“Growing your own herbs” and “cooking from scratch”: Contemporary discourses around good mothering, food, and class‐related identities

In a cultural climate of “intensive parenting” and concerns about the “obesity epidemic,” parents are expected to take responsibility for their children's health, particularly through the provision of a “healthy” diet. This study involved intergenerational dyad interviews with both middle‐class and working‐class mothers and daughters from the United Kingdom. Analysing the data using discourse analysis informed by feminist poststructuralist theory, we found that mothers were positioned as having prime responsibility for the nurturing of family members, including the provision of a healthy diet. However, providing a healthy diet alone was insufficient; mothers needed to demonstrate that time and effort had been taken in the preparation of meals using fresh ingredients. Those who failed to do so were positioned as “lazy,” thus inviting the blaming of mothers for any current or future health problems encountered by family members (especially children). However, talk from some of the working‐class mothers pointed to the unattainable and “classed” ideals that are set by such cultural expectations.