Stine Rosenlund Hansen

Food for Kindergarten Children: Who cares? Relations between Food and Care in Everyday Kindergarten Mealtime

This paper discusses mealtime in Danish kindergartens as sites for contested understandings of food, bodies, and care, in an everyday life perspective. Two contesting perspectives on the daily meals are presented, one that highlights the bodily experience of eating, and one that emphasizes the relations between food and health. The coexistence of these perspectives causes tensions in the everyday meals, and in the relations between children and adults. It is argued that adults often downplay the meaning of children’s bodily experiences of eating on behalf of a more rational approach to eating that seeks to construct healthy bodies. The paper builds on empirical material produced in the period from early spring 2011 to winter 2013 as part of a doctoral research project. The production of empirical material took place in three Danish kindergartens through a combination of several qualitative methods, among others participant observation, interviews and creative activities with children.

Striated agency and smooth regulation: kindergarten mealtime as an ambiguous space for the construction of child and adult relations

ABSTRACT Deploying an everyday life approach, this article focuses on the kindergarten meal, defined as a space in which humans, materials and discursive elements interact. The article identifies and discusses two co-existing perspectives on the everyday meals that emphasise children as future beings and here-and-now beings. Through the concepts of smoothing and striation the paper discusses how these perspectives produce different mechanisms of regulation and agency, and position the eaters differently. The paper emphasises kindergarten mealtime as an ambiguous space that does not offer simple discussions about good and bad meal situations. The paper thereby adds to the existing literature within children’s geographies which emphasise interactional, relational and material aspects of children’s lives. It does so by revisiting some concepts, striation and smoothing, that has been used to explore children’s spaces and child–adult relations, but argue that these concepts describe ambivalent and complex processes in children’s and adult’s everyday lives.