Start Date
26-5-2026 4:15 PM
End Date
26-5-2026 4:30 PM
Description
In this paper I use first-person literary accounts of the hope and despair experienced by women when feeding infants and young children. In Soldier Sailor, Claire Kilroy offers a vivid depiction of attempts to get healthy and nutritious food into an evasive toddler. In her memoir, Making Babies: stumbling into motherhood, Anne Enright dedicates two whole pages to the word “haNang.” The word portrays endless crying of her breast-fed baby if she ate anything other than brown rice. These visceral depictions of mothers’ experiences of feeding children raise interesting questions for gastronomic studies. Some of our most treasured childhood food memories may well be painful memories for our parents, particularly our mothers, who serve on the frontline of the battlefield of child nutrition. Mothers engage in the food wars on several fronts; children must not get too many treats, they must eat wholesome, healthy food daily, children must be neither too fat, nor too thin. Societal expectations are clear that “the ideal mother... opts for nutrition over convenience for the good health of the family” (Salvio 2012, 38). There is a gap between reality and expectation as mothers report overwhelm and exhaustion around child nutrition. This analysis is contextualised within Ireland’s recent history of Celtic Tiger neoliberal values and the dominance of scientific rationalism in studies of child nutrition internationally. In investigating these issues, the paper identifies how gastronomic studies could fill the gap between culinary and parental biographies in the battlefield of modern childhood nutrition.
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Included in
Chronicles of Despair and Hope: Food Wars on the Frontline of Motherhood
In this paper I use first-person literary accounts of the hope and despair experienced by women when feeding infants and young children. In Soldier Sailor, Claire Kilroy offers a vivid depiction of attempts to get healthy and nutritious food into an evasive toddler. In her memoir, Making Babies: stumbling into motherhood, Anne Enright dedicates two whole pages to the word “haNang.” The word portrays endless crying of her breast-fed baby if she ate anything other than brown rice. These visceral depictions of mothers’ experiences of feeding children raise interesting questions for gastronomic studies. Some of our most treasured childhood food memories may well be painful memories for our parents, particularly our mothers, who serve on the frontline of the battlefield of child nutrition. Mothers engage in the food wars on several fronts; children must not get too many treats, they must eat wholesome, healthy food daily, children must be neither too fat, nor too thin. Societal expectations are clear that “the ideal mother... opts for nutrition over convenience for the good health of the family” (Salvio 2012, 38). There is a gap between reality and expectation as mothers report overwhelm and exhaustion around child nutrition. This analysis is contextualised within Ireland’s recent history of Celtic Tiger neoliberal values and the dominance of scientific rationalism in studies of child nutrition internationally. In investigating these issues, the paper identifies how gastronomic studies could fill the gap between culinary and parental biographies in the battlefield of modern childhood nutrition.