The Psychology of Eating: From Healthy to Disordered Behavior

74 The Meaning of Food

and mothers in Wales that on the one hand women are responsible for the
health of their family while on the other they wish to please them and show
them love by providing foods to their taste. Further, as Lawrence (1984)
argued, “good nourishing food is what every mother knows her children
need. She also knows that it is usually the last thing they want. Give them
junk food and they will love you. But you will also have to live with the
guilt about their teeth, their weight, their vitamins” (p. 30) (see figure 4.6).

Power relations

Food can also reflect power relations within a family. Delphy (1979)
reported that in nineteenth-century rural France, men regularly received
larger amounts of food than women, children, or the infirm elderly, and
that if poultry or meat was available it was reserved for the men. Millett
(1969) also described how “In nearly every patriarchal group it is expected
that the dominant male will eat first or eat better and even when the sexes
feed together the male shall be served by the female” (p. 48). In line with
this, Charles and Kerr (1986, 1987) examined the distribution of food within
English families and argued that food allocation reflected the power rela-
tions and sexual divisions within a family, with larger portions of meat in
particular being given to men. The children and women had subsidiary
positions in the family hierarchy. Murcott (1983) similarly concluded
from her study that the cooked dinner “symbolises the home, a husband’s
relation to it, his wife’s place in it and their relationship to one another”
(p. 179), and that a woman’s denial of food both maintained a thinner body
and fulfilled a woman’s role as the provider for others.
In summary, food is embedded with meaning which is a central form
of communication in the interaction of individuals. Within this social con-
text food is a forum for expressions of love and caring and for conflicts
between health and pleasure, and is a symbol of power relations within a
family.

Food as Cultural Identity

Food is a form of communication about an individual’s identity and
about this identity in the context of others. Ultimately, however, such com-
munications occur within the broader social context, and food can be read
for information regarding a cultural identity. Research has explored the notion