The project investigates the everyday food practices of children and their families in various urban neighborhoods in an effort to better understand the relationships between food, ethnicity, and place. Although scholars have noted the importance of food environments in shaping food choices and health outcomes, research to date tends to compartmentalize place-level factors and ignore the relational qualities of place. The presumably less healthy food habits of low-income and minority populations are typically explained by lower access to affordable and healthy food. However, food practices, ethnicity and place are mutually constituted through a web of social, political, economic and emotional relations within homes and communities. These connections between food, ethnicity and place remain poorly theorized and need to be more systematically substantiated through empirical and comparative analysis. In particular, there is limited research on the ways that family dynamics and children influence these relationships. The project addresses this knowledge gap by investigating everyday family food practices associated with the acquisition, preparation and consumption of food, intra-household negotiations of these practices and responses to diverse and changing local food environments in several neighborhoods in San Diego representing predominantly Italian, East African and Mexican communities. Particular attention is given to the enabling/constraining capacities of place in shaping social reproduction and children's agency in influencing family practices, resisting gendered divisions of labor, and creating new bridges between home and other environments. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are integrated to collect and analyze data. In each site, the research team will conduct food audits, map food resources and census data, and interview store and restaurant owners, school and public officials, and leaders of community-based organizations to generate a better understanding of the local food environment. This will inform extensive ethnographic research centered on children and their families to collect data on everyday food practices and the dynamic relationships between food, place, and ethnic identities. Data will be collected through food-related activities in schools, participant observation, focus groups and subsequent family interviews of children and parents/guardians both separately and together.
This project will be the basis of a new community-based research and service-learning curriculum for undergraduates and will provide training for graduate students. The research team will work closely with local organizations in identifying needs and resources, developing solutions, and disseminating findings. This project will also advance the literature on food practices by situating them in place-specific social relations. Doing so, it will contribute to research on environmental context of food consumption by considering the relational qualities of place, their embeddedness in social relations, and the ways these spatialized relations produce unique food environments and influence food choices. It will expand and further connect literatures on children and social reproduction by bringing children firmly into the negotiated process of social reproduction through our ethnographic work. In addition, the research will contribute knowledge on race by generating better understandings of the spatiality of 'ethnic' food practices and the social construction and materiality of race.
This project is cofunded by the Geography and Spatial Sciences and Cultural Anthropology Programs.
