Julie M Parsons

In a 21st century neo-liberal era, everyday foodways or 'ways of doing food' are a powerful means of drawing boundaries between social groups; distinguishing the 'self' from the 'other'; and defining who we are and where we belong. This book draws upon auto/biographical food narratives from over seventy people and emphasises the power of everyday foodways in maintaining and reinforcing social divisions along the lines of gender and class. Parsons observes that everyday foodways have become a potent means of 'doing' gender and performing a middle class habitus. Furthermore, the book argues that there are legitimate ways of purchasing, preparing and consuming food, including when, where and with whom, which impact upon the presentation of 'self' in everyday life.

Incorporating respondents' voices and values, Gender, Class and Food provides unique insights into family, motherhood, health, embodiment and taste, and how these influence everyday foodways.

Abstract: This article draws on analysis of interview data from an exploratory case study at an independent ‘offender’ resettlement scheme in England, investigating the benefits or otherwise of commensality for criminalised individuals and the wider community who share a communal lunchtime meal. For prisoners released on temporary licence and others referred through probation, caught in the liminal space between criminal and civilian life, commensality enables social interaction with non-criminalised individuals in a social environment outside of the prison estate. It becomes an arena for the display of non-criminalised identities in preparation for release into the community after punishment. It is a useful tool for social integration that challenges stereotypical beliefs about criminalised individuals amongst the wider community. Moreover, commensality works as a theatre for the performance of non-criminalised identities, by promoting social inclusion and generativity, it is part of a process of desistance geared towards improving self-worth.

Abstract: This paper considers the benefits of participating in a Photographic electronic Narrative (PeN) project funded through a mid-career fellowship scheme and hosted at an independent, part community funded resettlement scheme (RS), located outside of the prison estate in England, for men released on temporary licence (ROTL) and others on community sentences referred through probation (trainees). After two years, two interrelated and significant outcomes have emerged, firstly, that the PeN project through the co-creation of blog posts, has given trainees an opportunity to imagine future selves (Giordano et al 2002, Hunter and Farrall 2018), with the research encounter a means of bearing witness to this and the trauma of criminalisation (Anderson 2016). Secondly, creating and posting PeN project blogs has created a virtual space for these imagined future selves to be articulated and crucially, it gives trainees’ families, friends and the wider community a means of also bearing witness to trainees’ desistance narratives (Anderson 2016).

This paper makes reference to embodied foodways or the attempt to articulate the often-complex affective relationship between food and the body. It is one of five themes (family, maternal, health, embodiment and epicurean) identified after analysis of seventy-five (forty-nine female and twenty-six male) auto/biographical narratives received from respondents who engaged in a series of asynchronous online interviews on the topic of food over the life-course throughout 9 months in 2011 (Parsons 2015). All of the food autobiographies were rich, emotional and evocative socio-historical descriptions of everyday ways of ‘doing’ food. Here, I focus specifically on Ophelia’s e-mail exchanges, because she prefers to feed others rather than herself and is critical of “eating disorders”, despite difficulties nourishing herself after the death of her mother when she was 12.  I make use of the “i-poem” which is constructed as part of the second stage of a four-step process developed by Mauthner and Doucet (1998) from Gilligan (1982), referred to as the Voice Centred Relational Method (VCRM). This analytical approach centres on the ‘voice’ of the respondent, with all of the ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘you’ statements highlighted in order to illustrate how the respondent may think, feel or speak. These are taken from the narrative and written out in the order that they appear and as such, become strong expressions of intent. In Ophelia’s case her food story begins with a focus on hunger and a lack of maternal love explored through relationships with food. Overall, she argues that throughout her life she has craved nourishment for herself whilst admitting that she does not really like food very much at all. At the end she claims, “I fear we are lost!”

Title: Cooking with offenders to improve health and wellbeing. Abstract: Purpose: This paper demonstrates the benefits of cooking one-to-one, alongside commensality (eating together) for improving offender/ex-offender health and well-being, measured in terms of improved social skills, cultural competencies and successful resettlement. Design/methodology/approach: Fieldwork conducted over nine months included; participant observation of lunch times (n = 56), cooking one-to-one with trainees (n = 27), semi-structured interviews (n = 23) and a 'photo-dialogue' focus group with trainees (n = 5) and staff (n = 2). Findings: Commensality is beneficial for offender/ex-offender health and wellbeing. Further, preparing, cooking, serving and sharing food is a powerful means of improving self-esteem and developing a pro-social identity. Research limitations/implications: The original focus of the research was commensality; it was during the study that the potential for cooking as an additional tool for health and wellbeing emerged. A future longitudinal intervention would be beneficial to examine whether the men continued to cook for others once released from prison and/or finished at the RS. Practical implications: Everyday cooking to share with others is an invaluable tool for improving self-worth. It has the potential to build pro-social self-concepts and improve human, social and cultural capital. Social implications: Cooking lunch for others is part of strengths based approach to resettlement that values community involvement. Originality/value: Cooking and eating with offenders/ex-offenders is unusual. Further hands-on cooking/eating activities are beneficial in terms of aiding self-confidence and self-respect, which are vital for improving offender/ex-offender health and well-being. Introduction This paper reports on the benefits of cooking for offender/ex-offender health and well-being at an independently run rural resettlement scheme (RS) that works with men released for work experience on temporary licence (ROTL) from the local prison every day and others in the community referred through the local probation team, collectively referred to as trainees. The RS is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO), currently the only one of its type in the country, now in its 4th year. It works with men from the resettlement wing of the local prison who are coming to the end of their prison sentences and offers through the gate support, alongside training in a range of occupations (for example construction, landscaping, market gardening and woodworking). Trainees also engage in what might be considered more craft based activities such as art, pottery and woodturning.

In this paper we contextualise the presentation of ‘i-poems’ and ‘they-poems’ used at the AMH Annual conference, in an attempt to continue to give ‘voice’ to socially excluded research participants, who engaged in a ‘food as lifestyle motivator’ (FLM) project funded by an Institute of Sustainability Solutions Research (ISSR) collaborative award in 2014, to support wellbeing and life skills in marginalised groups. The inter-disciplinary research team adopted a ‘photo elicitation’ method, part of a range of creative participatory techniques, with participants invited to photograph everyday food activities in order to empower/engage. The project aim was to demonstrate how ‘photo elicitation’, could be used as a tool of empowerment. We reflect on this technique and its’ potential to disrupt power relations, through analysis of a focus group discussion conducted with participants about their photographs, alongside analysis of some of the photographs. We illustrate the power relationships inherent in all social research practices and how creative participatory research approaches are no less influenced by these dynamics (Letherby 2003, Liamputtong 2007). Hence, whilst there were clear power relationships apparent within the homeless centre (HC) itself, as demonstrated through our oral presentation, these were also played out within the processes of research and knowledge production. Yet, the research participants’ photographs challenge the notion of ‘the homeless’ as an homogenous group, instead these can be considered presentations of the self outside of the label of ‘vulnerable’ and/or ‘marginal’. We therefore further demonstrate how residents at a homeless centre resist the regulation of their
lives around food, illustrating Foucault’s maxim; ‘where there is power, there is resistance’ (1990:95).

This article draws on findings from an auto/biographical study about relationships with food to demonstrate how everyday foodways continue to be influenced by the intersectionalities of gender and class. Following Bourdieu [1984. Distinction, a social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge] how ‘foodies’ use food and foodways (the production, preparation, serving and eating of food) as a material and cultural display of capital (Johnston, J., & Baumann, S. 2010. Foodies, democracy and distinction in the gourmet kitchen. London: Routledge) or even ‘culinary capital’ (Naccarato, P., & LeBesco, K. 2012. Culinary capital. London: Berg) has been demonstrated. There has been less work exploring how mothers use ‘feeding the family’ (DeVault, M. I. 1991. Feeding the family. London: University of Chicago Press) as a source of cultural capital for themselves. Three-quarters of the 75 respondents in my UK study were parents and all mothers with dependant children fed their family ‘healthy’ food as a means of performing a particular middle-class habitus. I therefore examine how mothers engaged in ‘healthy’ foodwork as a means of positioning themselves as ‘good’ mothers or ‘yummy mummies’ (Allen, K., & Osgood, J. 2009. Studies in the Maternal, 1). Indeed, despite decades of gender equality in the public sphere and neo-liberal assertions regarding individualism, ‘feeding the family’ (DeVault, 1991) continues to be a highly gendered activity, with the added pressure of now having to provide ‘healthy’ food cooked from scratch. In these accounts, convenience foods and/or ‘unhealthy’ family foodways were vilified and viewed with disgust, with an adherence to ‘healthy’ family foodways used as a means of drawing boundaries within fields of ‘organised striving’ (Martin, J. 2011. On the explanation of social action, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Savage, M., & Silva, E. B. 2013. Cultural Sociology, 7, 111–126). This article considers ‘healthy’ foodwork as a significant aspect of ‘good’ middle-class mothering, whereby ‘healthy’ family foodways become significant in the performance and display of ‘proper’ middle-class femininity that pathologises alternative family foodways and ‘other’ femininities. This serves to illuminate continuities within the intersectionalities of gender and class, with a commitment to ‘healthy’ family foodways central to ‘future oriented’ (middle classed) maternal identity.

Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09589236.2014.987656?journalCode=cjgs20#.VewcTs54hRk

Despite a contemporary milieu that emphasises fluidities across gender boundaries and shifting roles, the 75 respondents in the study that informs this paper presented their food auto/biographies as a type of transformation narrative heavily influenced by the continued intersectionalities of gender and class. Respondents utilised 'common vocabularies' (Mills 1959) and conformed to cultural scripts of what might be considered appropriate middle class and highly gendered foodways when developing a taste for 'good' food. The focus of this paper centres on the notion of food 'play' rather than food 'work' as significant in the performance of a gendered cultural habitus, whereby men distanced themselves from notions of feminised domesticity and health discourses by resorting to both hegemonic masculinities and epicurean foodways. This raises questions with regards to cultural influences on everyday foodways, as well as notions of what it means to be a gourmet, epicure and/or food adventurer within a contemporary foodscape. Indeed, for the male respondents in this UK based study a commitment to epicurean foodways becomes a field for the performance of hegemonic masculinities with the 'gourmet food adventurer' emerging from this culinary field coded elite and male.

A commitment to healthy family foodways is a means of demonstrating responsible individualism and self-care. In the current UK foodscape “good” food is usually “healthy” and feeding the family “healthy” food has high symbolic and cultural value. In this article I examine the implications of such rigid conceptualizations of appropriate feeding practices and feeding healthy food as a means of doing “good” mothering. I conducted a qualitative study over nine months in early 2011, inviting respondents to document their life histories around food through a series of asynchronous in depth on line interviews. There were two interrelated purposes, firstly to explore the food memories of others, and secondly to critically examine the social and cultural milieu in which these were articulated. Three quarters of respondents were parents and some considered food important for health and a source of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). This meant a commitment to the hyper surveillance of dietary practices in the interests of controlling health and/or illness, either theirs or others (children, partners, families). For one family this meant that they were forced to use “unhealthy” food in order to treat their child’s drug resistant epilepsy. The diet was highly successful, yet potentially problematic for maternal identity. How can a “good” mother feed her family “bad” food? I argue that one way of transcending this dualistic and absolutist approach to feeding is by engaging in intensive mothering.

Available at: http://ijo.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.199/prod.94

Selected as the winner of the International Award for Excellence for Volume 4 of Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal from among the ten highest-ranked papers emerging from the peer review process and according to the selection criteria outlined in the referee guidelines.

In the UK there are persistent class connotations associated with the cultural symbols of the ‘yummy mummy’ and ‘chav mum’. Celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver contribute to public disquiet regarding appropriate family foodways by vilifying ‘the mum and kid eating cheese and chips out a Styrofoam container’. Hence, mothers more than ever are responsible for inculcating appropriate middle class values and tastes, with family foodwork considered an essential aspect of maternal identity and a means of acquiring social, symbolic and cultural capital. Two-thirds of the seventy-five, mostly middle class respondents in my qualitative study, exploring relationships with food, were parents. Far from presenting a negotiated family model of feeding the family, they demonstrated a commitment to a highly gendered intensive mothering ideal. Despite commitments outside of the home and occupational identities, women went to great lengths to explain how they eschewed convenience food in order to prepare healthy family meals from scratch. Indeed other markers of middle class taste were also utilized in an effort to distance their family foodways from those associated with inappropriate parenting or the cultural symbol of the ‘chav mum’ ‘eating cheese and chips out a Styrofoam container’.

This article is based upon a paper given at the winter 2010 auto/biography conference ‘Feminism & Lives’. Notions of what constitute a feminist and feminism in general are contested issues both at the structural and personal level. This chapter explores these issues by focusing on unpublished autobiographical material from my husband’s grandmother; Peggy Barclay, along with my own auto/biographical reflections in order to consider the extent to which she was ‘doing’ feminism, as we might understand it today. It also charts the progress of my research which began with the desire to understand one woman’s identity in her own words, to the interweaving of public and private accounts, published and unpublished works from Peggy, her siblings and her father. What emerges is a glimpse in to the lives and motivations of these individuals and some reflections on feminism.