older generation and demand to make their own decisions regarding their children, while many grandparents attempt to assert their expert position and sustain the traditional, intergenerational way of passing on knowledge about childrearing. This was very visible for instance when I was talking to 37-­year-­old Joanna. Her mum was visiting at the time of my visit, and she spent some of the time with her grandchildren in the other room, and some joining our conversation in the living room. Joanna’s narrative changed depending on whether her mum was present in the room. And when she was complaining about the older generation’s less healthy approaches to food, she lowered her voice to a whisper and nervously looked at the closed door. A large part of this intergenerational tension focuses on sweets. Natalia explained to me how she attempts to limit her daughters’ sweets consumption: We negotiated Wednesday as a sweet ­day … ­I have read about it somewhere, that one day per week they eat an unlimited amount of sweets, and that’s it. But it’s impossible to achieve in real life! First of all, there would need to be consent in the family, and my husband does not really agree. Second, the grandparents would have to adapt, which is very unlikely; and third the whole world would have to conform to this idea, and this means school, which is completely not possible!

Natalia tackles an important issue here. Parents might try to control their children’s ­diet – ­and according to her it often seems that this is all she does even though Tomek cooks for the f­amily – ­however there are many other social actors involved in feeding children and influencing their eating. These other actors cannot be completely controlled. This includes the food industry, discussed in the previous chapter, and school and peers, discussed in the next chapter, as well as grandparents.



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In the Szymańscy family there are many grandparents involved in taking care of Julia and Kasia on a weekly basis. Besides Natalia and Tomek’s parents who take care of their grandchildren, there is also a third ­grandmother – ­a woman who used to babysit Julia and Kasia who has become so attached to the family that she is now treated as another grandmother. The issue of sweets consumption has in particular become a problem, a cause of many quarrels in the Szymańscy family. Natalia often told me how angry she was with the grandparents, that she made these rules and was trying so hard to feed her children well, and they would break them so easily. Julia and Kasia know that certain kinds of foods, such as sweets, are not allowed but they eat them anyway, because their grandparents provide them. But then again Natalia mentioned that the grandparents do help by caring for the children, so it is a little ungrateful to complain. The idea that the grandparents’ role is to spoil their grandchildren and that giving them sweets is a privilege of being a grandparent has been often repeated to me by the grandparents. Tomek’s dad told me: Children need sweets. Every child likes sweets. Of course one should balance their consumption, but they [Natalia and Tomek] are going to one extreme, which is in our favour [laughs] because the girls love to visit us because they will get sweets here. I think they love us much more because of that. I am not restraining myself, or them, for that matter.

Natalia’s father spent a lot of time explaining to me that the whole point of being a grandparent is to break the rules which parents set up, which mostly means giving grandchildren sweets. He added: Natalia made a great choice about limiting sweets consumption! I respect it, but I do not adhere to it. Well, basically, I lie to her. I tried to explain it to her once. I want my grandchildren to associate me with a certain amount of freedom and tolerance, with fun! I love this moment when they approach me and ask, ‘grandpa, what do you have?’ with a mischievous smile, and then we look together into the box where the sweets are hidden.

His ­wife – t­ he only grandparent who seems to adhere to the parental r­ ules – ­complained that it is not fair, that she follows the rules and the other grandparents do not, and as a result her granddaughters prefer staying with the other grandparents. Both of Natalia’s parents admitted that at least they try to give Julia and Kasia ‘better’ sweets, such as chocolate rather than gummy sweets, which they suspect the paternal grandparents do. Julia and Kasia like sweets. While Julia recognizes that sweets are not healthy, she enjoys eating them, likes their taste which brings her pleasure. She often disobeys her parents’ rules and buys sweets in the school shop or brings stickers to school to exchange for sweets. She also very knowingly

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manipulates her grandparents into giving her what she wants, and then lies about it to her parents, especially her mother. Mrs Krystyna, the nanny-­ grandmother, recounted to me how Julia tried to coerce her into giving her sugar on her pancakes, by saying that her other grandparents allowed her to have it, which turned out not to be true. The negotiations between adults and children are verbal and non-­verbal. They do include quarrels and verbally setting up boundaries, but also hiding sweets and moving the sugar bowl around the table. They are very subtle and exercised through breaking or upholding, bending and appropriating the rules Natalia and Tomek create in different ways. Other parents also mentioned grandparents as a problem with regard to proper feeding. For many of them, though, it became an actual problem only a few times a year, as many grandparents lived in other parts of Poland. As Małgosia told me: The grandparents have a completely different approach to food. It is more about large quantities of food rather than its quality. I don’t force them [children] to eat, if they will be hungry I’ll give them a carrot or something. But my mum would say ‘finish your meal, and I’ll give you a sweet’, which is not good. But when the kids stay at their grandparents we can’t influence it. I can say I don’t like such a behaviour, but I can’t influence what she does. It happens once a year, though, that they stay with her for a week. And I’m grateful for that, so I’m not arguing about food.

Like Małgosia, many other parents usually decided to accept that their rules regarding feeding would be broken by the grandparents and children together when visiting each other. It became a bigger problem when grandparents were involved in feeding their grandchildren on a more regular basis, as in the Szymańscy home. Grandparents were also mentioned as partners in crime, so to speak, by children. Twelve-­year-­old Zosia explained to me: My grandparents allow me to eat Nutella from a jar with a spoon. If I want to eat sweets, my grandma says ‘let’s go to the shop for sweets’. My parents do not allow this, so my grandparents would only give me sweets when they are away. [So you don’t eat Nutella at home, at your mum’s?] Maybe once a year. I eat it very rarely at my mum’s, more often at my dad’s and constantly at my grandparents’ place.

Nutella not only denotes sweetness and pleasure. The spoonfuls of Nutella become the marker of relationships. Mothers are usually the ones who set up the rules and are much firmer about keeping them; they want and are expected to instil in children the health-­related perspective on sweets, and to teach them self-­restraint. Marta, Zosia’s mother, understands that Nutella is delicious, but allows eating it only rarely. Fathers often allow children more, since they happily take upon themselves the roles of ‘fun parents’.



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Finally, grandparents usually seem not to adhere to any rules and allow their grandchildren almost complete freedom. They assume that children need and should get sweets as they are an inherent part of childhood.

THE BALANCING ACT On one of the many occasions I chatted with Natalia, she told me: It is one thing to take care that your children eat the healthy things they need, but it is something else to make sure that they do not eat unhealthily. A friend of mine takes care that her children eat vegetables, but then for dessert she opens a drawer and gives her children sweet white buns. I don’t buy things like that, their ingredient list runs for five lines. It is a different thing to make sure that a child eats grains and vegetables; I make sure that they do not eat things which, in my opinion, are harmful to their health, like these horrible sweets. I don’t want them to create a habit of eating things like that.

Feeding children is based on keeping a balance. Parents have to balance the ‘proper’ and the ‘not proper’ food they feed their children, but also multiple moral perspectives on food and multiple influences on feeding and eating. Mothers engage in what Cairns and Johnston (2015) called ‘calibrating’. They cannot be too relaxed or too stressed about how and what their children eat, they are supposed to calibrate and balance their behaviour. Any extreme, either being the ‘junk food mum’ or the ‘health obsessed mum’, is not good (Cairns, Johnston and Oleschuk 2018). Similarly to mothers in Hometown in the US Jennifer Patico (2020) talked to, mothers in Warsaw attempted on a daily basis to find a balance between being engaged and concerned about their children’s eating, without being overly neurotic and ‘Nazi’ about it. Małgosia, when describing their health-­oriented food practices, kept repeating that they are not obsessed about it. And Paulina commented many times that she is not orthodox about her children’s diet. Mothers should not care too little or too much, they should care and feed just in the right way, which connotes different practices in varied moments and contexts. Eating right means something different on a Sunday morning, a weekday evening, or during a birthday party. Satisfying those conflicting expectations, fitting within these moving boundaries and staying within them is an impossible goal. And yet, it is a goal that many mothers strive to achieve, and one which they are expected by many public and private social actors to accomplish. Monika explained that you need to make sure that your child does not eat in McDonald’s on an everyday basis, and does not eat sweets all the time, but if from time to time they eat French fries or a hamburger, nothing

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will happen to them. Eating fast food, such as in McDonald’s or KFC, was often referred to in such a way. Many parents treated it as a source of pride if their child ate this food rarely, or did not like it, because this meant that they were ‘proper’ parents engaging in ‘proper’ feeding practices (Cairns, Johnston and Oleschuk 2018). This pride was also shared by some children. Twelve-­year-­old Agnieszka was appalled and proud of herself, when telling me a story from a recent school trip, when the bus stopped for a break, and she and her friend were the only ones who did not want to eat at McDonald’s. Agnieszka was disgusted that teachers suggest eating there and that her peers were happy about it, and she judged their behaviour very harshly. Most parents agreed, however, that if their children eat fast food ­occasionally – ­and definitions of ‘occasionally’ differed from one family to ­another – i­t was not too bad, because they ate well on other days, so their diet stayed balanced: eating ‘good’ foods balances the consumption of ‘bad’ ones. The process of balancing between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ foods is difficult because ideas of what is good and bad are diversified and relational, often shifting with the context and depending on who is involved in the feeding-­eating relationship. And even within the category of ‘healthy’ f­ ood – r­ ecognized in general as ­good – t­ here are better and worse foodstuffs and practices. While fruits and vegetables are considered good for instance, the organic ones are better (see Cairns, Johnston and MacKendrick 2013). Marta told me: I try to buy the best possible products. But there is only so much we can do in the city. Of course apples straight from the tree would be better than those bought in a store, but still I try to buy the organic ones, so that’s better than the ones that are sprayed, full of pesticides, right?

The ideas about what is and what is not healthy are indeed diversified. Take dairy for instance. Marysia told me that she allowed her children to drink milk whenever they wanted to, and that some people found this weird. Nobody forbade her from consuming milk when she was a child, so she did the same for her children. She considered milk to be the ultimate healthy food for her children, as many other parents did. But over the last couple of years, a growing number of parents have started to perceive dairy as bad and unhealthy for children. They explained that milk contributes to having colds; it may influence the development of allergies. ‘It contributes to the mucus (phlegm) production, does not digest properly and in general it is not healthy’, Paulina explained to me. Piotr assumed that his wife, Weronika, was more knowledgeable about these issues and followed her lead. It was Weronika who opted to forgo milk in their children’s diet. Piotr was initially sceptical, but once he witnessed that ‘drinking a half of glass of milk causes a cascade of snot’, he was convinced.



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In the Szymańscy family, Natalia was against her children drinking milk, while Tomek believed milk to be healthy and good for children. Once Natalia introduced a dairy-­free diet for her children, which Tomek opposed: Children should drink milk, there is much more research proving that milk is needed, than that it is not. Maybe in different cultural regions milk is less important, but here it is important. But well, it was only six weeks on that diet, so they wouldn’t lose their teeth in six weeks, nothing would have happened to them, and Natalia needed that to feel better as a mother, so I agreed. After that period, it was normal again.

There are many differences between how parents conceive of a ‘healthy’ or ‘proper’ diet for their children. If both of them are involved in feeding practices, there tends to be more intense negotiations. Tomek and Natalia had different views on how to feed their daughters and continuously negotiated not only with their children, and their own parents, but with each other as well. Even though Tomek was responsible for cooking at their home, he recognized how important feeding was for Natalia as a mother. The children I talked to all recognized milk as good and healthy, unless they had allergies and could not drink it. In those situations they still considered milk to be generally good for children, just not for them. Children internalize the wider public discourses on dairy, even if these might contradict their parents’ views, as was the case with Adam who told me that he disagrees with his mum and thinks that milk is good for children. Feeding as a balancing process includes teaching children how to balance their own eating. This is usually done by providing good examples. Feeding as a mother often means controlling and limiting not only your children and other family members, but your own eating as well. Weronika for instance hides from her children the fact that she eats chocolate, because she does not want them to learn it from her. She usually snacks on chocolate when her daughters are already asleep, and then hides the wrappers. Joanna also hides the fact that she eats sweets, in the same way as she hides from her children that she smokes.4 She explained that it disgusts her to do so, but she cannot help it. A different kind of behaviour is presupposed for and expected from children. Children are supposed to be better, they are supposed to grow up to be better adults, eaters and feeders than their parents are today. So, they should get only ‘good’ examples. That is why many parents, particularly mothers, govern themselves and display particular eating practices in front of their children, while hiding others. Children do in fact learn to control themselves. Eleven-­year-­old Kamila told me: ‘I love crisps! But I don’t eat the whole pack at once; I always leave something for later!’ Kamila recognizes that restraint and self-­control are important values, and so even though she enjoys eating crisps, she claims to never eat the whole pack at once. And they judge each other. Twelve-­year-­old

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Hania, concerned, told me a story of disgust about two young girls, who happened to be Julia and Kasia: They cannot eat sweets, only on Wednesdays, and when I was at their place they went crazy. They threw themselves on sweets, tore them from each other’s hands. My friends were there as well, and we laughed a lot about that. Well, this was really tragic! I don’t have any restrictions of this kind, but I cannot eat sweets before obiad or breakfast.

This description contrasts with my own experiences with Julia and Kasia who shared sweets with me. Hania, herself very conscious about healthy food practices, was appalled that Julia and Kasia seemed to have no self-­ control. Children, after all, are expected to learn how to be ‘proper’ in their engagements with food. Not eating sweets is not only about not having dental caries or diabetes, it is also about being ‘proper’, slim, controlled people. As Biltekoff (2013) noticed, the dietary politics of food is never only about health and nutrition. Children’s lives are filled with moral tensions and ambiguities, when, like adults, they too strive to balance ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food, different registers of valuing food, and their own eating with adults’ feeding practices. Many children told me that they know they should not eat particular foods, because they are not healthy (e.g. sweets), but they like to eat them anyway, because they taste so good; and that they eat other foods, even though they do not like them (e.g. cheese or broccoli), because they are healthy and are supposed to be good for them. To understand feeding anxieties, it is important to acknowledge that it is not just about the food consumed, it is also about what it represents and how it extends to a person who eats it. It is about the practice of feeding and eating particular food products and not feeding and eating others. As in the ethnographic vignette recounted at the beginning of this chapter, fish, a healthy part of a homemade dinner was juxtaposed with pańska skórka, a sweet shop-­bought item. The different approaches to food of Natalia, Tomek and Kasia were all demonstrated and negotiated. Within feeding and eating practices, the enactment of love and care on the one hand, and discipline and control on the other, is truly a balancing act, always on the edge of collapse.

CONCLUDING REMARKS The politics of children’s food to a large extent focuses on family. The state, including schools, and food industry actors, as well as non-­governmental organizations and the wider public, are interested in and worried about what



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happens in people’s homes with regard to children’s food. They have different reasons for being concerned. But their worries shape the expectations about family lives and family meals, as well as creating challenges which parents and children have to deal with on a daily basis. Having children completely changes family foodways. Feeding children demands incredible amounts of physical, mental and emotional labour. It involves planning, scheduling, coordinating, remembering, disciplining, controlling, negotiating and compromising. Most often this largely invisible foodwork is done by mothers. In a few of the families I worked with, fathers were also involved in feeding children. This relieved women to some extent, but also meant further negotiations as parents do not necessarily agree on everything when it comes to children’s food. The negotiations also often involve grandparents, who might take care of the grandchildren on a frequent basis. But most of all, the power struggles involve children and adults. Families come together to share love and care with food, to have fun and pleasure, but also to control and discipline each other. These multiple experiences are intertwined on a daily basis. Practices of discipline and control are in fact expressions of love as both involve caring for and about children’s physical and mental wellbeing, about what kind of people they will grow up to be. Parents discipline their children with regard to what, how and how much they eat in order to take care of their bodies and teach them to eat ‘properly’. Family feeding-­eating relationships are guided by particular rules and rhythms, a particular interaction order as Goffman (1983) would say, but are always filled with verbal and non-­verbal negotiations. They come down to finding a balance: between different wants, needs and expectations, pleasure and discipline, fun and nutrition; conviviality and control; eating carrots and eating at McDonald’s. It is about balancing various registers of valuing food, people’s preferences, and between being ‘obsessed’ and ‘too relaxed’. This balancing act most often falls on women. They do it in relation to their children, partners, grandparents, schools, other parents and children’s friends, as well as different food products. That is why mothers experience feeding anxieties most intensely. This chapter studied how families came together to negotiate feeding and eating and deal with multiple feeding anxieties, and usually end up reproducing them. But family foodways and food rhythms are deeply embedded in and connected to the food rhythms of schools. Children’s taste and food preferences change when they start school, more so than when they go to kindergarten. They not only eat in school canteens or buy food in school shops, but also consume food brought by their friends from their homes. When children go to school they enter a completely new context, one which mothers cannot fully control, and which might be challenging to their practices of ‘proper’ feeding, as well as questioning what they consider ‘good’

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food. I explore these different food rhythms and the new sites of feeding anxieties in the next chapter.

NOTES Some of the analysis featured in this chapter was initially introduced in my previously published work (Boni 2018a, 2018b), but it has been substantially reworked and developed.  1. Pańska skórka is a sweet treat, made from egg whites, sugar, water and rose or raspberry juice, which is sold mainly in Warsaw, typically on All Saints Day.  2. This has been discussed by Filippo Oncini (2018) with regard to Italian school canteens.  3. Such daily negotiations and power struggles around the family table have been carefully studied in various cultural contexts, see for instance Ochs, Pontecorvo and Fasulo, 1996; Grieshaber 1997; Ochs and Shohet, 2006; Paugh and Izquierdo 2009; Wilk 2010; O’Connell and Brannen 2014.  4. This is a very interesting connection, strengthening the perception of sweets as sinful and wrong. Moreover, Moss (2013) in his analysis of the food industry in the US often compares its situation and actions with the tobacco industry and its crisis of the 1960s.

CHAPTE R 4

EAT LIKE A NORMAL PERSON On School Food, Catering to Children and Adjusting Bodies and Tastes

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n one of the schools, the 6-­year-­olds eat in their classrooms, not in the school canteen as the older children do. On one of the days I was there, the cooks and cleaners, who help with serving the meals, brought them up to the classroom around 11.30am. On this day obiad comprised of a tomato soup and a second dish consisting of fish fingers in batter, mashed potatoes and surówka made from carrots (a salad from raw vegetables). The school staff distributed it among children’s plates. Children were seated at their small chairs at the small, size appropriate tables, joyfully awaiting to receive their meals. After some time, the children had finished eating, but Filip was just staring at his almost untouched meal. The teacher told him, ‘Filip, I talked to your dad yesterday and we agreed that I will write down for him how you have behaved during the meal’. Filip didn’t reply. After a while she said: ‘Filip, your dad asked me to make sure that you eat your obiad’. ‘But I don’t like the fish fingers’, replied Filip. ‘You should have asked your parents to write a note that you don’t have to eat the fish fingers. They know the menu; they should have known what would be served’. The rest of the children were gathered around the teacher, who was reading a book out loud. This time it was Astrid Lindgren’s The Children of Noisy Village. They all sat across from Filip, in another corner of the room, which was carpeted. Some of them lay down, half asleep on the pillows. This was their napping and resting time. After some time had passed, the teacher again told Filip: ‘Eat at least one fish finger’. Filip replied after a while, ‘My mum doesn’t make fish at home’, to which a cleaner who was gathering the plates around him responded, ‘I don’t believe you. You should eat, it’s just after noon, and the dessert won’t be served until 3pm, you will be hungry’. ‘No, I won’t be

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hungry’. The teacher asked the cleaner to indicate on Filip’s plate how much he should eat. Filip, with a wan face, tried again to explain that he didn’t like it, but the woman replied: ‘How come you don’t like it, all the children ate it, eat it!’ He tried to put the pieces of fish in his mouth, but couldn’t, he was physically appalled, and put it back on the plate. He almost cried. He shyly tried asking again, ‘Ma’am, can I…’. ‘Eat, eat, it will get cold if you don’t eat soon’. It was probably already cold. After a few minutes, the teacher asked whether Filip had eaten one fish finger; in reply he asked whether he could finish the surówka instead, and the teacher agreed. He ate it quickly, left the table and got some kompot (a sweet beverage made from fruits) to drink. He was smiling and seemed quite content that he was finally free, and without eating the fish fingers too. He joined the other children. The teacher said ‘Filip, please give me your dzienniczek [daybook], I need to write this down for your parents’. We can see here how the school and the family are entangled in feeding Filip. The meal has been prepared by the school cooks, served by the school staff, and monitored by the teacher. But the teacher follows parental guidelines and expectations related to what and how Filip should and should not eat. If the parents write a note exempting Filip from eating the fish fingers, he would not have to do it. But the parents in fact ask the teacher to report back to them about Filip’s eating. Filip negotiated his food through verbal and non-­verbal means. In the end, he does not eat the fish fingers. But he receives a note about that in his notebook passed between parents and teachers.1 Filip, and many other children, are under close surveillance from adults both at home and at school. Their eating practices are closely monitored, noted down and evaluated. And school seems to be stricter about it than home. As 6-­year-­old Marta noticed: ‘At home I can leave food on the plate, at school that’s not possible. I always have to finish it, even if I really don’t like it or I’m not hungry’. Although many mothers attempt to retain control over their children’s food in schools, they often have to decide to either trust or distrust the school staff, and indeed their own children. And children in schools encounter a completely new set of rules regarding feeding. They have to navigate between the rules set up by their parents, those implemented in schools, and their own needs and wants. The food rhythms of home and school are in many ways intertwined with each other, and influence each other. Children go to school five days a week, usually from around 8am until the late afternoon. In school, many of them eat drugie śniadanie (second breakfast) prepared by their parents. This is supposed to happen during a ‘breakfast break’ around 9.40am. Many children also eat meals in the school canteen. This happens usually around noon, during two ‘obiad breaks’, around 11.30am and 12.30pm. That is in fact unusually early to consume the



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main meal of the day, and many children mentioned to me they are often not hungry at that time. Throughout the day, children can also buy food in school shops or vending machines, if they are available in their schools. Such an established food pattern guides feeding and eating in schools, although it is on a daily basis challenged and bent to the actual food rhythms of the school. School food is a political issue. Kevin Morgan (2006) noticed that the re-­emergence of the political interests in school food involve the struggle to reinvent the public domain and the ideas of citizenship. As Manpreet Janeja shows in her forthcoming book (personal communication), based on research with Muslim and Hindu migrants of South-­Asian heritage in England, ‘proper’, ‘healthy’ and halal school meals are entangled with networks of trust and distrust. These have implications for how the ideas about ‘public health’, ‘multiculturalism’ and forms of ‘integration’ are constructed and practised in daily school lives in the UK, further impacting the conceptions of citizenship. There are many power struggles in Poland related to school food, with the state, the food industry, schools and families, and many other actors involved. The scrutiny of children’s behaviour and their ‘proper’ food ­practices – ­as in the case of ­Filip – h ­ ides questions about what kind of values and visions of the future the existing school food system is representing, and attempting to implement. These ideas might or might not be aligned with how parents imagine ‘proper’ feeding, and with what they are demanding from school staff and children. And they certainly might not be aligned with children’s opinions on that matter. Primary schools are state institutions which promote and implement the government’s ideas about raising people to be certain kinds of citizens. According to Michel Foucault, schools are the perfect examples of biopolitics, as their disciplinary power is not directed at the individual child, but at the population of school children. School discipline, through the complex system of manipulation and conditioning, enables access to children’s bodies and attitudes (Foucault 1980: 125). As Gibson and Dempsey (2015) demonstrated, food is an important element of these biopolitics. The state cannot easily influence how families feed and eat. But it can very directly dictate how schools do so, and through that shape the food habits of the future generation, for instance, teaching the whole population of school children to be ‘healthy’ and ‘civilized’. The expectations towards children as ‘proper’ eaters might change, however, when their positionality shifts from being part of an abstract and broad group of future ­citizens – ­as discussed in Chapter ­5 – ­to being actual children that adults have relationships with, as this chapter demonstrates. The schools are indeed state institutions, but more than this they are places where individual adults and children meet and establish particular relationships.

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When it comes to feeding children, schools make everyone anxious: school staff, because they are trying to make sure children learn to eat in the ‘right’ way, and have to deal with being scolded by parents, while attempting to implement the curricula and the government’s ideas about food education, and establishing and maintaining their own personal relationships with children; local state officials who feel responsible for schools as state institutions, and are worried about the health costs caused by the ‘bad’ food habits of the future generation, and do not have full control over what is in fact prepared in school canteens; parents, who are worried that they lose control over their children’s eating when they go to school, are concerned about what their children in fact eat there, and are forced to trust other adults in schools, while being judged by them; the public, who are worried about what children can buy in school shops and what they eat in school canteens, and how this influences their habits and their health; and finally children, who in schools have to handle different, sometimes contradictory, expectations from adults and navigate multiple feeding-­eating relationships, including the ones they have with their peers. Schools are the sites where the power struggles over the rights and responsibilities related to feeding children, about who controls children’s food, why and in what way, come to life most intensely. This chapter paints a picture of children’s food practices in schools in Warsaw, in order to delve into these multiple feeding anxieties.

HAVING A BITE The bell rung and the breakfast break started. It was 9.40am. Children ran out of their classrooms. The corridors quickly got crowded and extremely noisy. I could barely hear my own thoughts. Many children opened their backpacks and pulled out something to eat, mostly sandwiches wrapped in aluminium foil. At one end of the corridor a group of around seven girls sat by the wall, they talked and laughed while eating. One of them was sharing grapes with the others. In another part of the corridor boys were kicking a ball. They ran after it, while eating their sandwiches. I walked down to the ground floor, where the group of younger children went to the bathroom with their main teacher to wash their hands before eating. Then they went back to their classroom and ate their drugie śniadanie there, sitting at their tables. Everyone got out their lunchboxes, and started eating what was inside. Initially, they all sat calmly at their desks. I could hear foil being unwrapped, sounds of chewing and drinking. But they quickly started getting up, walking or running around the room, looking into each other’s lunchboxes, and sharing and exchanging food. The teacher began scolding them, but then she



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told me on the side that they need to move at least a little bit between the lessons, so she is not too hard on them, although she would prefer them to eat their drugie śniadanie calmly in silence. Almost all children receive a packed snack from home. Drugie śniadanie connects home and school in a very direct way: it is prepared at home, usually by a mother, and is supposed to be eaten at school by a child. When children open their lunchboxes, as Morrison noted, ‘home’ is made visible (1996: 655). Parents usually prepare what their children like to eat, so that the food is not wasted. Thirty-­three-­year-­old Anna told me: ‘I don’t prepare things she won’t eat. I don’t want the food to be wasted, and I want her to eat something when she is at school’. But they also try to balance this meal in order to make it a healthy and appealing snack, so they strategize about what to prepare. Many children receive two sandwiches: a savoury one, considered healthy, and a sweet one, considered less healthy, but more pleasurable and fun. As within the home setting, parents strive not only to control, but also to balance their children’s eating outside of home. They attempt to cater to children’s wants, prepare something they will eat, as well as nudge them into eating something healthy which they might be less inclined to consume. Sandwiches are the most popular food prepared for drugie śniadanie. They differ, however, from what the previous generations ate during their childhood. One of the school principals mentioned that ‘“poor sandwiches” are disappearing now’. By poor she meant those sandwiches which are simple, consisting just of bread and butter, sometimes with ham or cheese. But the ‘poor’ here can be understood in multiple ways. It relates to the concept of health: they are poor in nutritional value, as they do not have vegetables for example. They are poor in the sense that they lack creativity and imagination, they do not inspire children who eat them (see Allison 2008). And finally, they are poor because it is usually poor, working-­class parents who prepare these kinds of sandwiches for their children. But as we learn, the ‘poor’ sandwiches are disappearing. Today they usually have salad, or tomatoes, or are based on wholemeal bread; it is something more than just a white bread roll with butter, ham or cheese, though these kinds of sandwiches do still appear. Some children receive more than just sandwiches: cut vegetables or fruits, sweets, often designed as a second breakfast treat, juices, yogurts, crisps, chocolate bars. Many of these can be eaten at any given moment, but as a whole they unmistakably create a cultural artefact: drugie śniadanie for children (see Metcalfe et al. 2008). The packaging often strengthens ­this – c­ olourful lunchboxes, often with popular culture characters are relatively new in Poland. And the Polish term śniadaniówka seems to be disappearing in favour of the English term ‘lunchbox’, used on a daily basis. Despite this name change, these snacks are still treated as a second breakfast rather than lunch.

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In some schools preparing and giving children drugie śniadanie for school is emphasized as a parental duty. Parents, their engagement with the school and their care for their children, are evaluated and judged based on these packed meals. In particular, parents whose children go to private schools, which display a more intense approach to ‘healthy food’, have to be careful about what foods they give their children. During one of my meetings with Paulina, she was preparing food decorations for the Christmas tree in her daughter’s preschool, which promotes healthy and organic foods. She prepared the decoration chains from dried apricots, and told me with a sense of guilt: ‘Well, I know I should have bought the organic ones, other parents would have done that, but that would have been so expensive! So I bought the dried apricots filled with sulphur, sorry! They will not see the difference. I hope’. Schools not only have their own feeding anxieties, but also add to many anxieties experienced by mothers. Mothers are often judged both by school staff, and by other parents, with regard to what food they prepare for their children to take to school, or what food they bring to school events (see Patico 2020). In one of the schools in ­Copenhagen – ­as Tørslev (2014) showed – teachers decide whether the packed meals are proper or not, and put red, yellow or green stickers on them. When children take the lunchboxes back home, parents are thus graded on how well they have fulfilled their parental responsibilities. Allison (2008) demonstrated how in Japan a school lunchbox becomes a symbol of a mother’s attitude towards a child’s wellbeing and education. The obeñto is a sign of a woman’s commitment as a mother and her inspiring her child to become similarly committed as a student. In schools in Warsaw I did not notice these kinds of elaborate and systematic evaluations of parental practices. The evaluations and judgements were more subtle. Some teachers established either more formal or implicit rules concerning what was proper to bring to school; for example crisps did not fall into this category and were confiscated. When we were chatting in the staff room, teachers often recalled stories about children’s ‘bad’ eating, and their parents’ ‘bad’ feeding practices, regarding drugie śniadanie. One of them told me: One of the kids brought a bag full of gherkins, so I’ve asked him why he brought so many, and he replied that he likes them. What sort of [mentally] healthy person would give something like that to a child to bring to school? But it is the same boy who gets 10zł [$3] to school and spends it on crisps every day. And when I pointed this out, he told me that it is his money and he can do whatever he wants with it, so I told him that it is my classroom so he should follow my rules.   [To which another teacher added] Once I took a bag of crisps from a child and I gave it to his mother during a parent–teacher conference. I told both of them that in my classroom these types of foods are not allowed. But the mother was trying to



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convince me that it is her right to give her child what he wants, and I shouldn’t interfere.

Confiscated food, such as crisps, often becomes a source of tensions between parents and teachers, as their ideas about ‘proper’ feeding and eating differ, and their rights and responsibilities collide (see Punch, McIntosh and Emond 2012). Moreover, they are challenged by children. Children might hide their food practices either from school staff or from parents, or from both. For instance, when one time a mother was criticized for giving her son a can of Coke and crisps to school by a teacher, it turned out that she did not manage to prepare his drugie śniadanie, so gave him money to buy himself something ‘good’ on the way to school. She could not control what her son bought, but was nevertheless judged based on his choices. Some of the children I spoke with were not sure where their drugie śniadanie came from. They just accepted it as a given, and it was obvious to them that they have drugie śniadanie in their backpacks when they go to school. It sort of magically appeared. It is usually mothers who prepare drugie śniadanie for their children. Joanna gets up thirty minutes earlier, at 5am, in order to prepare food for her children to take to school. She does not trust her husband to know what and how to prepare. Most of the mothers take time and care in the morning to prepare food for their children to take to school. But mothers’ foodwork often remains invisible, unless it is negatively judged and scrutinized. Many children are, however, to some extent involved in the preparation of their drugie śniadanie, from choosing products while shopping to asking for particular food, and helping with the preparation. For some, being able to prepare your own drugie śniadanie was seen as a symbol of adultness. When 7-­year-­old Basia was drawing the best possible drugie śniadanie, which consisted of a Nutella sandwich, a ham sandwich, marshmallows, a piece of an apple pie and an Actimel yogurt, she told me that this was what she would prepare when she made her own drugie śniadanie in the 3rd or 4th grade. She could not wait for this moment to come. Drugie śniadanie, or parts of it, often become objects of children’s informal economy and exchange, and they are important for gaining social prestige. As Bernardine Chee (2000) demonstrated, particular food products become popular in peer groups, and one might be shamed for not recognizing or not having tasted them. Children often share or exchange sandwiches and snacks they bring to school. Children who bring ‘better’ food to school might be more popular, although such alliances, quickly created, equally quickly dissolve. These also can become a source of tension or concern for children. Six-­ year-­old Marta recounted such a situation to me: ‘A school nurse, when she came to visit us, she said that we shouldn’t eat sweets. And one friend, Ola,

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Figure 4.1  Seven-year-old Basia’s drawing of her best imagined and the worst possible lunchbox. The latter (on the right) includes brussels sprouts, potato and a fish with bones. Published with permission.

Figure 4.2  Six-year-old Olek’s drawing of his best imagined drugie śniadanie, which consists of a shake and hamburger from McDonald’s, and a piece of a chocolate pie. Published with permission.



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she always brings sweets to school, she eats them and other children are sad, because they don’t have any, she doesn’t share. And besides that, we shouldn’t eat sweets, sweets are unhealthy!’ Marta seems to be more upset that Ola does not share sweets with others than by the fact that they are unhealthy, although she was quite proud when recognizing their unhealthiness. When Tomek started preparing garlic bread for Julia to take to school, he was surprised when all of her friends enjoyed it so much that she continuously asked for more and more. And then other parents started asking him for the recipe when they met in school. The exchanges involve food and children, but also adults and their cooking knowledge and practices. Children sometimes ask their parents to give them more of a particular food, because their school friends enjoy it. So parents end up making two sandwiches, or giving their child much more of fruit, dried fruit, sweets or indeed garlic bread, than they would otherwise do, just so that their children can share it with their friends, or exchange it for something else. Not always knowingly, parents become a part of this informal economy of food. They are not always aware of their children bestowing and bartering, which happens across different categories of objects. Julia for example often brings colourful stickers to school to exchange them for sweets, which are limited at her home. Often it is only the wrappers or lollipop sticks found in children’s backpacks, in the nooks and crannies of their clothes, in their pockets, that give hints that children consume many foods their parents are not aware of. Parents prepare drugie śniadanie, but their ideas about it often differ from how their children eat their drugie śniadanie. The feeding is spatially and temporally detached from the eating. Children often break the rules set up by adults. They often do not eat everything that is given to them and which they are supposed to eat, or they eat it in the ‘wrong’ sequence: sweets first. They forget about it, throw away things they do not like. They eat with their hands, they eat food that falls on the floor, they eat what is inside of the sandwich and leave the bread, they divide the foodstuffs that are not supposed to be divided into ten pieces and share it with their friends, etc. Exchanging and sharing drugie śniadanie are especially important social interactions and events, but often perceived as revolting by teachers. One of them told me: ‘Oh, this is disgusting! They share and try everything from each other. They would even divide a kabanos [small dried sausage] in ten pieces to share it!’ Moreover, children often do not eat in the places or at the times which the school designates. The proper place is usually a classroom, and the proper time is the breakfast break, around 9.40am. Many children do eat their drugie śniadanie during that break; however, they often continue to eat it throughout the whole day. The most popular place to eat is a corridor; children sit on the floor with their friends or eat while playing, often while kicking a ball. Another popular place during the summer is the yard in front

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of the school. But there are also others, for example in one of the schools a bathroom became a popular place for drugie śniadanie – children could hide from teachers there, though this practice was perceived as disgusting by teachers and quickly eradicated. Children often eat their drugie śniadanie on their way back home. And sometimes they do not eat it at all. Julia for example often saves the sandwiches and gives them later to her younger sister, Kasia, when she is hungry. Six-­year-­old Gosia often eats them in the car, on her way back home. Children challenge many of the feeding rules set up by adults with their eating and non-­eating practices.

CATERING TO CHILDREN Many children also eat meals at the school canteen during their school day. Most of the public schools in Warsaw, built during the Polish People’s Republic, are equipped with kitchens and canteens. They are not obliged but encouraged by the law to provide food for children during the school day. And most of the schools provide meals for children. For a small fee, children can eat obiad in the school canteen. There is also a state programme which subsidizes the meals of children whose families cannot afford them.2 In 2012 the Warsaw municipality decided to cease subsidizing the school canteens. This caused a huge outcry and social debate, focused mostly on the related dismissals and many people losing their jobs, but also on the expected increase in prices, and the decrease in the quality of meals. In many neighbourhoods in Warsaw schools had to contract out the provision of the meals. The district councils decided this locally. In the school year 2012– 2013 these changes were introduced in six districts in Warsaw and affected 88 out of around 200 public primary schools. In some schools outside catering companies won the tenders, and they either prepared the meals in the school kitchen, or supplied them from outside the school. In other schools the cooks, often together with the food supervisor, started their own catering companies, and after winning the tenders rented the space of the canteen from the school, and kept serving meals. This change was one of the reasons for many worries and concerns that the cooks and other school staff, as well as parents and civil servants, expressed to me during my fieldwork. School canteens in Warsaw have been subjected to neoliberal changes, a process driven mainly by a desire to reduce public expenditure, similar to what has occurred in other European countries and in the US since the 1970s (Morrison 1996; Nestle 2002; Rawlins 2009; Truninger et al. 2013; Pike and Kelly 2014). As Morrison (1996) and Morgan (2006) showed, in the UK the need to limit public health spending was framed as a wish to provide consumers with individual and private choices. The latter framework has not



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been utilized in Poland. The privatization and neoliberalization of school food occurred at exactly the same time that the lament about children’s ‘bad’ food habits and the moral panic about obesity was increasing. While children are recognized as independent and rightful consumers by the food industry, they are not seen as such by parents, school staff or state officials. Most adults assume that children’s choices cannot be trusted. This in fact has been one of the reasons for introducing, in 2015, the law which limited what food can be served and sold in schools (Boni 2022b). So while the overall tendency seems to be to control exactly what children eat in schools, to make it and them healthier, the neoliberal changes introduced by the local government are perceived as servicing children’s unhealthy desires. Parents, teachers and journalists perceive catering companies as harmful, focused only on the business side of feeding children, and not on caring for them. An official from the National Health Inspectorate told me: ‘For them this is just a business. They care only about earning as much money as possible; they do not care about children’s health, and as a result serve for example French fries, and other unhealthy foods to children’. Many adults I talked to, at home, at school or in state institutions, perceived the meals served by catering companies as using inferior ingredients, having worse taste and being reheated, which is considered bad. Moreover, it has been assumed that nobody cares how children eat: the meals are served in plastic containers, children eat with plastic utensils, and they are not under proper control when eating. The anxiety about catering companies serving food to children was expressed by a school librarian who told me: ‘a school canteen is not only about food and feeding, though our canteen has great food, it provides something like a mother’s care, and these catering companies don’t do that!’ School canteens have been culturally recognized as a p ­ rolongation – ­or during socialism even a ­substitution – ­of maternal care and feeding. They are supposed to be places where children are taken care of. This care, however, is usually expressed through discipline. For many of my young and older interlocutors, school canteens connote very disciplining spaces. Nevertheless, now, as school staff claim, these familiar places have been monetized, and they supposedly do not care about children’s wellbeing. Catering companies operated in two canteens I studied. In those schools the main thing that changed from the point of view of parents and children was the price of the meals. A meal consisting of a soup and a second dish followed by a dessert now cost 7 zł ($2), in comparison to 5.50 zł ($1.50) and 4.30 zł ($1.30) before when the canteens were subsidized by the local state. Mrs Hanna started one of those catering companies. She explained to me that she was young and had energy to do this. She attended a workshop on running a catering company and learned how to do it, otherwise she and the

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cooks would have probably lost their jobs. Her mum was one of the cooks, and her two sons attended the school. Mrs Hanna’s catering company prepared all the meals in the school kitchen and catered only to this one canteen. So basically, not much had changed in the way the canteen was organized, besides the financial aspect. Mr Piotr’s catering company serviced a number of the canteens all over the city, including one which I researched. None of them, however, served meals in plastic containers, or French fries. And from what I observed, they and their employees surrounded children with the same kind of care as cooks in other canteens. This of course does not mean that all catering companies in Warsaw are like that. Adam and Zosia for example complained to me about the quality of food served by catering companies in their private schools, and about eating from plastic containers. Zosia said: I don’t want to complain too much, they sometimes have good stuff. For instance, I like their spinach pierogi [dumplings], although one portion consists of only five pierogis. The meals are really small, and the food is usually cold. And it’s really expensive, 3 zł just for a soup, and 8,50zł for a full meal. … and we eat in Styrofoam containers. Soup is served in plastic bowls. It’s sometimes good, but in general I don’t like it, so I rarely eat it.

Despite Zosia’s complains, which are more about the size of portions and the fact that they are served cold, the quality of school food in Warsaw seems to be better than how the US school food system has been described (Poppendieck 2010; Gaddis 2019). Non-­governmental workers, civil servants, as well as school staff and parents, often mentioned the US when discussing their worries about children’s food. For many years and in many respects perceived as a benchmark Poland should strive for, the US has now become a negative example, of where we do not want to go when it comes to food. It remains a reference point, but with more and more negative connotations. Catering to children relates not only to literal catering companies, but also to the idea of catering to children’s tastes. Children used to eat what adults fed them, it was up to adults to decide, and there was a limited scope for negotiation on children’s part. This was partly related to food scarcity, and partly to a different model of raising children, as discussed in Chapter 1. But now, as many school staff and non-­governmental workers told me, children do not know how to eat ‘properly’. The increasing recognition of children’s agency, likes and dislikes cause a problem when their food preferences do not map onto what is considered ‘proper’ food in schools. Mrs Hanna, one of the food supervisors, explained: We cannot give them meals and products which they are not taught to eat. And they are not taught at home. Some of them have never seen Brussels sprouts in their lives,



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others do not know what gołąbki [cabbage meat rolls] are. The little ones, when they come to school, they do not know anything [about proper food].

According to this claim, eating is based on knowledge and familiarity. Children only eat food they recognize and know how to eat. And they do not know how to eat, because parents have not taught them about ‘proper food’, which in this case seems to include traditional Polish meals, such as gołąbki, as well as a variety of food products. During my fieldwork many adults told me that children today are spoiled. With children’s increasingly central position within the family and society, many people commented that children are overindulged and not properly raised. Food has an important role in that process since eating is an important part of socialization, and food pleasures can easily be seen as indulgent. Children’s ­tastes – ­or what is considered to be their ­tastes – ­have been increasingly taken into consideration not only by parents, but also by food supervisors and cooks working in school canteens who feel pressured to cater to children’s tastes, while complaining about them, and attempting to change them. In public schools there is no choice of dishes: everyone eats the same, with the exception of children with allergies, who receive different meals. Twelve-­year-­old Hania mentioned that she uses her severe allergies to her advantage, and if something she does not like or does not want to eat is served in the school canteen, she says that she is allergic and cannot eat it. In general though, school canteens do not accommodate for everyone’s tastes. This issue was raised during one of the cooking workshops for school cooks I attended, which was organized by a non-­governmental organization School on the Fork. It took place in a vocational school, where we sat, in a group of around twenty people, in a room with four separate workplaces with stoves and worktops. The participants were all women. In schools, as in the home domain, there is a high feminization of care work and foodwork. Before the cooking had started, Grzegorz, the founder of the NGO, was moderating a discussion about cooking in schools. The cooks and food supervisors, who came from all over Poland, sat around that room and shared their grievances with us. They said that they had no choice, they had to cook what children wanted to eat, otherwise they would lose their jobs. If children did not like the food served in the school canteen, they would stop eating there, and the canteen would cease to exist. The canteens are financially dependent on children actually eating there, and on parents paying for their meals, even though some canteens and some of the meals are still subsidized by the state. The cooks mentioned being often criticized, by parents or the media and the public, for preparing unhealthy dishes in school

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canteens, for instance fish fingers, hamburgers or fries. They would prefer to make ‘better’ food, but as they explained, they had no choice. One of them said: ‘With hearts on our sleeves we approach this, we encourage them [children], but if they won’t eat, the state will come and take our work!’ Somebody added: ‘They haven’t even tried, and they already spit it out!’. ‘That’s because they were not taught at home!’ said another person. Some of the workshop attendees noticed that it was the fault of parents because they did not teach children how to eat other ‘better’ and healthier foods. Once again, the blame and responsibility for children’s ‘bad’ eating is shuffled between home and school. After a heated discussion they started cooking. There were four groups, each led by one professional cook, each making a set of different dishes. Group number 1 made soups: chłodnik (a typical Polish summer soup from chard), lentil soup, corn soup and a carrot soup, which was a vegan option. Group number 2 made turkey in three ways with tabbouleh and other salads. Group number 3 worked on fish cutlets with dill, garlic, lemon peel and oats with vegetables. And group number 4 prepared desserts. We all had great fun when preparing, and later eating, these dishes. But some of the cooks and food supervisors were sceptical as to whether children would eat these meals if they prepared them in their canteens. It seemed that they could not even try making it. The ­canteens – ­and through them the ­cooks – ­are monitored by the National Health Inspectorate, which is the institution of the Ministry of Health. It used to be that they tested the quality of food, and checked the cleanliness and hygiene of the food preparation process, which they still do, but the Inspectorate was also responsible for monitoring the diets and making sure that they were nutritionally appropriate for children. One of the civil servants who worked in the regional office, Mrs Anna, anxiously explained that these rules changed when Poland entered the European Union in 2004. Now, the canteens are monitored to check that they are run according to the HACCP (Hazard analysis and critical control points) system, so for example if the preparation of raw food is organized in a different part of the kitchen than the cooking, and if the food is safe and handled hygienically, but nobody checks if the meals are nutritionally appropriate. Mrs Anna told me: We have certainly developed from the sanitary angle, there are many more hygiene standards and people respect them, but we have moved backwards from the food quality angle. It is sad what has happened with the school canteens in Poland. Of course, people complained, but the canteens really used to cook for children, cooks knew what children like to eat. These smells, I recreated them at home, I started preparing the mushroom soup in the same way as in my child’s school. And we’ve lost a lot of that food culture with all these Western standards.



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Feeding anxieties ­involve – ­that is they lead to and are the result o ­ f–m ­ any contradictions. For instance, catering to children’s tastes, perceived by the public in a very negative light, is presented here in a positive way by Mrs Anna, although maybe it is because children’s tastes have changed. Mrs Anna saw ‘the loss of our food culture’ as very worrisome in light of the growing obesity among children in P ­ oland – ­again used as a warning and alarming ­instrument – e­ specially given the increasing number of catering companies operating in schools in Warsaw which apparently cannot be trusted. Mrs Anna positioned the current situation of school food within the context of the broader socio-­economic changes that have been happening in Poland, shaped for instance by EU regulations and neoliberal shifts, a­ nd – l­ike many others I spoke ­to – ­was concerned with where things were going. Mrs Anna’s statement demonstrates the shared feeling in schools that something has been lost, and that things have changed for the worse ‘with all these Western standards’. Catering to children, both literally and symbolically, is a problematic issue. To many school staff it feels necessary, but worrisome, as children’s tastes have changed in a ‘bad’ way. Supposedly, they are less often shaped by a traditional Polish cuisine, and more by the food industry, ‘Western’ diet and junk food. Many school staff are attempting to counter this, as they see it, negative trend, and to adjust and change children’s tastes and food habits. Many of them indeed feel they are supposed to teach children about food since they have not been taught at home.

SCHOOL CANTEENS In the schools I researched, canteen dishes included for instance pierogi (dumplings), pancakes, meats in different forms, surówki which are more popular, such as those made from carrots. The meal typically consists of a soup and a second dish, comprising of meat, vegetables and starch. The only non-­meat meal is served on Fridays, which derives from the polish Catholic fasting tradition, but is now maintained as a cultural rather than religious custom. Additionally, to drink there is water, juice or kompot. Sometimes there is also a dessert, either fruit, a yogurt, a sweet bun, or a chocolate bar. All of these meals resemble traditional homecooked dishes, which reaffirms the view that cooks and other caregivers in schools take on themselves the roles of maternal figures when feeding children. I have not witnessed any hamburgers or fries being served, but it does not mean they were not served in other canteens across Warsaw. The figure below illustrates a typical weekly menu served in one of the school canteens. The menu was printed on a template delivered by one of the food providers. For that particular week the school canteen served:

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Figure 4.3  A menu from a school canteen, photographed by the author, 2013.



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Rice and barley soup, chicken breast schnitzel, coleslaw, potatoes. Kompot and fruit. Pickled cucumber soup. Pancakes with cheese and wild berries’ sauce. Kompot. Mushroom soup with noodles. Meatloaf/meatballs, carrot and peas, potatoes. Kompot and yogurt waffle. White borsch. All spice chicken, broccoli, rice. Kompot, fruit. Chicken broth with noodles. Chicken leg, vegetable salad, peach, potatoes. Kompot, yogurt. Tomato soup. Pork sirloin, beetroot salad, potatoes. Apple juice. Cauliflower soup. Fried fish, sauerkraut salad, potatoes. Kompot, ‘apple slices’ crisps. Pea soup. ‘Pounded’ pork meat, vegetable salad, barley. Kompot, yogurt waffle. Vegetable soup. Breaded schnitzel, cabbage with dill, potatoes. Kompot, fruit. Potato soup. Spaghetti, cheese, pickled cucumber. Kompot, fruit.

While some parents were critical of canteen food, others highly appreciated it. Małgosia Podolska told me: We buy meals for Bartek in the school canteen. He can eat a full two dish meal there. And Zuzia eats in the kindergarten. Because of that we only make dinner for ourselves in the evening, and they only eat supper. This really gives me a sense of security and comfort. I am not a big fan of the kitchen, I don’t like cooking. And when I come back home from work at 6pm, I really wouldn’t have the energy to cook a proper meal for them. So I’m glad it’s organized like that.

Małgosia trusts the school cooks to feed her son, so that she does not have to worry about it. And this gives her a sense of security and comfort. Nevertheless, family ­meals – ­as discussed in the previous ­chapter – ­have such strong normative and cultural connotations that in many families children eat dinner with their parents during the weekdays. Parents consider this a ‘proper’ thing to do, and a nice way to spend time with children. But they also do not want their children to be hungry throughout a long school day. As a result, quite a few children I met eat obiad twice on a daily basis. This represents well the tendency of overfeeding embedded in the Polish food culture. The interactions between children and adults in school canteens resemble playing a game of sorts. Unintentionally I became a part of that game. One of the rules of the interaction order of the canteen is that children have to show their plates to a­ dults – ­teachers controlling the c­ anteen – t­ o get their consent to return their plate to the kitchen, and leave the canteen. On several occasions a child approached me and showed me their plate, awaiting my assessment on whether they could return it to the kitchen. I always said that this was not my role, and that they should ask somebody else, bewildered by the idea of telling someone how much they should eat. Inadvertently, I was also used to discipline children. When they asked school staff who I was and what I was doing, they often answered that I was writing down who ate how much, and so they had better eat well. As a result, a few children came to me

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Figures 4.4–4.6  School meals, photographed by the author, 2012–2013.



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to tell me how much they had eaten. I tried to calm them down and said that I was not interested in how much and what they ate, which was not entirely true. I was indeed interested exactly in that, but I would not judge, scold or evaluate anyone based on that. I was not there to control or discipline children or adults. Still, my presence often caused reserve initially, and then interest and speculations. For instance, some children thought I was a spy, which maybe in a way I was. Warsaw school canteens are spaces of power struggles between children and adults, including teachers, cooks, food supervisors, principals, parents and state officials. In the midst of these struggles and negotiations, the goal of school canteens is twofold: to feed children in order to provide them with the necessary nutrients and energy, to make sure they are not hungry during their school day, or to substitute their food intake if they are not fed properly at home; and to feed children in order to teach them what proper eating entails, to socialize them into ‘proper’ eaters. In the canteen, there is usually a space for around sixty people. Pictures or cut-­outs of flowers or foodstuffs decorate the walls, and diverse slogans hang on the walls: ‘Eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day’; ‘Wash your hands before eating’, etc. Reminding children about these rules is one of the ways of disciplining and governing them in their proper eating practices. Moreover, the rules of using the ­canteen – ­for example, ‘we do not run’, ‘everyone eats in turn’, ‘there should be silence in the canteen’ – are sometimes also displayed on the walls. And the menus for the whole week are usually placed near the entrance (see above). The menus are displayed both for children and their parents. Parents often check them themselves or ask their children what is served in the canteen on a particular day or week, in order not to prepare similar food at home. They are also interested in what their children are eating. And if a child particularly dislikes a specific dish, they might receive a note from parents exempting them from eating that particular food. Older children, who have more freedom in their comings and goings in school, might choose not to come to the canteen when something they dislike is served. Younger ones usually come with their teachers, and are under closer surveillance. As Jo Pike (2008, 2010a, 2010b) argued, the spatial practices of school canteens implement what Foucault referred to as governing and disciplining technologies. Children are moulded into well-­ behaved eaters, into self-­governing subjects through verbal comments, such as ‘sit up straight’, ‘eat your meal’, ‘don’t talk when eating’, and bodily adjustments, as teachers would not only verbally but also physically adjust children’s posture or show them how to eat with a knife and fork. Children’s bodies and habits are also shaped through the spatiality of the school canteen. Children sit at the tables; there is not a lot of space to walk in between them. There are

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Figures 4.7–4.8  School canteens, photographed by the author, 2012–2013.



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two windows connecting the canteen with the kitchen, one for issuing the meals, which allows controlling how much food children are given, and the ‘collection window’ to which children return plates, placed in view of the school staff and cooks so that children cannot easily dispose of unwanted food. The canteens are sufficiently small so that all children fall under adults’ controlling and disciplining gaze. Many of the children I talked to complained about eating in school canteens, that they had to queue in order to eat, sometimes for the whole break, and that they had to eat in a hurry. They also worried about the quality and taste of food served, or about the portions. Children are often forced to eat everything on their plates, even if they do not like it or are not hungry at that moment. And they have a very limited say over the portions they receive. When in the canteen, children are constantly reprimanded, disciplined and silenced. They are rushed, because the break usually lasts only fifteen or twenty minutes, and during that time dozens of children have to use the canteen. Some of the children were anxious about going to the canteen, and in the end convinced their parents not to make them eat there. Teachers often asked children to eat a bit more, usually a bit more meat or fish and vegetables. What they said was dependent on the situation. It differed according to what time it was, whether it was the beginning or the end of the break, what kind of food was served that day, as there are some dishes which are clearly among the least favourite, and finally who was asking them. Children who are perceived as those who ‘eat well’, that is they eat everything that is put on their plate without complaining, and do not cause problems, are allowed to leave some food from time to time. Children who are labelled as ‘very problematic eaters’ are also asked to eat less than others. Children who often cause problems, the fussy eaters and naughty children who do not want to eat in the proper way are put under closer surveillance. Girls who put on sweet and innocent expressions are much more likely to pass the inspection than mischief-­maker boys. Eleven-­year-­old Kamila told me: ‘At the canteen I can choose, if I don’t like a particular thing, the cook will give me less or none [so they do not tell children to eat everything?] Yes, they control what children eat, but I usually eat everything so she doesn’t yell at me, and I can leave something’. Kamila is perceived by canteen staff as a well-­behaved girl, so on the rare occasions when she does not want to eat something, she does not have to. Children often ask the cooks for smaller or bigger portions, as Kamila does. But they also use different tactics to evade adults’ rules. They wait for the moment when nobody is looking to return their plates. While the younger children come to the canteen as a group with the teacher, and leave together once everyone has finished eating, the older children often just have to outwait the ­adults – ­when the break ends they are usually allowed to leave the

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canteen anyway since classes are starting. Children often help each other with this. Twelve-­year-­old Zosia told me: Our school nun is tough, she asks how much you have eaten, and if there is about ¼ left, you can throw it out, but if there is still half of a meal, you have to go back to your place to finish eating it. With other teachers it is a bit easier. We have this agreement, that one of us goes and talks to Mr Tomek, or distracts whoever else is there besides the nun, and the rest returns their plates.3

As Zosia demonstrates, children help each other in tricking the school staff, and avoiding eating what they do not want to eat. They might also say that another teacher allowed them to return the plate, that they have already complied with somebody else’s orders, which might not necessarily be true. If you do not want to eat what is on your plate, there are also different ways of arranging food on the plate so that it looks as if more has been eaten. If you pour yourself s­ oup – ­the only dish that older children sometimes serve ­themselves – ­a common tactic is to pour just a little and spread it over the plate, to make it look as if the whole bowl of soup was eaten. Meat can be hidden under the potatoes. And food in general can be spread out on the plate so that it looks as if more has been eaten. I sometimes used this tactic myself when served meals in the canteens and could not eat the whole portion but did not want to offend the cooks. Some of the older children check what is on the menu each day, and if they do not want to eat it, they simply do not come to the canteen. Twelve-­ year-­old Hania explained to me that as they get older, fewer and fewer children eat at the canteen, ‘because it is not that parents tell them to do this, everyone can decide on their own, so if they do not like the food, they will not eat at the canteen’. This seems to confirm the worries of school canteen staff that if children do not like the food, they will stop using the canteen. However, from what I saw and heard, they did not stop because the canteen did not serve hamburgers or fries. They stopped simply because they did not like the taste of the canteen food, or they particularly disliked the atmosphere of rushing and disciplining them. Conversely, one of the students, 7 or 8 years old, told me that she is planning to ask and convince her mother to let her eat meals in the school canteen, because she was tempted by the desserts provided. I was sitting outside of the canteen one day, making my notes, when she and her friend approached me. The friend has just left the canteen with a chocolate dessert, and that is what prompted our conversation about canteen food and desserts. Another time, a 9-­year-­old girl told me she wanted to eat in the canteen because her best friend did, and she wanted to spend time and share this experience with her friends. She did not want to feel excluded. There are varied reasons for children’s, and their parents’, choices about eating in school canteens.



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The main negotiations in the school canteen concern what and how much is eaten. The plates are under close control. However, teachers also regulate other aspects of children’s behaviour. They often tell children, especially the younger ones, where they should sit. This is to separate friends who talk a lot with each other, and also to make sure that they use several tables instead of spreading over the whole canteen. But for children eating a meal is first and foremost a social event. One day when I was in the canteen, a group of girls from the 6th grade entered. After careful consideration they chose where to sit. A moment after they sat down another friend joined them. She looked at that table and without a word sat at another one nearby. All of the girls got up and joined ‘the leader’ at her table. It is important where you sit, because some places and some people are more popular than others. Children do not like sitting with strangers, which they are forced to do if the canteen is full. Although for some children the obiad break is considered a waste, because they cannot play, for most of them it is an important social occasion. Younger children do in fact play different games when in the canteen, either word games or pretending that the cutlery are swords for instance. The older ones simply talk. Mrs Hanna told me that they treat her canteen as a restaurant; they would love to just sit there for hours and talk. Across the school, pairs or groups of children arrange when to go to the canteen, and with whom. I witnessed for instance a conversation between three 9-­year-­olds, debating during which break they should go and eat obiad in the canteen. One of them wanted to go right away, because she needed to leave school early that day, right after the next lesson. She tried to convince one of her friends to join her. But the third girl was at the same time convincing the same friend that they should go during the next break, because it was too early to go now. Indeed, going to the school canteen, eating with particular friends, is an important social interaction that children often negotiate not only with adults at home and at school, but also with their peers. Teachers constantly interrupt all of these engagements, negotiations and important social interactions. As Daniel and Gustafsson (2010) argued, while for children eating in a school canteen is first and foremost a social occasion, for school cooks and staff it is in principle an issue of speed and organization. They use this occasion to educate and socialize children, to change their current practices related to food. They repetitively reprimand children to sit up at the table and eat in a proper way, for example not to stick a cutlet on a fork and bite pieces off it. Many adults complained that children do not know how to use knives, that they eat only with their forks; however, when I looked for them myself, it turned out that knives were often not provided. Children are also asked not to talk, but to eat. They are reminded that ‘canteen is not for talking, it is for eating!’, and that they can choke if

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simultaneously talking and eating, or that ‘this is not time for playing, but for eating!’ PE teachers use their whistles to order silence. Others bang on the table, if verbal reprimands are not enough. Teachers make sure that children eat quickly, and do not engage in other practices. They tell children that if they do not eat everything they are supposed to, they will not receive dessert. Other pressures include telling children that if they do not stop misbehaving they will have to change seats, or e­ ven – t­ he direst of t­ hreats – ­they will have to sit with teachers. Some of the teachers also consume meals at the school canteens. Adults also threaten that they will come and cut children’s food up and feed them as if they were small babies, or that they will call their parents to complain that they are misbehaving. On the one hand, children are socialized and are supposed to be taught how to eat like ‘normal’ people in schools. Their behaviour is constantly verbally and physically adjusted. On the other hand, they are often not treated as normal people, and their eating is governed by different set of rules than when adults eat. They are not allowed to talk or choose their own seats for instance. They usually have a very limited say in their portion size. They might not be allowed to salt their dishes, as salt is considered bad for children. They are not allowed to leave food on the plate. Eating obiad in the school canteen is not only controlled by adults at school; also parents either ask their children about what they have eaten in the canteen, or directly ask the teachers what their children have eaten. Teachers are influenced by parents who often emphasize that they do not want their children to be force fed at school. Mr Bronisław, one of the food supervisors, told me that this is the most frequent comment parents make when paying for their children’s meals. They ask for their children not to be forced to eat, often because they have such painful memories of force feeding from their own childhood. But simultaneously, parents want their children to eat something in the canteen, so that they will not be hungry during the day. Therefore, teachers have to find a balance between making sure that children eat, while at the same time not forcing them to eat. And they deal with these expectations in various ways. Children today are supposed to be independent and rather gently nudged towards the proper behaviour than harshly disciplined and forced to behave in a particular way. School canteens indeed are places where the politics of children’s food come to life. There are national and local state regulations that guide how canteens are organized. But, above all, canteens are places of verbal and non-­ verbal negotiations between adults and children, of reprimands and bodily adjustments, of daily struggles and pleasures.



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FEEDER-­E ATER-­J UDGER: JUGGLING MULTIPLE ROLES School staff were often upset about what they perceived as destructive changes in food cultures and food practices in Poland and, troubled, asked me what I thought about the situation in their school. They complained that many parents feed their children in an ‘improper’ way, usually meaning unhealthily, but also not ­traditional – ­they complained that children do not recognize typical Polish dishes. They also mentioned that parents do not want to get involved in the various food education programmes implemented in schools; that they do not come to the meetings, are not interested in broadening their knowledge about what is good for their children. I have not had a chance to attend any such events, to see whether any parents in fact did join them, as they were not organized at the time of my fieldwork. According to many of my interlocutors at schools, parents do not know how to feed their children ‘properly’ so they should be disciplined into proper feeders. Mrs Beata, one of the food supervisors, noted: It’s the worst if a child cannot distinguish between a tomato and a beetroot. Those children who went to the kindergarten know these tastes, they know that surówki should be eaten; but those who come to school straight from home, it’s horrible, they don’t know anything because they are not taught at home that vegetables should be eaten, they are not taught about food.

Of course, what she means is that they are not taught about food in a typical, school-­like way. In school, children should learn the ‘right’ food practices and develop ‘proper’ tastes. Only children who have already gone through institutional education have ‘good’ food dispositions. Others need to be re-­ educated to be ‘proper’ eaters. One of the teachers, disgusted by how students eat their drugie śniadanie, told me: ‘They should eat calmly in the classroom, like normal people!’ Adults in schools often referred to the notion of normality with regard to how children should eat. From their perspectives what children did, for example eating in a bathroom, eating while kicking a ball or sharing and dividing food, was not normal. Not only f­ eeding – f­ or example what parents prepare for their children as drugie śniadanie – but also eating is perceived in a very normative way and judged as proper or not proper. The process of judging, commenting and normalizing is part of disciplining and socializing parents and children into particular feeders and eaters. On other occasions, however, home and family discipline schools. Joanna told me such a story regarding a vending machine placed in her daughter’s school: They placed a vending machine in our school. I think it lasted for about a month. We [parents] wrote a petition to the principal about that. I think that it was a trial run.

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They were just trying it out. I don’t know why they have taken it away in the end, I’m just glad they did. All of us [parents] signed that petition. My husband wrote a letter to the Education Office in Warsaw asking about these vending machines, how come they can be placed in schools. I suppose it is some sort of financial aid for a school.

Parents, as Joanna’s story shows, not only set up the rules for their children regarding their eating at school, for instance by deciding that children should eat obiad in the school canteen, by forbidding them to go to the school shop, or by preparing food in the form of drugie śniadanie; they also influence the school. In fact, ‘proper’ parents, according to a middle-­class ideal, are expected to get involved in school life; those who fail to do this are not only judged and disciplined by adults at school, but also by other parents (see Patico 2020). Joanna continued her story about the vending machine by criticizing parents who agreed to place it in another building of the school where it indeed stayed. The vending machine offered drinks, mainly sweet ice teas, and snacks including different kinds of paluszki (breadsticks), crackers and chocolate bars. Joanna asked me: ‘which parent in their right mind would want this vending machine to stay in school?’, implying a highly normative and disapproving perspective on both vending machines and parents who do not contest them. Problems with trust and control are important features of home–school relationships. Parents of younger children often ask teachers what their children have eaten at school, as was the case with Filip in the opening vignette. Some of them want them to eat at least a little bit, so that they are not hungry during the day. Others want their children to eat a whole meal since they have already paid for it. A teacher explained: ‘And then they resent me because I didn’t make sure that they eat, and children tell me that their parents allow them to leave something, not to eat everything. And then the parents are not angry at their children because they lie, but at me because I haven’t supervised them’. As Ian McIntosh et al. pointed out, exercising power over children is often an ambiguous experience for adults, as it can be perceived at the same time as necessary and unwelcome (2010: 301). School staff have their own opinions on how to feed children, but after all this is a parental responsibility and even if they complain about parents, they can rarely, only in severe cases, challenge that. Berry Mayall noted that ‘teachers tread a difficult path between asking the home to be as they think it should be and accepting homes, parents and families as they are’ (1994: 28). School staff have to find a balance between following the rules set by parents and their own opinions and judgements, and most of all they have to negotiate with children on a daily basis. Parents have to find a balance between feeding their children in the way they think is right, and giving part of that responsibility and care to adults at school. They



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are worried about giving that control away and about their children’s eating in schools, but they are also anxious about being judged by school staff and other parents. And children have to navigate between the food rhythms and expectations of home and school, as well as many social interactions with adults and their peers which are mediated with food. Decisions about sharing food, bringing particular food from home or buying it in the school shop are all based on important negotiations. While for children food is to a large extent and in various ways about intense sociality, sharing and exchanging it, for many adults the sociality of school food gets lost. People engaged in feeding-­eating relationships in schools change their positions as feeders, eaters and judgers. School staff often judge how parents and children feed and eat, but in certain situations they become feeders as well. And then they are judged by parents and children, or by civil servants, activists or the media. Although children are usually cast in the role of eater, they can become judgers as well. I recounted a story in the previous chapter of how Agnieszka was critical of her teachers and classmates who joyfully went to McDonald’s during a break in a school trip. The politics of school food involve not only principals, teachers, food supervisors and cooks, as well as parents, but also other state institutions, the food industry, media and non-­governmental activists. Children are caught up in these various feeding anxieties. They participate in the negotiations and power struggles, sometimes using them to their advantage, when for example they tell adults in the canteen that they cannot eat something because they are allergic, or that their parents told them they do not have to finish the whole meal, or when they lie to their parents about what they have eaten at school. Filip was certainly struggling in his position of being caught between the rules set up his parents and the rules implemented in school. But simultaneously he knowingly moved between these rules and influenced the feeding practices of adults with his own eating, shaping them into particular feeders, and reinterpreting the politics of school food in his own way.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Next to home, schools are the main sites where many power struggles and anxieties related to children’s food are focused and take place. This chapter delved most deeply into many feeding anxieties around school food which involve school staff, parents and children, as well as media outlets, state officials, non-­governmental workers and the general public. Schools have to deal with various, often contradictory expectations regarding feeding children. Their concerns are about creating the canteens, employing the cooks or organizing tenders for catering companies,

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and handling food suppliers. Schools are also often worried about fulfilling the local and national government’s expectations. They also have to deal with parents, their demands and beliefs, expectations and judgements. And finally, adults in schools on a daily basis interact with children and are involved, willingly or not, in their food practices. The principals, teachers, cooks and food supervisors are representatives of the state, just as the school shop owners and sellers are considered to be representatives of the food industry who are also present in schools. At the same time, they are individuals who establish various personal relationships with children and their parents, and who care both about and for them (Rummery and Fine 2012: 322). They attempt to adjust children’s bodies and minds, and sometimes those of parents too: their posture at the table, their behaviour, and their opinions on food. They have to find a balance between catering to children’s tastes, giving them what they want, and changing their tastes and behaviour according to what is expected of and typical for children in Polish schools. Children spend a lot of time in schools, where they consume food, either brought from home, bought on the way to school, in the school shop or a vending machine, or eaten in the school canteen. And food often traverses the school-­home divide. It travels with children throughout their days, changing the food rhythms in school and home, and challenging the feeding-­ eating relationships. The food rhythms of school are guided not only by the decisions of school staff, but also by local and national state laws and regulations. And the state, as the following chapter shows, is increasingly concerned about children’s food.

NOTES  1. Since my fieldwork, in many schools the notebooks have been digitalized.  2. In the 1990s children’s malnutrition and undernourishment was recognized as an important social problem. From 1996 the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy financed the municipalities, which provided meals for children in Poland through schools, day rooms and local culture centres. Between 2002 and 2004 the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy in coordination with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Sport launched a pilot project focused only on school children (Szymańczak 2005). Since 2005 the government has paid for feeding those children whose families otherwise cannot afford it, through the programme Pomoc państwa w zakresie dożywiania (The State’s Aid in Feeding). In Warsaw around 15,000 children benefit from this programme yearly.  3. The Catholic church has been present in schools in Poland since 1990, as religion lessons have become part of the curriculum, and have been often provided by nuns.

CHAPTE R 5

EAT FOR THE GREATER GOOD On Nutritional Norms, Food Education and Making Healthy Citizens

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n the late spring of 2013, I came to school on a Saturday, to participate in a Health Picnic. Mrs Agnieszka, the principal, had previously told me that it was supposed to be a health awareness year in schools, ordered by the Ministry of Education, so she decided to reframe the annual picnic into a Health Picnic. Nobody else, from other schools or the ministries, mentioned or knew anything about this health awareness year, but Mrs Agnieszka was certainly worried about it. Mrs Hanna, the food supervisor, mentioned that in previous years she used to prepare white borscht1 and roasted chicken for the picnics, but this year it was supposed to be about healthy eating. White borscht and roasted chicken did not seem healthy to her, so she asked the cooks to prepare baked potatoes, penne pasta with vegetables and rice with tomatoes. There was also food brought by parents: fruits and raw vegetables, salads, dips, oatmeal cookies and various cakes, dried fruits and nuts, shrimp crisps, and wholemeal bread, referred to in Poland as dark bread (ciemny chleb), with butter on the side. There was water, juice and strawberry kompot to drink. The whole school was covered with posters depicting food, some from the food education programmes, others clearly prepared by children. The school shop was also covered with posters presenting healthy food, mainly fruits. For instance, one poster depicted a huge pineapple surrounded by the phrase ‘zdrowa żywność’ (healthy food) in huge bold red letters. I talked to Mrs Iwona, who worked there, and she explained that ‘it is about healthy food today, so I have hidden all those not healthy products, that is what the boss wanted and asked me for’. So while the crisps, chocolate bars and gummy sweets were hidden, the nuts, crisp breads, carrot crisps, juices and water were on display.

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There were various stands where children could get their faces painted or make bouquets from paper flowers. One stand was taken up by four dieticians in white coats. They brought worksheets and a calculator to determine whether children have proper Body Mass Index (BMI), and a poster depicting a food pyramid (described below). Mrs Agnieszka, the principal of the school, had previously mentioned to me that she really wanted someone from the Warsaw University of Life Science, the main school where dietitians and nutritionists are trained, to come, and they sent a few students. The dieticians, however, looked rather bored, and their stand was empty most of the time. I noticed only one mother asking whether her child had a proper BMI during the few hours I spent in school that day. The most popular place was on the opposite side of the corridor. There was a huge ice-­cream fridge and children constantly gathered around it to pick their favourite popsicles. Why does parental feeding and children’s eating need to become healthier? Why do communities need to come together to hide what is unhealthy, and perform a particular perception of healthy feeding and eating? First, it is recognized by the state and international institutions, such as the National Food and Nutrition Institute and World Health Organization, that children in Poland do not eat, and parents do not feed them, in a ‘proper’ way, that is according to dietary advice. WHO research, for instance, documented that in 2012 overweight and obesity among children in Poland was rising at the highest rate in Europe, and this was largely due to their food habits (Currie et al. 2012). And second, it is documented that this situation will lead to startling health problems, and effectively to great public health costs in the future. When my fieldwork started, the Polish branch of KPMG, one of the biggest international auditor companies, published a research report created in cooperation with Nutricia Foundation. This report presented a forecast of costs of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, connected to bad food habits, that could be incurred by the Polish state up to 2030, which highlights some alarming figures. The Polish state is anxious not only about the supposedly bad food habits of children, and the costly health problems these will lead to, but also about the ways of dealing with this ­problem – ­different state institutions have varied ideas about what to do. The state is not a unified entity. There are many tensions and disagreements, and sometimes even competition, between different agents of the state. There are many tensions related to who has the proper knowledge and the tools, who has the jurisdiction, and who knows best how to teach people about food. These negotiations happen not only between different state institutions, but also involve various food and health experts, non-­governmental workers, schools, and even journalists, or food producers and marketers.



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The state institutions and the people working in them are also anxious about being judged, by public opinion and the voters in Poland, and by the international community, including WHO and the European Union. Therefore, in order to deal with these feeding anxieties and influence some of their sources, in a similar way to how a mother attempts to control what her child eats, the state attempts to control and influence how children in Poland eat, and how their mothers feed them. The Health Picnic I attended, with posters promoting healthy food, ‘proper’ food on display, and dietitians calculating children’s BMI in close proximity to an ice-­cream fridge, was a particular performance of healthy habits and aspirations, one that the school staff and parents felt pressured and expected to put on by other state entities, the media and society at large. As in the family domain, within a school community, when appearing to be healthy becomes more important, what is considered to be unhealthy food needs to be hidden. Elspeth Probyn (1998) noted that paying close attention to the role food plays in the relations between the family and the state allows us to examine many ideas about citizenship. And as Charlotte Biltekoff (2013) demonstrated, changing dietary advice plays an important role in the pedagogy of citizenship. For the state, a good citizen is not only a person who participates in elections, pays their taxes, and does not break the law. A good citizen is one who feeds others and eats in a ‘proper’ way. A good citizen is supposed to be an educated consumer, informed about dietary advice, who makes the ‘right’ individual choices, and takes care of their own and their family’s health, thereby taking care of the health of the nation. This responsibility is highly individualized, even if the case of the Health Picnic illustrates that healthy feeding and eating is also performed by communities. The goal of normalization ­processes – ­expecting everyone to adjust to the same n ­ orms – ­as Foucault showed (1991), is for people to govern themselves and each other. In Bentham’s panopticon, the prisoners adjust their behaviour because they know that their actions are constantly observed by unseen guards. People are responsibilized as free, knowledgeable agents, who are supposed to make the ‘right’ food choices without anyone else controlling them from above; they should control themselves from within. While mothers in Warsaw are supposed to feed their children in a ‘proper’, healthy manner, as a group they are raising the whole generation of citizens who should embody the ideas of ‘proper’ eating. They should both awaken children’s personal tastes and teach them to make individual choices, and to limit these desires and choices for the sake of ‘the future good’. The ‘proper’ eaters are expected to cherish the freedom of choice but stay within the limits of right and proper choices, be responsible for their own health, and participate in the consumer culture whilst practising self-­restraint.

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The problem is, though, that creating healthy and ‘proper’ citizens does not seem to work. The state seems to be failing at raising ‘proper’ citizens for the greater good of the nation. And this exacerbates the anxieties experienced by various state agents, which are passed on to other actors, including schools and families. This chapter is about the state’s feeding anxieties, about their sources and about the multiple ways in which it attempts to deal with them by attempting to influence and control how people in Poland feed their children, and how children eat.

NUTRITIONAL NORMS In order to deal with its own anxiety, to govern and normalize the society, the state uses biopolitical tools: it measures, calculates and provides prescriptions. It relies on nutrition science, or nutritional black-­boxing, as Emily Yates-­Doerr (2015) called it, ‘the process of consolidating technical and historically contingent ideas about nourishment and the myriad relationships surrounding dietary practices into seemingly unproblematic terms, for example a vitamin or a nutrient’ (2015: 56). The nutritional norms created at the National Food and Nutrition Institute, an institution under the auspices of the Ministry of Health, become official government and state recommendations. At the time of my fieldwork, there were four types of norms established in Poland: (1) the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) which establishes the average daily dietary intake sufficient to meet the nutrient requirement of nearly all (97%) of the healthy population; (2) the Estimated Average Requirements (EAR), which is a nutrient intake value that is estimated to meet the requirements of half of the healthy individuals in a population; (3) the Adequate Intake (AI), which is set for those components for which the demand cannot be determined, such as dietary fibres and vitamin D; and (4) the Upper Level (UL) which should not be exceeded. As one nutritionist told me, this last one is ‘created now mostly because of those supplements eaten today, for example those sweets with vitamins for children. A child can cover 100% of what they need with these sweets, and then on top of that they also eat normal food’. That might be one of the effects of the nutritainment strategies implemented by the food industry. These nutritional norms serve as the basis for dietary advice, monitoring the health of the population, calculating the proper intake and planning menus for particular groups of people, for example in schools ( Jarosz 2012). Nutrition science developed in Poland from the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century (Stańczak-­Wiślicz 2020). However, it was not institutionalized until 1918 when Poland regained independence. In 1936, the Health Committee of the League of Nations published the first



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dietary guidelines. They were popularized and referred to in Poland until 1950, when the National Institute of Hygiene created the first Polish version of dietary guidelines. However, the calculations and research that are the basis for these nutritional norms, a big part of the black-­boxing process, were not in fact created in Poland. As a nutritionist from the National Food and Nutrition Institute told me: ‘Because we cannot afford it [to do it on our own]. The norms are set in the US or Canada, and we use and benefit from them. We either use the American standards or the WHO standards, depending on what fits better with our [Polish] diets’. The knowledge and norms created by mainstream nutritionists, the hegemonic nutrition, as Allison and Jessica Hayes-­Conroy (2013) called it, is standardized, reductionist and decontextualized. They assume that the food-­body relationships can be standardized to a one-­size-­fits-­all approach and that nourishment can be reduced to calories, nutrients, etc. It neglects cultural, social and historical contexts of both knowledge about ‘good’ food, and ways of enjoying it. The cultural differences, local histories, and many intersectional inequalities embedded in such an approach are easily dismissed. Critical studies of the influence of hegemonic nutrition on individual and societal approaches to food have been conducted in the US (e.g. Hayes-­ Conroy and Hayes-­Conroy 2013; Guthman 2014), and other countries (e.g. Kimura 2013; Yates-­Doerr 2015). However, it is rarely recognized how much of an influence these hegemonic nutritional perspectives have on semi-­ peripheral states of the Global North, particularly those who went through post-­socialist transformation and nutrition transition at the same time. These nutritional norms, adjusted to the Polish diet and food culture, influence and shape dietary advice and food education in Poland. ‘Because we have these norms, we can educate the society!’ one of the nutritionists working in the National Food and Nutrition Institute explained to me. The assumption is that people do not know how and what to feed and eat, but if they gain the appropriate knowledge, if they understand what constitutes ‘good’ food choices according to nutritional standards and dietary ideals, they will make them and change their daily practices accordingly. Aya Kimura (2010) calls this a ‘food literacy’ approach, ‘based upon a deficiency framework which posits individual knowledge and skills as sole reasons for inappropriate food choices, dietary behaviours, and culinary practices’ (2010: 465). Such an approach is highly individualistic and apolitical, dismissive of any knowledge that people, adults and children, might have, and in fact do have, about food. It does not take into account the fact that for various social and economic reasons, people make different decisions about food, even if they possess nutritional knowledge. It also obscures the fact that, as Charlotte Biltekoff noticed, ‘dietary ideals are never simply objective reflections of nutritional facts’ (2013: 6), but are created in a very specific

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cultural context by a very specific group of people. Nevertheless, the message is that people do not know anything about food, and the state institutions need to teach them. The Polish term used for food education literally translated means ‘nutrition education’ (edukacja żywieniowa), thus reproducing the nutritional perspective on food as a dominating one. An expert I talked to, a professor of paediatrics who was engaged in children’s food education for many years, noticed: ‘The main priority in food education is on biology, the technological aspect is emphasized: proteins, fats etc. There is no place for the psychological, psycho-­nutritional ­aspect … ­The National Food and Nutrition Institute looks only at the components of the meal, while eating is not only about the nutrient components of what you eat!’ Indeed, the cultural aspect of food, and its sociality, are often dismissed in the state discourses about food. The nutrient components are the easiest to indicate as a set of rules to follow, and the simplest to measure. They seem objective and universal, even though there is a large scientific debate and controversy around them (Mudry 2009; Broad and Hite 2014). In an effort to ease their anxieties, the state institutions rely on what Gyorgy Scrinis (2013) called nutritionism, an ideology, which reduces people’s relationships with food to the measurement of calories and nutrients. The knowledge and norms created by nutritional science are then reproduced and promoted through various food education programmes, implemented for instance in schools. Moreover, they are r­ eproduced – ­and often ­distorted – ­by the media, the food industry, celebrity chefs, and sometimes also within families (Hayes-­Conroy and Hayes-­Conroy 2013). Chapter 2 demonstrated how nutrition, healthy food and exactly calculated food portions are packaged and sold by the food industry. And Chapter 3 pointed out the role of nutrition within family negotiations. Nutrition, as John Coveney pointed out, has become a commodifiable product (2006: 138). The most popular way of presenting the knowledge about nutritional norms is through a food pyramid. The pyramid was originally created in the US in 1992 (see Nestle 1993; Całyniuk et al. 2011). The National Food and Nutrition Institute created the Polish version in 1995, and the first pyramid designated specifically for children was created in Poland in 2009. In comparison to the adult version, in the version for children the amount of recommended dairy consumption is increased, salt intake is ­limited – ­illustrated by the crossed salt s­ haker – a­ nd dietary advice is framed in a different way:  1. Every day eat diverse products from each group included in the pyramid.  2. Be physically active every ­day – ­exercising has a positive effect on physical fitness and proper figure.



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Figure 5.1  Food pyramid for children (2009). Created by the National Food and Nutrition Institute. Reprinted with permission.

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 3. Products that are at the base of the pyramid (at the bottom) should be the main source of energy in your diet.  4. Eat at least 3–4 servings of milk and dairy products, such as yogurt, kefir, buttermilk or cheese a day.  5. Every day eat 2 servings from the group of meat, fish and eggs. Also remember about legumes.  6. Each meal should include vegetables or fruits.  7. Limit your intake of fats, particularly animal fats.  8. Limit your intake of sugar, sweets and sugary drinks.  9. Limit your intake of salty products, put away the salt shaker. 10. Drink the proper amount of water every day. The food pyramid is probably the most common tool and disciplinary technique used in food education programmes across Warsaw. There are often competitions in schools for ‘the best’ representation of the food pyramid. The intention is that through the careful copying of the food pyramid, children will learn and internalize the rules it conveys, and through understanding that this is the ‘proper’ way of eating, they will govern not only themselves, but also their parents, to make sure that they follow these rules. And research shows that children in Poland to a large extent do indeed understand the food pyramid, and are familiar with the guidelines it conveys (Górnicka et al. 2014). The rules of healthy eating listed under the food pyramid are after all directed at children. Children are considered by the state institutions to be the agents of change within their families. The assumption is that it is more difficult to change adults’ habits and perspectives, and easier to influence children. That is why most of the food education programmes in Poland are directed at children in schools who are still in the process of being shaped into citizen-­consumers. While the younger children I talked to, 6–10-­year-­olds, created elaborate and creative stories about food, the older ones, 11–12-­year-­olds, always in some way referred to nutrition and dietary advice. They initially mentioned fats, proteins and vitamins, assuming that this is what I would like to hear. They told me that their teachers mentioned something about healthy and unhealthy food, that they should not eat sweets, and should eat vegetables, although, when I asked for specifics, they were usually vague. Eleven-­year-­old Adam told me that there were some posters about healthy eating in his school. Meanwhile, 12-­year-­old Hania explained that her class participated in How to Keep Fit programme and they learned that five portions of fruits should be eaten daily, what constitutes such a portion, and that it is important to eat in a healthy way, but not go crazy about it. Indeed, ‘proper’ eating again seems to be about finding a balance



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Figures 5.2–5.3  Food pyramids created by children, displayed in one of the schools. Photographed by the author, 2013.

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between focusing on health and heathy food, but not becoming obsessed about it. The pictures above illustrate food pyramids created by children in one of the schools. They were displayed on the wall in a school corridor, as part of the competition for the best food pyramid. Because they all represented the same content, the criteria for winning was usually based on the aesthetic or unique representation of the food pyramid. Jessica Mudry noticed that this kind of food guide is an attempt to turn eaters into metric subjects, who view food through the measurements of different nutrients (Kimura et al. 2014: 38; see also Mudry 2009). ­People – ­as good citizens envisioned by the ­state – ­are supposed to engage in self-­surveillance to keep their behaviour and their bodies in line with the quantified ideal (the ‘proper’ BMI). In the case of children, this relates both to children’s self-­control and close surveillance from adults. But in their daily lives people in Warsaw rarely check the food pyramid and do not follow its guidelines to the letter; certainly, children do not. Nevertheless, parents are disciplined and responsibilized with regard to feeding their children according to dietary advice, and they are expected to discipline and responsibilize children in their eating. Thirty-­seven-­year-­old Joanna told me: I explain to them for example that they have to eat cheese, because it has calcium, and they are growing. Marta asks for example ‘Is broccoli healthy?’, well yes, it is healthy because it has vitamin K, P and some B vitamins; ‘what is that for?’, so I tell her what I remember, I don’t remember everything; and so then she eats it.

Nutrients and vitamins are used as symbols of health and functionality of food to convince children to eat something. Six-­year-­old Marta told me: ‘I don’t like eating yellow [hard] cheese, but my mom tells me I need to and have to eat it, because my teeth will grow. So I eat it to be healthy and make my teeth strong’. Nutritional health in this case has the highest value, and is the ultimate goal of eating. The norms set the ideal towards which people should strive and on the basis of which they are judged. ‘Nutrition talk’ – as Julie Guthman noticed – ‘is implicated more generally in the construction of modern subjectivities and provides a moral underpinning for how one ought to think and live’ (2014: 2; see also Biltekoff 2013). The nutritional norms set unattainable standards, even if that is not usually the intention of nutritionists and dieticians. In real daily life, almost nobody can follow these guidelines to the letter, which in turn becomes a source of frustration. Nutritional ­norms – ­as both an abstract ideal and detailed ­guidelines – ­inform varied feeding anxieties experienced by the families, schools, the food industry and the state. Diverse actors reinterpret them in their own ways, as food producers do with the idea of the number of food portions



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contained in one packet of crisps or gummy sweets with added vitamins. And the state uses them as the basis for institutional feeding and food education initiatives, to which I now turn.

CONTESTING THE NORMS Ola is an outlier with regard to the dominating nutritional norms and dietary advice. In her early thirties, she has been a vegan for ten years and has a 2-­year-­old vegetarian daughter, Tosia. Ola created an online forum for parents who are, as she put it, interested in their children’s wellbeing. She gathered recipes, and advice from dieticians, paediatricians and psychologists. Ola repeatedly described to me how difficult it was to be a vegan or a vegetarian in Poland.2 It becomes an especially difficult issue when it concerns children. Everyone asks why I take away healthy food from my child? Why I take away proteins, iron and vitamin B from my child? Why do I take away the possibility of choice from my c­ hild – a­ s if giving her meat would provide that choice?! … When you are feeding your child according to the vegetarian diet you try so hard to make sure that they receive all the nutrients they need, your knowledge becomes much broader than people’s who feed their children according to the traditional diet. And this thoughtfulness and carefulness is reflected in children’s results: those on a vegetarian diet are not obese, they are not anaemic, they have loads of energy, and that’s because their parents take special care when feeding them.

The issue of choice is particularly interesting here. Not eating meat is also a choice after all, but it is rarely perceived as the ‘right’ one. Meat is considered an essential part of the Polish diet, especially of children’s diet. And, therefore, deviating from this tradition, seen as a norm, often meets with harsh judgements, including from other family members. Ola mentioned that she could not leave Tosia with her grandparents, who were critical of their daughter’s approach, because they would surely feed Tosia meat, which she would have problems digesting. Ola repeatedly mentioned feeling stigmatized. Usually people react that it is crazy, that it is some sect. This is often quite primitive, people show no respect, even though I do not impose anything on them. When I was at the doctor, he called ma a cow, because supposedly I only eat grass! I’ve tried to answer all his questions and calmly explain that I take good care of myself, but when I left his consultation room I was trembling. … When we are at the paediatrician, I do not say anymore that she is a vegetarian, because they explain everything: a running nose, a cold, painful teething with not eating meat. … It is easier to say that your child is allergic, they accept it. And if you say at the kindergarten or at school that your

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child doesn’t eat meat, you are asked to supply a note from the doctor that your child is ill, as if not eating meat was an illness! … People are against vegetarianism without knowing anything about it. You cannot change anything in these [educational] institutions. Our constitution guarantees that parents can raise their child according to their worldviews, but they do not respect it in schools. They respect people’s diet choices in prisons, but not in schools!

The fact that prisoners might have a greater influence over their diets in state institutions than children, or their parents in schools, is indeed striking. Ola spent months writing petitions, networking and lobbying for the acceptance of a vegetarian diet for children. One of her goals was to obtain a document created by the state administration which would say that a vegetarian diet for children is acceptable. This would be a tangible tool to use in kindergarten and school canteens to persuade food supervisors and cooks to prepare such a diet for her child. She needed the state to accept a vegetarian diet for children, for it to be acknowledged within different parts of society. She was often ignored or treated in a condescending way. But in the end, after months of struggle, the National Food and Nutrition Institute published the official statement which explained that if children are under proper nutritional surveillance, they can have a vegetarian diet (IŻŻ 2012). The state is reluctant to accept anything that falls outside of the norm, anything that might be different and potentially threatening, such as children on vegetarian diets. Children who are vegetarians question the norms of ‘proper’ and ‘moral’ eating. From the state’s point of view, ‘good’ choices are healthy choices, defined by the nutritional norms, and apparently also traditional Polish diets. There is no space to welcome any practices that introduce different conceptions of health or different ways of becoming healthy. When entering the conversation with the state, you have to play its biomedical game. Ola mentioned the good medical results which children on vegetarian diets have, referring to the medical standards and tests set by the state institutions. But even if children have medical results which reflect the appropriateness of their own and their parents’ food ­habits – ­as Ola pointed ­out – ­any diets considered unusual are not trusted. The statement about the acceptance of children’s vegetarian diet was created not because of the institutional flexibility and openness on the part of the state, but because there was one person, a nutritionist, who became Ola’s ally. Other nutritionists working in the National Food and Nutrition Institute in fact commented that what she was suggesting undermined the work that they were doing, that with her ‘alternative’ food practices, she in fact was challenging and questioning the nutritional norms, particularly when she proved the good medical results of children on vegetarian diets. Some of the nutritionists felt threatened by different perspectives on and practices of obtaining health with food.



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Most of the state agencies Ola ­contacted – ­various ministries, state sanitary inspections, child’s ­ombudsman – ­claimed that this did not fall under their auspices, and referred her to other institutions. One of the civil servants tried dealing with this difficult situation by saying that in the end the nutritional norms were just guidelines, so she could do whatever she wanted. When pushed, the bureaucracy and the state institutions become insecure and retreat or attempt to transfer the responsibility to someone else.

CONNECTING FOOD, HEALTH AND INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY The Polish state has been anxious about children’s food habits for decades. The problems of malnutrition after both wars, or the issue of undernourishment during the periods of food scarcity are just some examples. But the institutional context and the realities and expectations that amplify these anxieties have changed since the late 1980s. The polices and institutional changes occurring in Poland since the late 1980s have to a great extent been influenced by international organizations and entities, such as the IMF or European Union, which Poland entered in 2004, after years of preparations (Wedel 1992, 2001). And so it makes sense that since the 2000s Poland has been influenced by the increasing interest and worries about children’s health and their food habits expressed by these international entities. In 2004, the World Health Organization published the Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health. The strategy addressed two of the major risk factors considered responsible for the increase of non-­communicable diseases: inadequate diets and the lack of physical activity. WHO urged member states to develop effective and integrated national strategies, for which they provided guidelines, to reduce the human and socio-­economic costs of non-­communicable diseases. In December 2005 the European Commission published the Green Paper ‘Promoting healthy diets and physical activity: a European dimension for the prevention of overweight, obesity and chronic diseases’, which was intended to trigger a debate about the increasing obesity problems in Europe. In July 2007, the European Commission signed the White Paper ‘A Strategy for Europe on Nutrition, Overweight and Obesity related Health Issues’. The document pointed to the multivariate nature of the phenomenon of overweight and obesity, with an emphasis on the causes related to an inadequate diet and a lack of physical activity. This strategy was supposed to strengthen the development of national policies to deal with these phenomena, taking into account the participation of all stakeholders, including the private sector and civil society representatives. These strategies and documents did not focus only on children. Children, however, were

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identified as an especially vulnerable group, and also a group in which the ‘good’ food habits could still be successfully inculcated. The EU told the Polish state, as well as other European states, that there was a growing problem and that they were expected to do something about it. The problem was the rising rates of overweight and obesity, and the solution was identified in diets and physical activity. Health has been completely equated with thinness, and being healthy measured through body size. Charlotte Biltekoff (2013) argued about similar campaigns in the US: The primary message of antiobesity reform was that people needed to attain and maintain body weights (or BMIs) in the ideal range established by federal guidelines. Implied in this message was that people needed to access and assert their will in order to overcome the threat of obesity posed to both their own bodies and the social body writ large. … It insisted on the irrefutable equivalence between thinness and self-­ control that extended to an equivalence between thinness and fitness for citizenship. (2013: 125)

In Europe, and consequently in Poland, the responsibility for obesity and for health has been individualized, and reduced to individual choices. Such a perspective has found a very fertile ground in Poland. By now there is a growing recognition in many European countries that childhood obesity is not an issue of individual diets, but rather a structural problem that might be better dealt with for instance through community approaches (Vogel 2021). However, in Poland the emphasis continues to be on what is considered a straightforward connection between food, health, obesity and individual responsibility, even though such approaches are in fact standardized, reductionist and reproduce structural inequality (see Boni 2022a). The government’s official position addressing the White Paper pointed out that schools have been identified ‘as places that play a particularly important role in shaping children’s healthy preferences and acquiring the skills necessary to maintain a proper health status, [so they] should be widely supported in conducting this type of education programs’ (Ministry of Health 2007a: 4). In response to the EU’s document in November 2007, the Council for Diet, Physical Activity and Health was created in Poland. It has twenty-­ five members, which include representatives from the Ministry of Health, the Chief Sanitary Inspectorate, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Sport, the National Food and Nutrition Institute, as well as representatives from academia, non-­governmental organizations and the food industry. The main role of the Council is to support and advise the Minister of Health. Also in 2007, the Ministry of Health initiated the Program for Prevention of Overweight, Obesity and Chronic Non-­communicable Diseases through Improved Nutrition and Physical Activity (POL-­HEALTH) (Ministry of Health 2007b). This programme focused on popularizing the dietary norms



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for children and youth in schools, for instance through the distribution of publications about nutritional norms and sample menus for school canteens ( Jarosz 2008a, 2008b). Most of the school cooks I asked about this told me they were not familiar with this programme. Others mentioned that they had received the publications, and even used some of the recipes provided, but in general did not find it very helpful. In 2008 the school curriculum changed, and health education was given a more important place in comparison with the curriculum from 1999. It states that: ‘school’s important task is health education, which aim is to develop in students the habits (and attitudes) of care for their own health and the health of others, and the skills to create a health friendly environment’ (Ministry of Education 2008). In school students are supposed to be disciplined into ‘proper’, healthy subjects who govern themselves and others. When the Ministry of Education was working on the new curricula, health education was not initially included. But, as I heard from a few interlocutors, a group of health experts organized themselves and decided to influence the Ministry. At first they heard that health education was not a big deal, and that it was not worth wasting the government’s time. But in the end, after some negotiations, it was included. ‘The PE teachers started attacking us right away’, I was told by a paediatrician, the main initiator and for many years the coordinator of the international Health Promoting Schools programme in Poland.3 She continued: ‘Nobody wanted this health ­education …N ­ either teachers, nor students want this! … It’s like banging your head against the wall, it is beautifully written down and we keep improving those documents, but it all stays only on paper’. Before, health education was just one of the inter-­subject educational paths that schools could choose, such as film education for instance. But it became a separate part of the curriculum. Ewa, an official who worked in the Centre for Education Development, an institution of the Ministry of Education, told me: Health education was developed to include also the psycho-­social aspect, communication and coping with stress were added; so it’s a broader and deeper understanding of health education, we don’t work only on brushing teeth and eating carrots. But the problem is that this psycho-­social aspect of health education was adjoined to physical education, and most of PE teachers, well, they just don’t know how and they don’t want to do this. There were trainings and all of that, but the last monitoring showed that there is still so much to do!

As often happens with government programmes, the idea might have been great, but the implementation did not work well. ‘Health education is the right of every child’ explains another publication on implementing the new curriculum (Woynarowska 2012: 11). Children have the right to health education, but then it is their and their parents’ responsibility to implement

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healthy practices; they do not have the right to not do so. And health education has to a large extent been reduced to food education, or rather nutrition education, in the assumption that implementing nutritional norms and following the dietary advice is what makes people into healthy, ‘proper’, moral subjects. The importance of physical activity or alternative perspectives on health got lost somewhere along the way. Another health expert I talked to commented in a similar vein on another state initiative, comparing it to the situation from the early 1990s: Back then the agreement between the ministries was signed within a week. This was truly amazing. Everyone wanted to do something, and our enthusiasm coincided with the European ­help … ­and for the last one [an Agreement signed in 2009] we have waited 8 years! Things were different then. People wanted to do something, there was this energy and the will to do things, and now it all crushes down on bureaucracy. [The Agreement between the Minister of Health, the Minister of Education and the Minister of Sport signed in 2009] was the first time that the government took a position on food in schools and on food education. So that’s amazing! But they signed this Agreement in the spotlight, it was put on their websites, and that’s it. These are all just illusory actions!

Indeed, in 2009 the three ministers signed an Agreement to cooperate in order to improve children’s health and work together on health and food education in schools. As far as I could tell, and as many officials and civil servants told me, it did not transform into any tangible activities in schools. Many of my interlocutors who worked in various state institutions expressed frustration, and often anger, that so little was in fact being done with regard to children’s health and proper food education, despite multiple societal and institutional worries and anxieties about children’s health and their diets.

FOOD EDUCATION In its attempts to deal with feeding anxieties, exacerbated by public health concerns, the state places most of its resources in food education. A multitude of food education programmes are implemented across schools in Warsaw. The programmes are organized by different entities and build on various, sometimes surprising, collaborations. They bring in actors from local and national state institutions, the non-­governmental sector, the media, and the food industry, and focus mainly on schools, although families and parents are included in many ways as well. I focus here on two state programmes to show how state institutions attempt to deal with their own feeding anxieties through food education.



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Trzymaj Formę: The State and Industry Collaboration Before the EU papers were published, and before the school curricula was changed and many food education programmes were implemented, the food industry was one of the first actors in Poland to react to the increasing societal anxieties about children’s food habits. It was sort of a pre-­emptive strike, borne out of worry and fear of being blamed. In 2005, the Polish Federation of Food Industry (PFPŻ), an umbrella organization that represents the food sector in Poland, came up with the idea of organizing an education programme for children. During our very official meeting in one of the professional offices, built out of glass and shiny surfaces, a representative of PFPŻ explained to me: This idea was inspired by the WHO strategy, which at that time issued a global resolution, and in this document, it was advised that actions to prevent diet related diseases should be implemented. … At that time there was a gap in this area of healthy lifestyles in Poland, so there was a huge interest in what we started.

The Federation contacted the Chief Sanitary Inspectorate, an institution of the Ministry of Health, and they signed an agreement on cooperation. ‘There were pressures from above that something in that area should happen’, a person who worked in the local office of the Sanitary Inspectorate told me, ‘and so the Council was created, Council for the Diet, Physical Activity and Health, and under their patronage this programme Trzymaj Formę [Stay in Shape] started’. The goal of the programme, as stated on the website, is ‘the education for the development of healthy habits among school children through the promotion of an active lifestyle and a balanced diet, based on individual responsibility and a person’s free choice’. The last part is a unique addition in comparison with other programmes. Other food education programmes often focus on showing children what is ‘good’ food and what is ‘bad’, with the expectation that once they know, they will make proper food choices. But the personal choice and responsibility are rarely so evidently emphasized, even if they are implicit assumptions. Trzymaj Formę explicitly highlights the importance of ‘free’ choice and individual responsibility for healthy choices, thereby putting the responsibility for ‘bad’ choices or ‘improper’ health outcomes on individuals. The goal of the programme is to create ‘proper’ citizen-­consumers. Children, and their parents, receive knowledge about what is good and bad f­ ood – a­ ccording to the government experts and nutritional ­norms – a­ nd then they are supposed to govern themselves when making ‘free’, individual choices among all that is available. Such an embodied ­neoliberalism – t­ o use a term coined by Guthman and DuPuis (2006) – makes them into good and healthy citizens, but also into good consumers.

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And with that, all the responsibility for public health and ‘the good of the country’ is individualized, rather than approached relationally and structurally, considering socio-­economic inequalities and alternative approaches to food. Almost 8,000 schools participated in the Trzymaj Formę programme during the 2012–2013 school year and around 800,000 students were, in varying degrees, affected. I was told by the organizers that it was the longest running and the most widespread food education programme in Poland. It is often promoted and presented as a success. But this programme was criticized by many of my interlocutors engaged in food education, be it non-­governmental or state workers. Anna, who organized the first food education programmes in Warsaw in the early 2000s, told me: ‘Of course if a programme is financed by food producers, you cannot say that certain products are not good’. This opinion was shared by others. A common belief was that the ideal food plate promoted by Trzymaj Formę consists of sweets, because the programme is partly run by the food industry. This was in fact not true, although, as I demonstrated in Chapter 2, the food industry does promote the concept of a balanced diet that sweets should be a part of. They are trying to change the negative perception of sweets. Food producers’ attempts to educate people about ‘good’ food habits are questioned and challenged, because they are perceived as a way to promote certain brands and products rather than demonstrating sincere concern for people’s health. Organizers of Trzymaj Formę explain, in reply, that in accordance with the provisions of the programme, any names and trademarks of food products or food companies cannot be communicated and used, which demonstrates that the programme is not used for promotion purposes. Additionally, they argue that none of the food products are bad for you if you eat them in a proper, balanced amount. None of the food products allowed to be sold are unhealthy. This is a mantra repeated by actors from the food industry, as well as from the state. But the responsibility for actually balancing the diets, following the dietary advice, and eating ‘properly’, falls on individual citizen-­consumers. When I mentioned that Trzymaj Formę is one of the programmes organized on the largest scale in Poland, Marta, a civil servant who worked in the Warsaw City Hall and ran one of the few food education programmes that had been by many recognized as a success, explained: No, it doesn’t work on any scale, because it doesn’t work at all! Nothing happens. … It was organized in my daughters’ secondary school, so I’ve seen it, I know nothing happens. The school is doing something, like a health day or one lesson based on these materials they send, and they put it in the report, describe it beautifully and send this report to the Sanitary Inspectorate. But these reports are real only on paper! And they [the civil servants] don’t want to deal with this; they are happy with how things are organized, they accept these reports, but I am not sure if they still believe in them.



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Trzymaj Formę provides a way for both the food industry and the state to deal with their feeding anxieties, with worries of being judged and accused of not solving the problem of children’s ‘bad’ food habits, which are linked to the increasing rates of childhood overweight and obesity. As well as focusing the blame for children’s ‘bad’ food habits on parents, journal articles, blog entries and other expert commentaries point either to the food industry or the state, for not controlling the food industry appropriately and not creating polices which would change what children eat. The pressures directed at the Polish state not only come from the international community, but also from within, even from within state institutions. Even though the concerns of the state and the food industry are shaped by different expectations, accusations and worries, the goal of Trzymaj Formę seems not to be for either of them to really change children’s food practices for the ‘better’, but rather to ease their anxieties about children’s food.

EU Programmes: ‘Fruits and Vegetables in School’ and ‘Glass of Milk’ The state’s attempts to deal with feeding anxieties, and to normalize how and what people feed and eat, are not only limited to Polish initiatives, but are in fact influenced by and reflect international worries, guidelines and disciplinary techniques. In 1977, the European Union implemented the School Milk Scheme, which supported the distribution of milk among children in the member countries. In 2009, another programme, School Fruit Scheme, was created. In 2014, the European Commission suggested combining and reinforcing both programmes; ‘with the slogan Eat well – feel good, this enhanced scheme from farm to school will put greater focus on educational measures to improve children’s awareness of healthy eating habits, the range of farm produce available, as well as sustainability, environmental and food waste issues’.4 The EU is using food as a tool in the pedagogy of citizenship, and combines the dietary and moral perspectives on how to make ‘proper’ people (see Biltekoff 2013). Since 2004 and 2009 the programmes have been implemented in Poland by the Agricultural Market Agency, a state enterprise, as ‘Fruits and Vegetables in School’ and ‘Glass of Milk’. When I asked principals about implementing these programmes in their schools, they explained that they were contacted by food distributors who suggested their participation in those schemes and not only supplied the products, but have also taken care of all the bureaucratic and administrative issues. The products are distributed for a few weeks free of charge among children in grades 0 to 3 in primary schools. Fruits and vegetables are distributed cut and washed, ready to eat, in small plastic bags. Milk is provided in small cartons. The programme guidelines

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point out that the food distribution is supposed to be supplemented by teachers’ involvement. They should educate children about the importance of these products and the ‘proper’ food habits. Eleven-­year-­old Zuzia told me that in her classroom, the teacher used to put all the fruits, vegetables and milk in a basket; the idea was that children who were hungry or wanted to have a snack could take them and eat them, which Zuzia thought it was a great idea. But usually, the food products were distributed individually to children. Some of these were consumed, but I have also seen many of them in bins in and around the school. The packets of fruits and vegetables were used to play with and throw around, or they were later discovered by parents, rotting in their children’s backpacks. The evaluation of the ‘Fruits in School’ programme, conducted by the National Food and Nutrition Institute, shows that both parents’ and children’s knowledge about fruits and vegetables consumption has increased (ARR 2012). Many of them are for example familiar with the importance of eating five portions of fruits and vegetables a day. The question of whether they then implement this knowledge in their daily practices has not, however, been asked or answered. As in many programmes that aim to educate citizens, who are supposed to be informed consumers of dietary advice, the focus remains on a knowledge deficiency framework, and the difference that might occur between someone’s knowledge and their daily practices is not usually analysed. This disconnection between a knowledge deficiency framework and people’s daily practices is why most of the top-­down education programmes do not really work (see Murcott 2019: 123–36; also Baum and Fisher 2014). The EU schemes differ from other food education programmes in that they not only promote knowledge about ‘proper’ feeding and eating but also aim to change children’s (and their parents’) food practices by providing them with ‘proper’ food, thereby instilling in them ‘good’ food habits. The foods chosen, fruits, vegetables and milk, are the epitome of healthy food for children. They are the norm of health, not considering for instance allergies that some children might have or an increasingly contested approach to dairy. Eating these foodstuffs is supposed to nudge children into changing their food practices. It is also a way to directly discipline children’s bodies and normalize their tastes. By consuming fruits, vegetables and milk children should become proper and healthy Polish and European citizens. But even if the programmes bring about results, in that people’s knowledge about ‘good’ food habits changes, in practice they are appropriated in multiple ways, which are sometimes contradictory to the initial idea. Many parents mentioned that their children leave in the morning with one apple in the backpack, and they come back with two apples which adults end up eating. The same is true with milk, which children often bring back



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home for their parents, or throw away. Eleven-­year-­old Zuzia told me: ‘If I were to receive flavoured milk I would have drunk it because it’s tasty. But I don’t like the normal milk, and they give us the full-­fat milk, it’s the worst! So I bring it back home, for my mom, she can drink it with her coffee’. In many schools there is an option to receive flavoured ­milk – ­vanilla, strawberry or ­chocolate – ­for which parents have to pay more. This is a good example of the tensions between being consumers and citizens. As a ‘good’ citizen you are supposed to drink your milk in order to gain strength and all the necessary nutrients to grow up healthy. As a ‘good’ consumer you are supposed to want more, strive for the flavoured milk, which is considered less healthy because of its sugar content, but which for many children is more tasty and fun. The health-­oriented programmes are very easily co-­opted by consumer cultures and the food industry. Moreover, children appropriate the disciplinary attempts at becoming ‘proper’ citizen-­consumers in their own ways, often resisting, even if unintentionally, the process of normalization. And in that way, the EU programme which aim is to teach Polish children about ‘proper’ food, and provide access to such food, indirectly becomes the supplier of milk for homemade coffees or of flavoured milk to young consumers across Warsaw.

BEING ANXIOUS LIKE THE STATE Many of the initiatives of the Polish state appear ineffective. They are supposed to deal with the problem of children’s ‘bad’ food habits, or ‘bad’ health more broadly, and ease societal worries, as well as the concerns experienced by state institutions. But it seems they keep failing at that. The situation of food education programmes in schools was well summed up by one of the health experts I talked to, who noticed: The number of education programmes with which schools in Warsaw are bombarded [is extreme], and they are all the same, this changes nothing! And why are schools doing that? They want to be active. So they make these ridiculous, long lists of programmes they are participating in, without any kind of evaluation and quality or effect control. All of this is just onetime activity, and I would really care for more coherent and long-­term solutions.

Especially in Warsaw, there is a great number, even an overabundance, of programmes and initiatives schools can participate in, but most of them have been criticized as just illusory, health-­washing activities. Some people who worked in state institutions as employees, civil servants or consultants were frustrated by this situation. Ewa, who worked in the Centre for Education Development, an institution under the auspices of the Ministry

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of Education, mentioned that the emphasis and pressure from the Ministry concerns mainly quantitative rather than qualitative results. We were sitting in her office; I could barely see her amongst the stacks of files and papers. This materiality of overbearing bureaucracy was in stark contrast to the shininess and modernity of the food industry offices I visited. Somewhat hesitantly, Ewa told me: One of the goals I have received for the upcoming year is to increase the numbers. But I don’t want to focus on numbers! It is about the systemic, long term work with the community, it is a process, and it is not about the numbers! I’m not sure they get it. … Well, it is a little bit like that, in this area of food education, that there is a very large offer, a lot of things are happening. I am against multiplying the programmes and duplicating the same things over and over again, teaching children for the tenth time what the food pyramid looks like. … But there is this kind of competitiveness. We are committed to work together, there was this Agreement, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Ministry of Health has their programme [Trzymaj Formę], and we [the Ministry of Education] have our programme.5 These are in many ways similar, and yet separate, parallel activities.

This was a very common view among experts working within the food education field. I often heard that the politicians only pay lip service to health and food education. Health and nutrition experts, civil servants and activists, often irritated, told me many stories from abroad, from Finland, France or Italy, where the state, either on the national or on the regional scale, was more successful, and where things have been changing. They were anxious that meanwhile the situation in Poland was not changing for the better, or was changing too slowly. People who wanted to make a difference and were looking for more coherent and thoughtful ways to do so had usually been ignored by the state institutions they worked in, not supported and even discouraged in their attempts. One of them was Marta, who worked in the Warsaw City Hall. We met a few times in 2012 and 2013, in her many offices as she kept being moved from one place to another. She runs a programme called Wiem, co jem [I know what I eat], which distributes booklets and interactive lesson plans across all primary schools in Warsaw, and organizes meetings and cooking workshops, for instance free of charge activities for children in the city during the summer and winter. She trained in dietetics, and has been involved in food education since the early 2000s, when she organized the first programmes in Warsaw. The spark that gave her the idea and energy to do this was in fact her own children. She noticed how they were coming back home from school with the sandwiches she prepared for them untouched, because they did not have time to eat them, while at the same time they broke into their piggy banks and bought probably everything that was available in a school shop.



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When during one of our meetings I asked Marta what had changed during all those years that the City Hall food education programme had been running, she told me: First, then [around 2006–2007] the topic of feeding children did not exist in schools. They said they didn’t need it; they all had programmes against violence, things like that, but were not focused on food. … So what has mostly changed is the awareness. Many products were withdrawn from the school shops, and even if they weren’t, people know that they should not be there. And another important thing are the breakfast breaks, they are often longer now than they used to be. … I remember that we asked ‘What should be changed?’ and they all answered that children should be encouraged to bring more fruits from home etc. [All the responsibility] was shifted on the family and home, as if the school didn’t play a part in how children eat – ‘children eat badly because their parents teach them to eat badly, because parents give them bad breakfasts or don’t give them drugie śniadanie’. So we work on that as well. … This [change] will be a slow evolution, though in the context of what’s happening this really should be a revolution!

Besides organizing events and preparing materials for children and teachers, the Wiem, co jem programme also focuses on working with school canteen cooks. As Marta told me: The way in which children eat in the educational institutions is based on how and what the cooks are taught in the vocational schools. And they cannot cook! They have only two weeks of dietetics in school. They don’t learn that tomato soup can be made in four different versions: without flour, without dairy etc., so that it can fit diverse diets.

So Marta organized cooking workshops and meetings for cooks. Changing the ways in which cooks feed should change the ways in which children eat. Her plan was also to organize meetings for parents, but it had not been going that well. She said that parents rarely come to the meetings organized in schools, and did not want to participate. And those few who were interested were those who were already preoccupied and concerned with their children’s food habits, and even obsessed with their health. The food education programmes in Poland focus mainly on children and on changing their eating practices. Schools provide great sites to access children’s bodies and minds since they are obliged to be in school anyway. While you cannot force parents to come to school or participate in a programme, it is easier to compel children. Moreover, it is assumed that due to their young age children are impressionable and malleable, and that their food habits can still be shaped. Children then will change the feeding practices of the adults in their lives, who otherwise would not be susceptible to change. A dietician who worked in one of the NGOs focused on food education told me:

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Children [in primary school] are at such an age that if [a healthy diet] is presented in an interesting way, if we show them that it is good, they can do a revolution at home! They can say: ‘mum, prepare broccoli for me, because I made plans with Kasia that I’ll bring broccoli and she’ll bring something else’; or ‘mum, maybe we can eat fish every Friday?’

Society as a whole is perceived by various state institutions as in a need of food education. In these educational and normalizing attempts, the structural differences, related for instance to the access to food or knowledge about food, financial constraints, cultural practices and traditions are often disregarded (see Guthman and DuPois 2006; Rawlins 2009; Maher, Fraser and Wright 2010). It is assumed that Poles, in general, do not know how to feed and eat properly. And the blame usually falls on women, on mothers who are the ones perceived as being directly responsible for feeding children, and for doing it ‘badly’. It really seems that whatever mothers do, they will be considered ‘bad’ feeders by various state actors. Working-­ class mothers are blamed for not teaching their children to distinguish a tomato from a radish, preparing ‘improper’ meals at home or giving their children unhealthy snacks to take to school. However, other officials I spoke to applauded the practices enacted among parents from the countryside, and criticized urban middle-­ class parents. One state official pointed out: ‘Such a princess-­mom in Warsaw, this doll will go with her child to the restaurant, because she is lazy; while a mother in the countryside will dig out the potatoes and prepare a potato soup for her child. And the latter is much better for a child!’ The dismissive and moralizing tone of this statement was striking. Parents are criticized for not taking ‘proper’ care of their children and for not feeding them ‘properly’, either because they are perceived as not having the sufficient and right nutrition knowledge and food culture, or because they do not prepare homemade meals. It really seems that the ‘proper’ feeding of children is an unattainable ideal.

CONCLUDING REMARKS This chapter focused on the state’s anxieties about children’s food, its various sources, and multiple attempts to deal with them. The state of course is not a unified and homogenous entity. There are different actors, with lesser or greater power. There is rivalry between many of them, and frustration and anxiety stemming from varied ideas about how to solve what is considered an increasing problem: children’s food. The state is also nudged by international entities, such as the World Health Organization or the European Union, to react and implement changes with



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regard to children’s health and food. Many actors perceive the Polish state to be responsible for what is considered a bad situation; it is judged based on that, and expected to react. And different agents and coalitions of the state do indeed react. The state signs agreements, measures children and prepares worksheets, creates guidelines and implements food education programmes. Nutritional norms as guidelines to follow are a way to deal with these worries. Since they are out there, people are expected to know how they should eat, and the responsibility is shifted onto them. That is why the state is worried about anything that challenges the norms it establishes, such as children having vegetarian diets. The food education programmes, which promote the dietary advice based on nutritional norms, are a way of changing how children eat for the ‘better’, as well as easing the state’s worries about being negatively judged and evaluated. Many people working in state institutions were genuinely worried about children’s food habits, rising obesity rates and changing food cultures. And their frustration and anxiety grew, because despite their attempts nothing seemed to change. The larger state bureaucracy did not respond adequately to what they felt was a problem. State officials told me about their worries and frustrations that politicians only pay lip service to this issue, that many actions are just one-­time events or are completely illusory. Through food education programmes the state attempts to mould children into ‘good’ citizens who are educated consumers, making informed individual decisions about their food and health. But this in fact is a way of dealing, although unsuccessfully, with the state’s own multiple feeding anxieties.

NOTES  1. A celebratory soup made of wheat or sourdough rye flour and meat, typically made for Easter celebrations.  2. This has slightly changed since my research in 2012–2013. In 2019 Warsaw was ranked the sixth most vegan friendly city in the world by Happy Cow, the leading international guide for vegan restaurants.  3. Health Promoting Schools is a WHO programme and part of the research network conducting international comparative studies on Health Behavior in School-­aged Children (HBSC). In the 1980s, Professor Woynarowska translated the first booklet published by the Health Promoting Schools programme into Polish, and then at the turn of 1980s and 1990s she was invited by the WHO to create the Polish-­specific conception of the Health Promoting Schools.  4. European Commission press release, 30 January 2014.  5. The Ministry of Education’s programme was the Health Promoting Schools, which

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I do not discuss here as for various reasons I did not study it during my fieldwork. It was one of the few health/food education programmes that was presented to me in a positive light by many of my interlocutors working in state and non-­governmental institutions.

CONCLUSION



I

started the research for this book in 2011. Although there were many signs which indicated that something intriguing was happening with regard to children’s food in Poland, the spark was that one meeting with Magda which I mentioned at the beginning of the book. She talked about her worries regarding feeding her children, her angst about being indoctrinated into a ‘cooking mother’, and her concerns about how her children would eat in the future. A few years after our initial meeting, I told Magda that I was writing a book and that one of her statements would be the opening quotation. She started laughing and wondered what she could have told me that was so important. We were drinking coffees while sitting in a café in a park. It was calm and sunny. Now a mother of three, she reminisced that it was really a shock for her to deal with feeding her children and all that came with it. She was calmer about it now, as she told me, though often felt that things were out of control and she could still feel that struggle. Magda did not understand what was so interesting and important in her statements. But for me her experience, as well as the experiences of many other mothers, became an important social fact, an invisible truth about modern lives. For Magda, Natalia, Marysia, Paulina, Małgosia, Joanna and many others, feeding anxiety becomes a form of being in the world. Each of them felt it differently, some more, some less intensely. But it is a mother’s daily experience. And feeding anxieties, as I show in this book, permeate different parts of the society. They are not the sole experience of mothers, but are felt differently by various social actors and institutions: families, schools, government agencies and the non-­governmental sector, and the food industry. Mothers, fathers, grandparents, school staff, civil servants, food producers and marketers, food experts and journalists, health ­professionals – ­they all have their own anxieties about children’s food and maternal feeding. Those shared feelings, however, do not create an affective and sympathetic

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collective. Rather, it seems that each actor is alienated, positioned not together, but against each other. How is it then, that something so social as food and feeding, shared by so many people, becomes such an alienating experience? Feeding children is a deeply personal as well as a political act. When you scratch the surface and look at what lies underneath people’s worries about how children eat, it turns out that many things are hidden there: concerns about what ‘being Polish’ means today and what it will develop into in the future; worries about being judged and criticized; different ideas of what health is and how to obtain it; financial concerns and economic issues; tensions between citizenship and consumerism; struggles about rights and responsibilities; problems with trust; fears about tangible treats, such as sugar and dental caries, and abstract futures; and striving to fulfil the expectations of modern personhood. This book has looked at what happens to people, adults and children, when the intense and often contradictory expectations related to their behaviour and their bodies, to be ‘proper people’, all collide in food, in what and how they eat and feed, in subtle daily bites and numerous mundane daily food decisions. Each chapter of this book focused on a different social realm of children’s lives and a different aspect of feeding-­eating relationships. Although for the purpose of organization and coherence these spheres are discussed separately in each chapter, they continuously influence one another. When attempting to understand the process of feeding children, and the experiences of feeding and eating, I did not look separately at the realm of home and family, schools, the state or the food industry, but rather looked at the connections and disconnections, influences and shifting boundaries between these spaces. Moreover, while feeding anxieties are deeply local and ingrained in the Polish cultural norms about mothering, childhood and food, I wanted to recognize how the global moral economies of food might actually influence what Julia and Kasia are eating, and how the World Health Organization and European Union guidelines and regulations influence food in schools across Warsaw. Children’s food is a political issue because diverse actors are interested in what and how children eat, and attempt to shape their eating practices. They exert their different kinds of powers to influence how children eat, and how mothers feed. It is partly out of worry about children, and partly out of concern for themselves. They imagine feeders, and eaters especially, as certain kinds of people who embody particular characteristics, related for instance to being nutritionally balanced, being ecologically conscious, being responsible, or having fun. Children’s food is political, because it is about power and influence over the future generation. It is political, because it is about money: profits for the food industry and stakeholders, and lower costs



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with regard to public health spending for the state. It is political, because it is about different kinds of inequalities, related to gender, class and age. The politics of children’s food elicits feeding anxieties. The different actors involved in these politics, people and institutions, relate to various registers of valuing food, have different ideas about what would be good and bad with regard to children’s food, and attempt to influence mothers and children accordingly. The food industry wants to make children into loyal customers and engaged consumers, and asks them to eat particular brands of children’s food. The schools want to normalize children’s tastes and teach them what typical children in Poland are supposed to eat, while also catering to their preferences. The state attempts to make children into healthy citizens who follow the nutritional norms. As the book shows, each field has its internal politics, rivalry, and indeed anxieties about children’s food. And there are surprising alliances, for instance between some state institutions and the food industry actors who want to teach children to become educated citizen-­ consumers who make the ‘right’ and ‘free’ individual choices. Families are at the centre of these various normalizing attempts and power struggles. They have to deal with multiple, often contradictory, influences, with the expectations of family lives, and with the realities of feeding-­eating relationships and foodwork at home. It often comes down to mothers to balance these various influences on themselves and their children. Feeding is entrenched with love and care. Out of this love mothers are expected to discipline their children and control everyone and everything around them, while not becoming obsessed about it, and in fact caring just ‘the right’ amount. Feeding anxieties are about attempting to control these varied influences and dealing with fears about tangible and intangible treats. There are so many objects of feeding a­ nxieties – ­different food products, such as sweets, junk food, dairy or nuts, collectables added to food products, other people including children’s friends, other parents, grandparents or school s­ taff – t­ hat it is impossible to control all of them. That is why mothers, as well as other actors, including the state, focus on the subject of feeding anxieties: children. While it is impossible to control everyone and everything that poses a threat to children’s ‘proper’ feeding and eating, it might be considered easier to control children. It is children’s bodies and minds, their present and future habits and practices, that are the focus of all these power struggles and citizen-­consumer making projects: children, who might feature on health report covers and be on everyone’s lips and in many actors’ minds, but who are in fact rarely listened to or recognized as independent social actors. But these controlling attempts do not seem to and cannot work. Feeding anxieties stem from unattainable ideals. Different adults, parents, state officials, school staff, food producers and marketers, are unsuccessful in implementing their feeding ideals partly

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because of the social world around them and the influences of all the other actors, and partly because children have their own ideas about eating and enact their own food practices. Children are often treated as pawns and objects of particular feeding strategies, rather than subjects in their own rights. But in fact, children are independent subjects of the feeding-­eating relationships. Children, like adults, navigate between different expectations and registers of valuing food. They relate to health, responsibility, ecology, conviviality, pleasure and fun through their own food practices. Children’s food practices challenge adults’ feeding practices as they tactfully negotiate their own eating in many situations and through various relationships. Children in many ways resist and negotiate with adults around them. What I kept wondering is whether there is also a space for resistance and contestation on the part of adults? Do mothers look for ways to confront and oppose the responsibilization, individualization and alienation processes ingrained in feeding anxieties? Ola, fighting for the acceptance of a vegetarian diet for children, might be an example. However, although she was indeed fighting ‘the system’, she certainly had many worries related to her daughter’s food. In a way, not having feeding anxieties as a mother would mean that you do not care enough, that you are not nurturing enough. Feeding anxiety is a sign of good mothering in Poland, so one should not want to resist or escape from it. Experiencing anxiety is part of the socialization into motherhood. These tensions and expectations embodied and enacted particularly by mothers, but in fact experienced by many people and institutions, are the product of post-­socialist and neoliberal transformations in Poland. There are many contradictions embedded in contemporary capitalism, and as Guthman and DuPuis (2006) demonstrated, they are resolved not only in the sphere of surplus distribution, but also in people’s bodies. The tensions between different consumer-­citizen making projects, the individualized responsibility for having ‘good health’ and a ‘good life’, striving to be and raise ‘proper’ people, but never fully succeeding in any of these endeavours, are all conditions of modern capitalism (see also Fischer 2014; Patico 2020). The tendency of capitalist systems to create anxious subjects has found a very fertile ground in Polish cultural norms related to mothering and food. However, it is certainly not mothers or children who benefit from feeding anxieties, even though at their root they stem from caring about and for children. So the question remains: who benefits? One of the things I did not anticipate when starting this research was the amount of judgements, normative assumptions and moralizing. Too often when I told ­someone – ­be it a friend, a colleague or a ­stranger – ­what I study, the response was a story about a 2-­year-­old child eating gummy sweets, and how appalling that is, or a story about that person’s child, and how they do



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not like eating gummy sweets or do not like going to McDonald’s. I often felt that I was expected by my interlocutors to give them praise, some kind of award for raising their children in such a way. They expected to hear from me that they were doing a great job, and it seemed they needed recognition, just as they wanted to hear how horrible the food practices of other families were. With time, I grew really annoyed with these assumptions that I was against sweets or going to McDonald’s, and the expectations that I would reaffirm people’s views about themselves and other parents. Class politics were often involved in those judgements, as middle-­class parents judged working-­class parents, which annoyed me even more because it seemed particularly unfair. While often annoyed, I also felt for them. I came to realize that these harsh judgements about other parents and other children came from a place of insecurity and indeed anxiety about their own parenting and feeding practices, and about their children. They were looking for comfort and reaffirmation. I like to think that this book is a way to tell all those parents that it is really difficult, that they are not alone, that I hear and understand their anxieties, and they are doing really well. It is the same with children. Feeding anxieties encompass and involve children as well. In some cases, these anxieties take very visible shape. For instance, 6-­year-­old Gosia declined to go to the kindergarten after struggles she experienced there related to being forced to eat soups she disliked. Other children might sit at the table and not be physically able to chew and swallow food, they might cry or otherwise become stressed because of the eating practices and food relationships they are expected or forced to fulfil. Other experiences of worry and concern, however, are more subtle: 7-­year-­old Bartek who disciplines his grandmother about sweets consumption; 7-­year-­old Ewa who frowns upon her friend bringing sweets to school; 8-­year-­old Sylwia who asks her mum for money to buy specific kinds of snacks, which everyone eats, and she wants to share this experience with her peers; 9-­year-­old Julia who hides sweets from her parents. Although, when talking to me, children did not frame their experiences using the terms of anxiety, their practices and their narratives often reflected adults’ intense preoccupations with and political interests in children’s food. I moved from this research to study childhood obesity, and I see how anxious, frustrated and terrified children can get around food. Somewhere along the line, when they turn 10 or 11 years old, or perhaps even earlier, something changes. From having fun with food, eating chocolates in hiding and sharing sweets and snacks with their friends, many of them become anxious about food, very aware of what they are eating and very focused on what their bodies look like. The intense and joyful sociality around food that many children experience changes into an alienated and individualized preoccupation with their food and their bodies. Poland has the highest

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rates of body distortion issues among teenage girls and boys participating in HBSC research (WHO 2020). And many younger and younger children are employing dangerous dieting practices and attempting to lose weight. The multiple feeding anxieties I have described in this book, are indeed consumed and embodied by children, and for some of them transformed into difficult relationships with food and their own bodies. That should not be a surprise. If everyone around them is a little obsessed with what and how they eat, they feel and embody it as well, even though so many people, particularly mothers, attempt to find a balance and not be too obsessed about their children’s food, to care just the right amount. Anxieties about food take new shapes and a life of their own when embodied by children. Because feeding anxieties are individualizing and alienating, they do not make compassionate connections between individuals and collectives, between bodily space and social space, as Sarah Ahmed (2014) would call it. The social realities which produce feeding anxieties do not create a supportive community, but rather anxious alienated subjects. There is an inherent contradiction embedded in these processes, as the social relationships created with the means of f­ood – s­ omething that is inherently and deeply ­social – ­are increasingly characterized by anxiety and isolation. People have always tried to civilize others in their food habits (Biltekoff 2013). Mothers have for a long time been worried about how and what their children eat (DeVault 1991). The state, in its modern form, has been attempting to implement biopolitical tools to control and impact its citizens for a long time (Foucault 1980). The food industry has created consumers’ wants and desires in the past (Cook 2004). So why now? What is so specific about contemporary Poland that its social realities produce feeding anxieties? There are of course many elements to the answer, which I have been exploring throughout this book. The changing societal role of children, the new parenting models embedded in the historically shaped ideas about motherhood and family, the post-­socialist and neoliberal changes and the increasing influence of the food industry, what is considered the growing number of medical problems stemming from how people feed and e­ at – ­these are all parts of the puzzle. Pointing to the role of neoliberal politics and the values and ways of life it promotes and demands, and to the internal tensions and contradictions of modern capitalism as they have developed in Poland, is another part of the puzzle. The answer to why now lies in all of the above, but there is also something else, something ephemeral that relates to how people deal with multiple expectations, how they think about and feel their bodies, approach their food and imagine their futures, how they trust and distrust others. Feeding anxieties, alienating as they are, have become a new form of sociality, a way of engaging with each other and with the world.

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INDEX

 advertisement, 56, 63–64, 67–68, 76–78. See also food industry; marketing affect, See emotions age, an issue during research, 25–27; and dietary politics, 33, 146–48; inequality, 33, 83; segmentation of the market, 55–56, 58, 78–79. See also children; intergenerational knowledge Ahmed, Sarah, 7, 172 alienation, 7–9, 29, 51, 87, 167–68, 167–72; as a new form of sociality, 2, 7, 87, 139, 167–68. See also individualization; neoliberalism Allison, Anne, 6, 117–18 anthropology and ethnography, at home, 23; methodology summary, 13–27; relational ethnography, 13–14 anxiety, 1–10, 85–86, 90, 123, 133, 139. See also emotions; feeding anxiety aspirations, during People’s Republic of Poland, 34–40; middle class, 9; to be healthy, 50, 65, 78, 90–92, 141–43; to be like the West, 3, 38, 65; personal merged with political directives, 3, 42, 78. See also choice; class; personhood; values Biltekoff, Charlotte, 9, 33, 48, 65, 78, 110, 143, 145, 150, 154, 159, 172

biopolitics, 115, 144, 172. See also medicalization; state blame, 5, 48, 71, 75, 84, 124–26, 163, 157–59; blame games, 62, 71–72, 75–76, 126, 163–64; collective placed on mothers, 50, 85–87, 164. See also individualization; judgment; power; responsibility body, 7, 80, 83, 115, 163; idealized, 78, 111, 171–72; -ily adjustments and reprimands, 14–15, 96, 98, 115, 131–36, 140 Bourdieu, Pierre, 17–18, 30n3 Bowen, Sarah, 6, 9, 30n5, 84 breakfast, See meals Brenton, Joslyn, 6, 9, 30n5, 84 Cairns, Kate, 43, 50, 65, 87, 107–8 Caldwell, Melissa, 35–36, 38–39 capitalism, 32, 77; disillusionment with, 39–40; transition to, 37–40. See also neoliberalism; post-socialist transformation care, See feeding as caring; food as an expression of home and care catering, companies, 122–27; to children, 124–27. See also children being spoiled; school Catholicism, 18, 42–43, 46, 127, 140n3 childhood, changes in, 44–47, 53–55, 167–72; commodification of, 55;



INDEX 

obesity, 8–9, 32, 47, 59, 64, 84, 123, 127, 142, 153–54, 159, 165; studies, 11, 24. See also children children, ‘s menu, 56–57, 99; ‘s desires, 55–56, 59, 67, 123–24; and wellbeing, 6, 41, 111, 118, 123, 151; as innocent and naïve, 11–12, 73–78; being spoiled, 99, 125; changing role in the society, 41, 44, 124–25; laws and rights, 45; research with, 24–27; their space, 46, 113–14, 131–35; violence towards, 45. See also children’s food; children’s foodwork; eating; family; negotiations; new consumers chocolate, See sweets choice, freedom of, 38, 47, 77, 151, 157; increased responsibility for making individual, 32, 38–39, 47–51, 67–69, 71–73, 122, 143–44, 151–52, 157–61; limited during socialism, 38; ‘proper’, 29, 47, 50, 67, 71, 143–45, 151–52; worries about children’s, 71–75, 94–96, 121, 123–27, 134–35. See also citizen-consumer; individualization; neoliberalism; responsibility citizenship, 32, 46, 115, 143; citizenconsumers, 32–33, 38–39, 47–51, 143–44, 148, 157–58, 160–61, 165; pedagogy of, 33, 51, 115, 143–44, 154, 159–60. See also choice; individualization; neoliberalism; state civil servants, See state officials class, a socialist model of a classless society, 35; and dietary politics, 33, 63–65, 84, 117–18, 145–46, 154, 164, 169, 171; and socio-economic inequalities, 39, 62–63, 66, 72, 86, 158, 160; and research, 17–18, 30n5; and the politics of parenting, 9, 17, 65, 117–18, 164; middle-class, 9, 39, 78, 138, 164; system in contemporary Poland, 30n6, 30n7. See also aspirations; judgment; post-socialist transformations; prestige consumption, as not only domestic and private, but also political matter, 12, 145, 167–72; consumer culture, 32, 54,

191

61, 77–79, 161; consumer rights, 47, 72; consumerism, 28, 32–33, 48, 55–56, 67, 168; new consumers, 44–45, 56, 58, 78–79, 161. See also choice; citizenconsumer; shopping control, 66, 71–73, 104, 143; as a feature of modern capitalism, 47–51; children as being out of, 60, 80; -ling children, 54, 60, 65–67, 72–73, 78, 89, 91, 97, 104, 114, 123, 131–36, 138–39, 150; not having, 9, 72, 114–16, 119, 121, 138–39; self- 59, 64, 67, 80, 102, 106, 109–10, 150, 154. See also discipline; feeding anxieties; power Cook, Daniel, 32, 55, 78, 172 cooking, adjusting to children, 86, 99, 111, 122–27; indoctrinating mothers through, 1, 40–43, 85–87, 91–92, 99–100; lost culinary traditions and skills, 47–48, 89, 102, 123–27; school cooks, 124–25, 131–36, 163; workshops, 102, 125–26. See also foodwork; mothers Coveney, John, 3, 48, 146 Crawford, Robert, 49 dairy, 2, 44, 54, 57, 62, 68, 94, 108–10, 148–50, 163, 169; Glass of Milk school programme, 159–61. See also food pyramid; normative assumptions about food; health; negotiations De Certeau, Michael, 30n3, 97 DeVault, Marjorie, 10, 85–86, 172 diet, -ary advice and guidelines, 143–48; -ary politics, 33, 48, 65, 144–50; balanced, 49, 60, 62–63, 65, 76, 83, 107–11, 117, 148–49, 158. See also food; health; nutrition discipline, 15, 28, 64, 78, 80, 87, 91, 95–98, 115, 123, 129–36, 137, 150, 155, 160, 169; self-discipline, 4, 32, 78, 80, 87, 98, 150. See also control; individualization; power distrust, See trust Douglas, Mary, 10, 63 Dunn, Elizabeth, 30n10, 39–44, 52n3, 56 DuPuis, Melanie, 32–33, 47, 157, 170

192

INDEX

drawing, 26, 68, 120, 149; as a method, 25–26 eating, as resistance, 73–75, 82–85, 100, 113–14, 121–22, 125, 133–36, 139, 150; eatertainment, 57; overeating, 21, 44. See also children; feeding-eating relationships; food; negotiations; power struggles economy, informal, 53, 69, 73–74, 105–6, 119; of shortage, 34–37. See also capitalism; moral economy education, edutaintment, 67; programmes, 137, 141–43, 145–56, 156–64; system, 10, 30n8, 45, 115 Elliott, Charlene, 57, 68, 77 Elliott, Sinikka, 6, 9, 30n5, 84 emotions, 7–8, 31, 93, 99–100, 105, 111, 118, 131–36; -al pressure, 85–86, 90–93, 99, 101, 107, 137–40, 150; -al children’s work, 69, 102–7. See also anxiety; feeding anxiety; feeding as emotional process; foodwork as emotional process European Union, 2–5, 39, 42, 52n5, 76, 80n1, 126–27, 143, 153–54, 157, 159–61, 164, 168. See also West family, as a problem when it comes to children’s food, 83–84, 118–19, 137–39, 163–64; as a consumption unit, 46, 55; meals, 14–15, 82–85, 93–101; research with, 14–18. See also children; fathers; family at the centre of feeding anxiety; food rhythms; grandparents; mothers; Murcott; parents fast food, 107–8; as a place welcoming young people, 65; introduction of, 38–39; McDonald’s, 38–39, 58, 65, 108. See also food; food industry fathers, and Sunday breakfast, 95; as fun parents, 88, 106–7; engaged in feeding, 86–87, 92; research with, 15. See also family; gender feeding, as a balancing act, 49, 89–91, 107–11; as a compromise, 82–83, 94–95, 97–101, 105–6, 125–26; as caring, 82–93, 98–99, 102, 107–12,

113–14, 117–18, 123, 126–27, 133–34; as disciplining, 15, 28, 64, 78, 102, 110, 123, 131–36, 169; as mental, physical and emotional process, 10, 85–88, 101, 107–11; as part of unpaid care work, 12, 85; collective, 36; force-, 44, 53–54, 99, 133, 136; -eating relationships, 10–13, 49, 82–85, 92–93, 96–112, 116, 121–22, 133–36, 139–40, 142, 163; overfeeding, 53, 84, 129. See also eating; food; foodwork; feeding anxiety; negotiations; power struggles feeding anxiety, 4–10; as a social concept, 4, 167–72; as a socializing emotion, 5, 40–43, 85–87, 91–92, 85–87, 99–100; as a way of being in the world, 6, 87–89, 91–92, 107–11, 167, 172; family at the centre of, 79, 83–84, 110–11; in relation to and within schools, 113–16, 122–27, 129–40; within the food industry, 54–56, 61–62, 66–68, 71–72, 76–80, 157–59; within the state, 141–44, 152–65. See also alienation; anxiety; blame; control; individualization; responsibilization food, abundance, 35, 56; and fun and play, 57–58, 78, 105–16; and pleasure, 33, 96, 106, 117; and tradition, 48, 89, 124–25, 127, 137; as a research tool, 21, 23; as an expression of home and care, 3, 63, 86–89, 99–100, 117, 119, 123, 127; celebrations, 35, 97, 103; children’s, 56–59, 67–68; its role in children’s future, 31, 55, 143–44; natural, 3–5, 33–35; normative assumptions about ‘good’, ‘proper’ and ‘bad’, 3–4, 33, 49–51, 54–55, 64–66, 68, 71, 73–75, 87, 107–10, 118–19, 141–42, 157; processed and junk, 61, 63–66, 78, 91, 127; pyramid, 27, 29, 142, 146–50, 162; quality, 72, 77, 89, 91, 106, 124–26; rhythms, 10–11, 86, 89–93, 114–16, 139, 127–36, 140; safety, 5–6, 41, 71, 126. See also dairy; fruits; healthy food; meals; sociality and food; sweets; values food industry, 53–55, 61–63, 67–69, 72, 75–79, 128, 157–59, 161; producers,



INDEX 

193

34, 38, 41, 54–55, 58, 61–62, 67–69, 72, 75–76, 79; retailers, 66–75, 77; researching, 22. See also advertisement; consumption; marketing; Polish Federation of Food Industry foodwork, as a mental, physical and emotional process, 10, 85–101, 117–19; children’s, 101–4, 119; gendered division of, 83, 85–89, 90–93, 117–19; unpaid and invisible, 12, 85, 117–19. See also balanced diet; DeVault; eating; feeding; mothers Foucault, Michael, 98, 115, 143, 172 fruits, 10, 44, 50, 54, 56–57, 67, 75, 79, 90, 95, 108, 114, 117, 121, 129, 131, 141, 148, 163; Fruits and Vegetables in Schools programme, 159–61. See also food pyramid; normative assumptions about food; health

75, 158, 161. See also aspirations to be healthy; childhood obesity; Crawford; dairy; fruits; medicalization; nutrition; sweets; health and nutrition as dominating value attached to food; World Health Organization Hryciuk, Renata, 7, 40, 42

gender, norms during socialism, 36–37; double shift, 40, 43, 86–88; and segmentation of the market, 55, 58. See also gendered division of foodwork; mothers; fathers Gille, Zuzsa, 37, 52n5 global and globalization, 12, 33–34, 37, 39, 145, 157; political interests in children’s food, 3–7, 56, 154, 168. See also capitalism Goffman, Erving, 83, 101, 111 grandparents, 85, 91, 104–7, 111 See also intergenerational transfer of knowledge Guthman, Julie, 32, 47, 145, 150, 157, 164, 170

Jackson, Peter, 5–6, 50 James, Allison, 6, 24–25, 56–57, 59, 88 Johnston, Josée, 43, 50, 65, 87, 107–8 judgment and judging, 3, 9, 13–17, 64–65, 83, 87, 91, 108–9, 118–19, 137–40, 143, 159; self-, 83, 99. See also class; discipline; normative assumptions about food; morality; values Jung, Yuson, 38–39, 52n8 Jing, Yun, 3, 6, 44, 56

health, different conceptions of, 48–51, 68–69, 90–95, 107–11, 137–40, 145–46, 151–53; healthism, 34, 49–50, 62, 65, 144–51, 153–56;-y food, 49–50, 60–61, 71, 87–89, 107–10, 117–19, 137–39; performing, 59–69, 70–72, 82–83, 87–88, 94, 107–11, 116–22, 127–29, 141–43, 151–53, 157–61; public, 8, 115, 122, 142, 153–56, 158, 169; unhealthy, 56–67; 71, 74, 76, 79, 84, 108, 121, 123, 142–43, 164; -washing,

individualization, 9, 47–51, 143, 145, 154, 158, 160, 170–72; individual responsibility, 4, 7–9, 39, 51, 77, 143, 145–46, 153–56, 157–61; post-socialist transformation, 39–40. See also alienation; choice; citizen-consumer; responsibilization; self-control; selfjudgement interaction order, 83, 97, 101, 111, 129–36. See also negotiations; power struggles

Kimura, Aya, 145, 150 knowledge, 97, 121, 145; deficiency framework, 145, 160–61; expert advice, 8, 41, 51, 97, 146, 156; undermining mother’s, 41, 50, 85–87, 151–52, 164, 167–72; intergenerational transfer of, 28–29, 33, 41, 53, 59, 69, 73–74, 84–88, 101–7, 110. See also foodwork; mothers; nutrition Korolczuk, Elżbieta, 7, 40, 42 Lahire, Bernard, 10–11, 18, 30n3 Lavin, Chad, 5–6 lunchbox, 6, 25, 29, 61, 66, 88, 116–18, 120. See also food; foodwork; judgment; meals; negotiations

194

INDEX

marketing, 76–77; dirty, 66; niche, 56; research, 55–58, 61–63, 75–76, 78. See also advertisement; consumption; food industry; shopping meals, breakfast, 10–11, 68, 86, 88, 90–91, 93–96, 102; second breakfast, 114, 116–22; dinner, 14, 16, 84–86, 96–101; structure in Poland, 10–11. See also family meals; food rhythms; negotiations; power struggles medicalization, 4, 41, 142–48, 152, 172 milk, See dairy Ministry of Education, 22, 140n2, 141, 154–55, 162, 165n5 Ministry of Health, 125, 144, 154, 157, 162 modernity, as in becoming modern, 39; symbols of, 37–38, 65. See also aspirations; capitalism; personhood; post-socialist transformation Mol, Annemarie, 30n4, 32–33 morality, moralizing, 64–65, 108, 137–39, 156; moral ambivalence, 59, 75–79, 107–10, 152; moral economy of food, 6, 51; moral panic, 64, 123; scientific moralization, 48, 144–50. See also childhood obesity; normative assumptions about food; personhood; values mothers and mothering, 31–32, 40–43; Matka-Polka, 3, 31, 42–43, 51, 86; through food, 42–43, 67, 84–87, 99, 103, 107, 117–19, 170; women socialized through anxiety to be, 5, 31–32, 50, 85–87, 92, 164, 167, 170. See also blame; responsibility; family; feeding; feeding anxieties; foodwork; gender; judgement Mudry, Jessica, 146, 150 Murcott, Anne, 12, 84, 86, 160 National Food and Nutrition Institute, 22, 37, 72, 142, 144–47, 152, 154, 160 negotiations, 9, 66–67, 82–83, 89–101, 104–11, 113–14, 131–36; strategies, 59–60, 77, 96–97, 99–100, 170; tactics, 66, 97–98, 100, 133–34. See also balanced diet; feeding compromises;

foodwork; interaction order; power struggles; values neoliberal, 4, 28, 32, 37, 42, 125; transformations and changes, 3, 37, 47, 50–51, 122–23, 127, 170, 172; personality, 48–49, 157–58; embodied neoliberalism, 32–34, 157. See also capitalism; citizenconsumer; control; individualization; post-socialist transformation; responsibilization non-governmental organizations, 13, 64, 73, 102, 110, 124–25, 139, 142, 154, 156, 158, 167; research with, 22–23 normality, search for during socialism and post-socialism, 37–40; and the West, 38; and ambivalence, 39; -ization of children’s behaviour, 131–37, 143, 155–56, 159–61. See also aspirations; biopolitics; control; personhood; responsibility; values nutrition, science, 36, 144–45; -al guidelines, 36, 126, 144–51, 156; nutritionism, 76, 146, 150; nutritainment, 67–68, 80, 144; transition, 39, 145. See also normative assumptions about food; health; expert knowledge; values; vitamins obesity, See childhood obesity O’Connell, Rebecca, 25, 112n3 Oleschuk, Marin, 65, 87, 107–8 parenting and parents, 82–85, 93–104; blamed for the public problem of children’s ‘bad’ food habits, 5, 48, 84, 118–19, 124, 137–39; intensive, 42; paranoid, 8–9, 42. See also family; fathers; mothers; negotiations personhood, 65, 78–82, 110–11, 150; a changing model of, 40–41, 48–49; making a person with food, 3, 48, 64–65, 78, 150, 156, 167–72; socialist, 36. See also aspirations; citizen-consumer; individualization; modernity; morality; neoliberal personality; responsibility; values



INDEX 

Pike, Jo, 6, 122, 131 Pine, Frances, 34, 36, 39–40, 43, 52n2,6 Poland, See capitalism; class; European Union; post-socialist transformation; socialism Polish Federation of Food Industry, 75–76, 157. See also food industry; marketing post-socialist transformation, 37–40, 47–49. See also capitalism; neoliberalism; socialism power, exerting over women and children, 9, 13, 131–36, 138–39; pester, 45, 66, 88; purchase, 44, 53, 79; struggles, 66, 83, 92–93, 96–101, 115, 131–36; empowering, 77–78. See also blame; control; discipline; feeding anxieties; Foucault; interaction order; negotiations practice theory, 10–11, 65, 97, 102. See also Bourdieu; de Certeau; Lahire prestige, 102–3, 119–20. See also class; sociality and food privatisation, 32, 38–39, 41, 123; of care, 40; of school food, 122–23. See also catering; choice; individualisation; neoliberalism; responsibility Probyn, Elspeth, 32, 143 Punch, Samantha, 24–25, 119 relational approach, to feeding and eating, 10–13; relational ethnography, 13–14. See also feeding-eating relationships responsibility, 74–75, 77, 118–19, 152–53, 165; collective of mothers, 86–87, 164–65; of parents, 9, 54, 71–72, 95, 117–18, 126, 138, 155, 163; of schools, 118–19, 125–26, 138–39; responsibilization, 72, 74–75, 77, 85, 89, 118, 143, 150, 155, 157–61, 163–64. See also blame; citizenconsumer; choice; control; individual responsibility; mothers; neoliberalism; personhood Rose, Nikolas, 12, 42, 50 Rosen, Rachel, 11–12, 85

195

school, 69–75, 113–42, 156–61; canteen, 122–36, 163; research in, 18–22; shop, 53, 69–75; vending machine, 19, 115, 137–38, 140. See also catering; food rhythms; feeding anxiety in relation to and within schools; privatisation of school food; teachers Scrinis, Gyorgy, 146 shopping, 53, 66–75, 89–91, 95; during socialism, 34. See also citizenconsumer; choice; consumption; food; food industry; negotiations; pester power; purchase power sociality, anxiety as a new form of, 2, 85, 92, 167–72; and food, 54, 69–71, 74, 78–80, 96, 116–17, 111, 119–22, 134–35, 137, 139, 146. See also family meals; feeding-eating relationships; food; sweets; values socialism, 5, 34–37; and citizenship, 48; ideology implemented though food, 36; state as a parental figure, 36; women’s roles during, 40. See also post-socialist transformation state, 4–5, 40, 47–50, 71, 77, 115–16, 142–65; officials, 23, 54, role during socialism, 34–37; 74, 83, 102, 116, 122–24, 126, 139, 153, 156–58, 161–62, 165–69; research, 22–23. See also biopolitics; blame game; citizenship; feeding anxiety; nutrition; power; privatisation; responsibility subjectivity, See personhood sweets, 44–45, 53, 57, 59–63, 69, 73–74, 78, 82, 85, 104–7, 117, 158; availability, 54; disenchanting, 61–62; parents hiding their consumption of, 59, 109; as a symbol of bad food habits, 49–50, 53–54, 59–63, 82, 104–11; sweet day, 60, 82, 93–94, 104. See also blame; citizen-consumer; balanced diet; food; judgement; negotiations; values teachers, 8, 45, 54, 72–74, 104, 108, 113–22, 127–40, 155, 160. See also care; discipline; school Titkov, Anna, 42–43, 86

196

INDEX

trust, 8–9, 63, 74–75, 92, 114–16, 129, 138, 152, 172; distrust, 8–9, 80n4, 88, 114–16, 119, 123, 127, 168, 172. See also anxiety; control; emotions; feeding anxiety; food safety; responsibility Urbańska, Sylwia, 41–43, 48 values, 33, 48, 66, 69, 115, 150; changing, 51, 89; health and nutrition as dominating attached to food, 33, 49–50, 60–61, 78–79, 83, 144–51; hierarchies of food values, 49, 76; registers of valuing food, 33, 49, 62, 66–68, 80. See also aspirations; judgement; morality; personhood Warsaw, changing space, 46; city council, 22, 122, 140n2, 162–63; research, 13–17 welfare system, 39; mythologized

generosity of, 40. See also class; postsocialist transformation; privatisation of care; state West, -ern companies, 38; -ern products, 38, 41, 56; aspirations to be like, 3, 38, 65, 162; fears to be like, 47, 124, 126–27; seen as modern, 38; standards, 126–27, 145. See also capitalism; citizen-consumer; global; nutrition transition Wilk, Richard, 67, 84, 112n3 womenandchildren, 11–12. See also biopolitics; capitalism; feeding anxiety; foodwork; power World Health Organisation, 4, 12, 142, 153, 164, 168. See also health; medicalization Yates-Doerr, Emily, 9, 143, 145 Zelizer, Vivianne, 44, 73