The failed child of the failing mother’: Situating the development of child eating practices and the scrutiny of maternal foodwork

The key argument in this chapter is that the development of dietary practices, tastes, and so forth, and maternal feeding practices cannot be isolated from the specific social, cultural, economic and political conditions within which these practices take place. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of some of the critiques offered by those such as Burman in relation to the framing of mothers as constituting the social world of the child in orthodox developmental research, and the implications this has for both children and mothers. It then presents a critical discussion of some of the developmental research on maternal feeding practices and children's eating habits. Finally, the chapter draws on a selection of critical and primarily discursive scholarship in the area to illustrate the locatedness of food and eating practices and how these cannot be adequately understood when viewed in isolation from economic circumstances and the classed, gendered and culture-specific meanings imbued within food practices.