Sharing food at home and school: perspectives on commensality

Sharing food at home and school:perspectives on commensality

Marlene Morrison

Abstract

Sharing meals together, both in terms of their social construction andthe social rules which govern behaviour, is thought to be the essence ofour sociality. Teaching and Learning about Food and Nutrition inSchools (reported by Burgess and Morrison in 1995) is an ESRCfunded project, which, as part of the Nation's Diet Programme: TheSocial Science of Food Choice investigated food use and eating inschools. Prior to the project social scientists had seldom focused uponthe social and educational contexts in which children and youngpeople learned about food as classroom activity, as routinised eating inschools, or at the interface between home and school. It is at the meet-ing point of such interests that this paper on the social significance ofeating together is framed. Interview and diary data from parents, 'din-ner ladies' and pupils, in combination with research observations, areused to explore familial perspectives on the changing relationshipbetween eating at home and school in two primary school case studies.The discussion of school eating arrangements highlights the complexissues underpinning the advocacy of school meals, not only in terms ofnutritional impact but also in relation to the cross-cutting effects ofinstitutional practice, socio-economic advantage and disadvantage, andcultural preference. The alleged decline of the 'proper' shared meal isalso contested. Rather, the data show commensality being producedand reproduced in different forms.

Introduction

You want me to talk about food and eating, I'd rather not. Itry to avoid thinking about it. I mean, when I was growing upeating was a horrible, it brings back horrible memories . . .Rows, arguments at the meal table, and Sundays, I just

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Sharing food at home and school

couldn't tell you about Sundays. Even now, I dread havingdinners, you know parties . . . No, a [school] cafeteria system isa good idea. Get it over with as quick as possible.

Ann Ballard, Secondary teacher and parent, interview extract.January, 1994.

Until recently, sociologists expressed relatively little interest inwhat we eat, how we prepare and consume food, how we feelabout it and why. Paradoxically, when the relationship betweenfood, eating and society is discussed, this is often in functionalisttenns of commensality, that is, the social significance of livingand eating together that is thought to lie at the heart of oursociality. Yet, from time to time, changes take place in the wayour structures and interactions are perceived and prioritised.Most recently, as Mennell et al., (1992) demonstrate, the relation-ship between food, eating, and society is discussed in a range ofways that include commensality. Frequently, sociological interestsaccompany or follow outbreaks of societal apprehension. Themutual implications of societal 'panics' and sociological concernare evident in burgeoning interest about food and eating. At aglobal level, there is concern about the co-existence of food plentywith shortage, the socio-economic implications of the north-southdivide, and the massive gap between human existence as wealthyor poor, expressed, in extreme, by the absence of food, or starva-tion. Recent national interest stems from an awareness of nutri-tional problems (the diseases of affluence) which have beenaccompanied not only by the professionalisation of nutrition,dietetics, and health education but also by a growing abhorrenceof 'fatness', once the symbol of status and wealth, yet currentlyimplicated in the growing incidence of eating disorders.Underpinning such issues is alarm about morality itself, or atleast its current manifestations. This includes the 'decline' of fam-ily life, particularly as a symbol and seedbed for social solidarityand morality. As Mennell et al., (1992) comment:

Recognising the importance of conunensality is not just anesoteric matter buried in specialist literature. Functionalist tonesnonwithstanding, sociological expressions such as 'the promotionof social solidarity' find an easy equivalence in a moral apprehen-siveness in the modem world . . . There seems to be a tendencyfor those concerned with nutritional adequacy to incorporate abroader anxiety in their reaction to market researchers' reports

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that taking meals together is being supplemented by 'grazing' ona solitary succession of snacks (Fischler, 1979; Herpin, 1988: 116)

Worries about the decline of the family meal have, then, signalledworries about the decline of the family, despite neither evidenceof 'such an idyllic past' (Fischler, 1979; Herpin, 1988: 116, andapparent in the opening interview extract) nor sufficient accompa-nying support for trends towards solo eating (Ekstrom, 1991). AsMurcott (1988a) has pointed out, public {and fictional) allegianceto the importance of shared meals persists, along with anxietyabout their supposed decline. Together, anxiety about what, how,and with whom we eat has surfaced in relation to the health andphysical well-being of adults and children and in cultural con-cerns about the disintegration of family life and values.

The public identification of problems demands solutions. UKgovernment policy initiatives have focused increasingly uponchildren and young people, and a remedial as well as proactiverole for education. 'Teaching and Learning about Food andNutrition in Schools' (reported by Burgess and Morrison in1995) is an ESRC funded project, which, as part of theNation's Diet Programme: the Social Science of Food Choice,investigated food use in schools. Prior to the project, social sci-entists had seldom focused upon the social and educationalcontexts in which children and young people learned aboutfood as classroom activity, as routinised eating in schools, or atthe interface between home and school. It is at the meetingpoint of such interests that this paper on commensality isframed. Interview and diary data from parents and pupils, incombination with research observations, are used to explorefamilial perspectives on the changing relationships between eat-ing at home and at school. In part, the paper responds to pre-vious calls from sociologists of food to 'take a harder look atthe idea of commensality itself (Mennell et al., 1992; Murcott,1988b). It is also the sense in which further understandingsabout power and control over 'food choice', seen here in rela-tion to understandings about food consumption and educationat a critical phase in the lifecycle, might be explored and devel-oped. For the purposes of the paper, the main informants areparents (including lunchtime supervisors or 'dinner ladies') andpupils in two primary schools which were two of the four casestudies for the project. (A previous paper (Morrison, 1995)focused upon the perspectives of older children.)

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An educational focus upon food

Alongside increased nutritional and social concerns about thequality of British school children's diets there has developed acommensurate belief in the ability of education to affect changesin both attitudes and behaviour towards more 'healthy' eatinglinked to individuals' lifestyles. Such a belief, it is argued, hasoften been both ill-founded (Rodmell and Watts, 1986) and ill-for-mulated. Yet in its recent manifestation, education has beenranked as the number one priority for all age groups, but in par-ticular for those of school age, by the Nutrition Task Force(Department of Health, 1994) established in the wake of TheHealth of the Nation White Paper (Department of Health, 1992).Whilst some educationalists have striven to maintain a place forfood in the school curriculum, those with other interests, whethereconomic, political, or welfare, have prioritised nutritional issues,often linked to the provision of school meals. Convergent anddivergent trends are visible (Morrison, 1995). Applicable to thestudy of food and eating are changing conceptions about the roleof parents in education. This is set alongside a political ideologyof pupil individualism and self-reliance to 'encourage individualresponsibility, awareness and informed decision-making' (NCC,1990) and a rhetoric of 'self-empowerment'.

The advocacy of parental choice

Among important connections between social, educational, andnutritional interests are those linked to terms like: freedom, choice,efficiency and responsibility when applied to education in generaland to school meals' provision in particular. Murcott (1988c)rehearses the arguments well: freeing LEAs from obligations laidupon them by the 1944 Act to provide meals of a specified nutri-tional standard, legislation of the early 1980s reflected an underly-ing political philosophy that has gathered momentum. Marketforces and parental choices have come to define most aspects ofthe English education system, except the curriculum which is cen-trally driven and offers decreasing scope for teaching and learningabout food (Morrison 1996). Simultaneously, children's eatingpractices have become increasingly divorced from official interpre-tations of what counts as schooling or as appropriate educational

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experience. Instead, school-based eating now reflects the 'responsi-ble' and 'efficient' choices made by parents, or governors, orLEAs. Paradox persists at wider levels. Whilst children's eating isthought to be essentially a private and family matter, what, whenand how children ought to eat is expected to be controlled and sub-ject to educational guidance. Advocacy of this kind has placed'moral entrepreneurs . . . curiously poised between authoritarian-ism and privatism' (Dale, 1989: 86) in the paradoxical position ofasking schools 'to give a moral lead' on issues like health (with itsfood and nutrition element) which are 'simultaneously held to beproperly none of their concern' (Dale, 1989: 86). Of research inter-est were the ways in which parents (and pupils) understood andinterpreted these recent changes. Questions about commensalityfocused upon two main sets of issues: first, the routinised featuresof daily food preparation and eating, particularly for children,including school-based eating, and second, parents' interpretationsof the respective roles of home and school in food-focused educa-tion.

The schools

Fieldgate Primary School is a co-educational school with 350pupils, and is situated in a village on the outskirts of an Englishmarket town. Its catchment draws from surrounding villages, andincreasingly from the neighbouring town. With a declining ruralpopulation, a growth in owner-occupied housing, and a nearbymotorway network, Fieldgate parents are predominantly mobileparents who have elected to live in an area which they consider tobe economically, socially, and educationally conducive to theirfamilies' well-being. The school is sited within a local educationauthority which, two years previously, had decided to end itsschool meal provision in response to educational priorities deemedmore pressing. The LEA meets its legal obligation to provide freeschool meals for the economically disadvantaged by providingpacked lunches. These consist of: sandwiches/roll, biscuit, fruit anddrink items delivered to school in distinctive brown paper bags.The demise of the school meals service has brought one majoradvantage to the school, namely the conversion of the canteeninto a large well-equipped classroom currently occupied by a year2 class. Changes in local policy have reinforced a view amongteachers of 'school dinners' as mixed administrative and educa-



tional 'blessings', a view reinforced by the removal of lunchtimeduties from teachers' responsibilities since 1986. A vociferousminority among the teachers regret the passing of school mealsprovision mainly for 'other' families' children but also for the chil-dren of families with working, professional parents who iieed toengage in multiple strategies for the timing and content of whatteachers describe as the 'main meal' event of the evening.

Brook Street Primary School provided an urban, co-educational,multi-ethnic setting for the study. The school, which has 326pupils, is surrounded by terraced housing, comer shops, councilHats, and local factories. The catchment area is more than 50%Asian, and in recent years the headteacher considers that 'problem'families have been decanted from other parts of the city to the areasurrounding the school. As a result many Asian families are mov-ing out of the area; those who remain are not in a position tomove. Brook Street School provides a full school meals service, hasa purpose-built dining hall, and its own canteen (which also pro-vides for several other server units in the locality). Teachers hadmixed views about the value of school-based eating for children.Whilst considered important from a nutritional and welfare per-spective, it was also discussed by them as part of the administrativeproblem of lunchtime supervision and control, and by several staffas a precursor to afternoon disciplinary problems among pupils.

The number of parental interviews requested (20) were, in part,a reflection of the fieldwork resources available, and a preferredstrategy for in depth interviews. Responses to requests for parentalinterviews showed differences between the two schools, and this isreflected in the responses given. Reasons are speculative. At onelevel were the language barriers at Brook Street, partially over-come by my attendance at an afternoon club for parents (allwomen), among whom were those whose first language was notEnglish, but where voluntary interpreters were available.Fieldnotes of conversations were made. Less speculative, is thelikely effect of the greater visibility afforded me at Fieldgateschool by members of the teaching and non-teaching staff. Thisculminated not only in a high response rate, but in parents volun-teering interviews. In total, 14 interviews were tape recorded; 11were from Fieldgate and included two joint husband/wife inter-views. At Brook Street, one interview was conducted with apupil's father in the presence of the mother, one with a mother,and the third with the eldest daughter of the family who acted asspokesperson for her parents. Notes were also taken on lunchtime


Marlene Morrison

conversations with dinner ladies. Pseudonyms are used through-out.

Eating at school

Commensality is critically linked to its institutional arrangements.For young primary school entrants, eating provides initialencounters with food beyond the home and in the presence ofoutsiders. Daily eating rituals are continuing, if occasionallypoignant and tearful reminders of irrevocable shifts in the locusof their lives. Such experiences straddle an intriguing half-wayposition between 'eating in' and 'eating out' (Mennell et al.,1992). On the one hand, they stand in sharp contrast to the pub-lic commercialised world of fast food outlets and restaurants, andon the other hand diverge from, or substitute for familial anddomestic routines.

At Fieldgate school, eating resembles a large indoor picnicwhich takes place in two settings in the main hall. Children havethe choice to go home for lunch, but 85% of the children remainat school, bringing an array of lunch boxes which are stackedeach morning in classrooms. Each lunchtime, individualised eat-ing takes an institutionalised form. This comprises mainly sand-wiches, crisps, a chocolate biscuit and a drink, with fruit andyoghurts not uncommon. What is labelled 'a packed lunch' or'school dinner' by parents and children is, in fact, a collection ofsnacks. What is most notable about individualised eating atFieldgate is not its variety (there are isolated pockets of differencelike hot soup in flasks) but its standardised format. Care is takenby staff not to make the free packed lunches distinct from thoseof their classmates. Eleven children deliver their lunchboxes to theschool secretary who repackages the free school meals into thelunchbox stands during first break. Free school meals are dulland unimaginative. An unintended consequence is that even whena family's needs remain unchanged, few children take them con-sistently.

'Home' in a box

When children opened their lunch boxes, they displayed some ofthe opportunities and constraints of familial food choices. In



effect, 'home' was made visible. The data also illustrated thatwomen's position in the domestic division of labour was inti-mately linked to the distribution of food, including that con-sumed at school. In interviews, parents explained that theirinfluence over what went into the box was mediated by severalfactors which, together, were described in terms of eating com-promises or 'bargains'. The combination of (predominantly)mothers' ideas about what was nutritionally balanced with theirpositioning of a 'snack' meal as a stop-gap to the main mealevent in the evening, was mediated not only by children's foodpreferences but also by what was affordable and practically storedin a lunch box. Mrs Baxter has two boys at Fieldgate School anddescribed elements of the eating compromise. I asked:

How do you decide what goes into their packed lunches eachday?

Mrs B: It is their likes because I think it's very important thatthey eat what they have at lunchtime. I don't like them cominghome with their box still full of food. It worries me if theydon't eat properly. So, it is what they like but it's tempered bywhat I feel is good for them. So I give them the choice ofbrown and white bread and a filling and I say, cheese, butter,perhaps a meat and salad, and they choose out of that. So Idon't say what do you want . . . They have got to have asandwich or cheese and biscuits - and they've got to have apiece of fruit. So there are guidelines. They tell me that otherchildren have two packets of crisps and that a lot of peoplehave two chocolate bars and some people don't have anysandwiches. I talk to them about it quite a lot. [David] isactually quite happy. Because he's been brought up on actuallystrict diets [he has food allergies] and actually goes along prettywell with what I say but [Adrian's] got a very sweet tooth, hejust loves cakes and biscuits, doesn't like what he calls boringfood, sandwiches, so it's a little bit more difficult. But theyknow why, they know that I am concerned about their health.

It was also recognised that children's choices were mediatedthrough the influence of the peer group. Mrs Simpson, with twochildren at Fieldgate school, balanced her choice of food inputwith the importance of what she described as the social side ofeating - not having food in the box which was different from


Marlene Morrison

other children, and providing food which she 'knows' was usedfor the 'occasional trade'. In addition, Mrs. Simpson engaged insome unusual strategies to make explicit the implicit influence ofa mother's choice for lunchtime eating, as the following extractindicates:

Mrs S: Yes I mean it's [school lunchtime] not just aboutfeeding their little bodies, it's also about being sociable withother children and if they're the only one without a packet ofcrisps then let's face it, if it's only one they can have, it can'tdo them any harm . . . I mean I try to convince them withthings. I do sometimes put chopped carrot sticks and celery oranything like that in the hope they'll eat it now and then. . . .Sometimes I put a little surprise in as well and a little note.MM: Do they appreciate that?Mrs S: Yes they do like it. I always try to imagine when theyopen their boxes and they see 'I love you' [on the note], I try toimagine their faces.

Feeding children at school illustrates and extends what previousresearch confirms (Murcott, 1983; Deem, 1986; Charles and Kerr,1988) as a complicated web of domestic obligations for women.In providing food for school that they hope will sustain their chil-dren, keep them happy, and in personable relations with theirpeer group, women's role to ensure conflict-free family life wasbeing extended in absentia to the school premises. Such influenceswere sanctioned implicitly and explicitly by teaching and non-teaching staff. For example, whilst sweets were not permitted atschool, both parents and teachers were ambivalent about whatconstituted a sweet and what constituted a chocolate snack.Generally, parental choice was paramount. Parents were informedif children became persistent non-eaters and the deputy headacknowledged a 'sandwich graveyard' at one comer of the schoolsite. Overall, the provision of food as one aspect of home/schoolrelations was recognised as a potentially sensitive issue by staff,with parental rights to choose prioritised except in very excep-tional circumstances, as in the case where a parent provided onlychocolate bars.

Both parents and lunchtime supervisors noted dips and peaksin the popularity of certain items, with lunchtime supervisorsmore willing to acknowledge the influence of current advertisingthan parents. (In an observed example, a boy who won £10 as a



result of a promotion by a well-known crisp manufacturerachieved an albeit temporary 'lottery-winner' status in the play-ground). Whilst there was minimal institutional influence on whatwas eaten at lunchtime, some opportunities were taken by schoolstaff to maximise the social and educational impact of eatingarrangements. Types of food consumption more usually describedas 'solo eating' and/or as 'grazing' were here being converted intosociable and administratively manageable forms. This was pro-moted via close liaison between lunch-time supervisors (also localparents) and school managers. Children picnicked at tables ofeight. At the start of each academic year discussion took place todecide upon an eating partner. Table groups were mixed acrossfour classes; this was a deliberate attempt to foster interrelationsbetween age groups and classes. Where children wished to changepartners 'this ha[d] to be an exercise in democracy' (the head) andcleared by partners before changes were made. Swapping foodwas discouraged by lunchtime supervisors as it was thought tothwart parental choice, although there was a tension between thesocial aspects of sharing and the more problematic features ofswapping. So, for Mrs. Turner, mother of two pupils at FieldgateSchool, the process of determining what her children had eaten,did, on occasion, require an element of detection:

Mrs T: Well, what they have on their sandwiches depends onwhat we've got here but I mean I usually try to give them whatthey ask for, then they usually choose a packet of crisps and adrink on the way to school . . . but actually they do tend toswap some of the stuff, sometimes what's left she hasn't gonewith, she's eaten other stuff and the stuff that she's had shehasn't eaten or sometimes she has.

Lunchtime supervisors took a firm but friendly stance, clearingspillages, opening difficult packages, encouraging children to sam-ple and finish all items in the box. What children relayed to par-ents about such experiences tended to focus on issues of fast andslow eating and its implications for what remained in the box,and times spent in the playground. Mrs. Waller and daughterDaisy described the problem of fast eating:

Mrs. Waller: They [the lunchtime supervisors] do go on a bit,don't they, about you hurrying up to eat your dinner? She'snot been allowed to gollop her food anyway. It's a bit unfair

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really, because she's not been taught to eat that way, in ahurry.Daisy: If you're a junior you have to try and be like oneminute more, but if you're in infants you can stay there for likethe second sitting.

Meanwhile, Mrs Waller continued to try and resist providingfood 'that's just galloped down' because 'it's not the way we eathere' [at home], on occasion sending hot snacks in a flask.

At Brook Street School, commensality showed contrasting for-mations. Since the industrial action of the mid 1980s and subse-quent legislation, lunchtime activity had been excluded fromofficial interpretations of educational experience by teachers atBrook Street. This was reinforced by the physical separation ofthe dining hall and the disinclination of the staff to eat there. 230children out of the 326 on roll at Brook Street stayed for lunch;of these 58 brought lunches and the remainder ate meals providedby the city's school meal service. 73% of children received freeschool meals. With 50% of the children from ethnic minoritybackgrounds, predominantly South Asian, food consumption wasboth an ordinary and sensitive issue of family, gender and culturaldimensions. When Brook Street pupils started their schoolcareers, parents were asked to indicate their children's eating pref-erences; this was interpreted mainly in terms of whether childrendid or did not eat meat. Menus were displayed weekly in advanceinside the school entrance. This indicated up to three dailychoices of first and second course, and were devised by the CityCatering Service on the basis of nutritional content and balance,and cultural preference.

At Brook Street School, sharing food created social divisions interms of marking out cultural attributes. An early fieldnotedescribes the event:

Queuing into the dining hall. This can't be pleasant in the coldor rain. Children take plastic trays with a place for differentitems. One child offers me a knife and fork. The menu includescarrots, mash, fried chips, baked potatoes, cheese and onionpasty, beans, salad, cooked meat in a roll. Pudding - sconewith jam, cream yoghurt, and fruit. As on previous days, chipsare popular and so are scones. A girl joins me with three kindsof potato - chips, mash, jacket potatoes plus beans. The notionof a balanced diet goes awry when children select that they will



eat across the menu range. Packed lunches vary in quantity andquality, but quantity is the most obvious dimension along withcrisps in just about every box. Some children keep their lidsfirmly closed and are secretive about revealing the contents. Iobserved a child I had seen the previous week with bread andmargarine sandwiches and a dry biscuit. This week she is minusthe biscuit and has only water to wash it down with. Thecontradictions are extreme. Opposite her a boy with a plate fullof pasty, beans, chips, milk drink, and jam scones is reeling offthe list of games he professes to possess for his Nintendo.Discussion centres on ghosts, aliens, and Sonic the hedgehog.My friend with the margarine sandwiches looks on. Talking tome slows down their pace of eating as the children ask meabout my family. They are urged to eat up by the patrollingdinner lady.

This extract from my fieldnotes highlights several themes (dis-cussed also by Burgess and Morrison, 1993). First, children whohad school meals as opposed to those who brought packedlunches. Second, divisions between those who had a range of foodand those who did not. Third, the control element exercised bydinner ladies who worked within the dining hall. In following upmy observations in the dining hall, I found that the food childrenate was used as a means of organising seating and also the flowof children through the dining hall, and acted as a mechanism fordivision. This was then repeated in the dining hall as I observed:

Reception are lined up into those who eat meat and those whodo not. They take their trays. When they go to the hatch theirmeat/non-meat preferences are rechecked. Packed lunches sitseparately. The emphasis is upon eating everything up andspeedily to await the entrance of the older children.

In this respect commensality involved a vast range of behaviourwhich was played out in terms of school organisation, school rit-ual, social division, and social control. Lunchtimes were staggeredat the start allowing the youngest children to enter the dining hallbefore the majority. The sociability of eating resembled a con-veyor belt system, with queuing, consumption at speed, a mini-mum of talking, and emphasis on throughput, its salient features.Whilst most dinner ladies sat at the same tables as children, stew-ardship was exercised with minimal social discourse and included


Marlene Morrison

patrolling to maintain social and temporal order. (Children werenot permitted to save spaces for friends.) 'Eating up' was of para-mount importance. Queuing performed a control as well aslabelling function, and daily lists of children in receipt of freeschool meals, that were available to lunch-time supervisors, rein-forced a perceived need among adults to encourage children to'eat up'.

If a meal is more than its construction and includes social shar-ing, the latter had specific features at Brook Street. Because din-ner ladies viewed eating and conversation as oppositional, thelatter was discouraged, and persistent offenders isolated at smallertables. Among adults, the rationale for control was dominated bypractical and institutional concerns to feed large numbers in a rel-atively short time span. Dinner ladies also applied other kinds ofrationale. This included the view that children who ate 'freeschool meals' should eat up not only because it was 'their onlymeal' but also because 'other people's taxes' paid for them. Thosewhose parents paid were also chivvied to eat up; this was linkedboth to dinner ladies' interpretations of parental expectations,and a view that to waste food and money was wrong.

Issues of control extended to what was eaten as a school meal.The school meals service made central decisions about choice ofmeal which included attention to cultural preferences. In the din-ing hall, such intentions were thwarted and reinforced by counterstaff and dinner ladies, and by the children. Adherence to the'meat' and 'non-meat' queue was rigidly enforced. Blanket 'nomeat' assumptions about mainly Asian diets could be problematicfor children, as the following field note indicates:

Rayi (year 2) joins me at the table. Tells me dinner ladies are -points a finger to the head and twists finger. I looked quizzicalenough for him to continue. 'They keep telling me I'm "nomeat" but I do eat meat'. Anyway, today he has secured somechicken pie. Do you eat meat at home I ask? We establish thatmeat at home comes from a special shop.

Adults and children also thwarted attempts to control the nutri-tional balance of foods. The overriding adult view was that eatingsomething was preferable to not eating, and so children's foodtrays might contain a number of supplementary dishes ratherthan 'main' categories. Being labelled 'meat' could also restrictchoice. In theory, children could choose a vegetarian dish. In



practice, adults controlled choice by discouraging specific cate-gories if it was felt that the vegetarian allocation might be usedup. Parent Mrs Gupta, a Hindu bom in Bengal, ha^ a son atBrook Street School. She considered the eating arrangementsunsatisfactory and commented:

I don't think it [school meals] reaches the multinational peoplethat we have in this country. Even if it's an English meal itshould be prepared in such a way that it's edible for everyoneto eat. Because a lot of the time they'll have two meat dishes.He won't eat any meat unless its chicken, that's just the way heis. Just the way he's been brought up. So [at school] he ends upwith a little bit of salad which he doesn't like anyway. Andsometimes he'll say I've just taken the cheese out of the salad. . . Sometimes he will come home and say 'mummy all I hadwas mashed potato' and I'll say why? and he says 'oh therewere fish fingers but it was all finished and there were beefburg-ers and I don't eat beef. So you've got this sort of problemyou see, so I think the staff should be a lot more aware withinschools that a child is properly fed.

Neither were attempts to meet the cultural tastes and preferencesof ethnic minority groups always received positively. Conversa-tions with children highlighted views among the 'no meat' chil-dren that food at school - for example, curries or samosas -tasted 'different' to home-cooked food. This tended to restrictchoice even further usually to cheese, beans, and chips. Accordingto Mrs Gupta:

I mean sometimes in [Brook Street] school they have Indianmeals but obviously anything that's cooked in a vast quantityis never the same as what you've cooked at home so justbecause he's Indian he's given an Indian meal but that doesn'tmean that they like to eat an Indian meal because childrenwould rather stick to fish fingers, chips and beans rather thanhave an Indian meal.

Not all families saw the issue of cultural preference as restrictive.For Latabahen Datta, eldest daughter and spokesperson for theDatta family of Bengali Hindu background, school lunch pro-vided the opportunity for her younger brothers and sisters to eatdifferent kinds of food, including sandwiches, rather than havetwo 'heavy' meals a day.


Marlene Morrison

LD: Most people are starting to have sandwiches, like atlunchtime, even at home. Sort of people like my dad - oldpeople - it's a bit hard to give it up, they are used to having ittwice a day.MM: You mean the hot meal?LD: Yes, the curries, rice, dal.

From one perspective, being able to experiment with differentkinds of food outside the home enabled children to sample newtastes and new foods without disturbing, in any fundamental way,an important component of culture, namely home cooking andthe rituals of eating, which offered positive assertions about cul-tural identity. From another perspective, this might be seen torepresent an early phase in the slow erosion of food-linked cul-tural identities.

The myth of school food choice

The above data takes first steps, then, in challenging the myth ofschool consumption choices as 'free' or 'independent,' and illus-trates that commensality in school can and does show a variety offormations. This applies also to understandings about parentalchoice and influence. At Fieldgate School, family infiuences wererevealed more directly because children brought to school visibleaspects of their home life, albeit contained in a school lunch box.Such influences were reinforced and thwarted by a variety ofother factors, including peer group influence, but overall, parentalchoice was considered paramount. At Brook Street school, theparental impact upon commensality was indirect, both in terms ofcultural background and the ability (or not) to pay for a schoolmeal. But in the dining hall, commensality was directly influencedby school structures and actions; what was eaten and how foodwas eaten were used as mechanisms for social division and con-trol by institutional actors who placed their own interpretationsupon cultural eating patterns and the importance of 'eating up'.In this sense. Brook Street school fostered commensality of a kindwhich resembled that described by Goffman (1968) in 'total insti-tutions'; here, the school meal event in the dining hall exhibited akind of uniformity in which the eating autonomy of 'inmates' (iepupils) was both limited and resisted by children and adults.

Common features between the two schools were also discem-



able. In each school, food consumption was part of a pupil pro-cessing system through which children had to pass quickly and inan orderly way. Both schools were also caught in an educational'pincer movement' (Morrison forthcoming) in which curriculumand financial legislation had increasingly segregated formal'knowledge' about food from the everyday experiences of eating.What kinds of connections were made between commensality athome and school, and how did parents view the respective rolesof parents and teachers? Issues were explored with parents andpupils using interviews and diaries.

Eating at home

Previous studies of food and eating (Murcott, 1982, 1983; Charlesand Kerr, 1986) have explored the issue of food choice in thehome and examined its politico-economic context, including theextent to which for women, in particular, the term 'choice' isappropriate. Not only is the notion of a daily 'proper meal' cen-tral to their findings, but also the extent to which the preparationand consumption of that meal represents and reinforces the divi-sion of labour and power differentials within the family. AsMennell et al. (1992) point out:

Feeding children at the same time as feeding husbands compli-cates the picture [and] gets caught up in loving and pleasing[children] expressed in, among other things, acquiescence intheir demands for one kind of food rather than another. At thesame time, children must be tutored and their good manners ineating - as well as at others - be ensured. And as if this wasn'tenough, women are also expected to be the guardians of theirfamily's health, (p. 108)

My interest in the interrelations between eating at home andschool explored not only the significance of the main meal eventand the ways in which this was understood, but also the contribu-tion of daily school eating to family eating patterns.

At Fieldgate School, parents had mixed views about the end ofthe school meals' service. Drawing on their own varied memoriesof school dinners, they recognised that current arrangementsincreased their work load in relation to food preparation. Ofequal interest were interviewees' assertions that regardless of


Marlene Morrison

whether or not the school provided a meal, they would still see itas their responsibility to provide a 'proper' evening meal at home.As Mrs Baxter said:

It's an awful lot easier if the school provides a school meal . . .but even if they stayed for dinner or I brought them home forlunch, it would still be a snack. I wouldn't tend to give them amain meal, because that's what we have in the evening.

Few of the parents interviewed mentioned the nutritional value ofthe school meal. Those most strongly in favour were women whoworked twilight shifts and needed to make prior arrangementswith partners for the preparation of meals, and those who feltthat the practice of eating school meals would constitute a train-ing exercise in developing children's preferences for proper meals.Mrs Turner works at the local hospital:

Mrs T: Well, for three evenings I work, so their dad cooks forthem [Mrs T. bulk purchases from the local freezer shop toenable her husband to make a selection from the freezercabinet] . . . I preferred it when you had a cooked lunch atschool . . . It's just that I knew they were getting something atschool so that in the evening if we were rushed it didn't matterso much if they didn't have a cooked meal every night. Now,they've got to have a cooked meal at night.

Mrs Ame, on the other hand, stressed the training aspects ofschool meal provision:

Mrs A: When [Paul her son] goes out with friends for dinner. Isay 'what did you have Paul?' 'I had a roast dinner with vegeta-bles' and I say 'what did you do with your vegetables?' and hesays 'I ate them' and I say 'why don't you eat them here?' 'Idon't like them', but if he was in school eating a proper mealhe'd feel a bit under pressure. I think he'd eat them.

For other parents, the absence of school meals had removed anemergency source of eating which had been called upon discontin-uously, not primarily to supply nutritious food, but to solve thetime overload problem at the end of the school day when childrenengaged in a number of after-school activities - like music clubs,riding, sports, and ballet classes. For parents at Fieldgate, suchactivities were an important part of their children's social devel-



opment. They also added to what was a mainly female responsib-ility namely, to fit together the temporal jigsaw of multiple eatingand non-eating activities.

As outlined earlier, among the school population at BrookStreet were children of socio-economically disadvantaged families,whose needs have been most vigorously advocated by campaign-ers for the resumption of a 'properly resourced, nutritionallyadequate, dependable school meals' service' (Leather, 1994: 36).Data contained in earlier sections already highlights a number ofsocial and cultural issues that emerged in the interpretation ofthese objectives at the micro-level of school.

A 'proper' or 'real' meal

Previous research into familial food and eating patterns havestressed the importance of the main meal event of the day.Women's accounts (Murcott, 1982; Charles and Kerr, 1988) of'the meal' recognise its significance in symbolising the home andmembers' roles within it. Links are made between the 'propemess'and the 'realness' of the meal (Makela, 1991: 92). A 'proper' mealcomprises different ingredients and cooking methods combined inthe appropriate way. A 'real' meal requires more than the rightconstruction but also social sharing, which applies both formaland informal rules and carries symbolic and cultural significance.In reality, there is a good deal of overlap between interpretationsof 'real' and 'proper' meals; it is also the arena in which moralalann about the disintegration of the family is overlaid upon the'decline' of the meal.

In interviews, and without prompting, all respondents spokeabout the importance of providing a hot, plated meal whetherthis was expressed in terms of the 'main', 'proper', or 'real' meal.This eclipsed any discussion of healthy breakfasts or of schooleating, and during weekdays was focused upon evening eating.Mrs Gupta discussed the significance of the evening meal whichwas eaten together and from communal dishes on the table. Datafrom Mrs Gupta suggested that individualised eating was theantithesis of the Indian eating event. Her role in its constructionas nutritious and healthy were also important:

Basically it all depends on the individual cooks who actuallycook them. The dais, the lentils, or any sort of dal is very good

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because it contains protein and it hardly contains any fat andit's filling. Rice is filling as long as you boil it and don't fry it.Again you have chapatis or roti as they call the bread. As longas you don't put too much butter on them or too much gheeon them, it's purified butter, ghee, that's not too bad . . . Nowthe curries all depend on how you cook them, so it all dependson the amount of oil you put in, the amount of spices you putin. It's not just for flavouring, so different spices will cut outthe fat. Turmeric adds to the digestive system as well.

Different patterns of eating were discernible between weekdaysand the weekend. Whilst parents stressed the importance of tryingto eat 'as a family' there were a number of modifications whichtransformed daily eating patterns. Sharing food as a family wasthus presented as an 'ideal', with daily events requiring differentapproximations to the ideal. For Fieldgate parents, children eat-ing at a first sitting was a frequent adaptation (and of coursethere are many historical precedents for this, particularly amongthe privileged classes). This arose from a combination of factors:children's after school activities, the perceived late arrival home ofthe professional parent (usually the father), to prevent prolongedsnacking before the main meal event, and, as importantly, interms of women's peace-making obligations in the organisation ofthe home. Mrs Banks, with two children at Fieldgate explained:

In the week it (the evening meal) can be stressful because moreor less everyone's a bit tired and hungry whilst it's beingprepared . . . Anybody in the family, any of us will fly off thehandle, not just the children, so that's one reason I do try tofeed the children before my husband comes in . . . because he'llcome in tired and hungry and it's nice for him to eat with usall if everyone's behaving nicely. But we don't always have a100% chance of that and sometimes it's easier for all of us ifthe children have eaten before.

Mrs Baxter followed a similar strategy but was keen to point outthat she remained with her children whilst they were eating, sothat she could talk to them about the day's school events andanything else that they wanted to talk about. Some familiesapplied different strategies. Mr and Mrs Coleman described howthey 'swapped' roles in the evening. Mr Coleman felt that his wifewas better equipped to discuss school issues and homework prob-



lems than he was, so he prepared the evening meal whilst she satwith the children.

At the weekends, both children and parents described furtherchanges to the main meal event. Sunday eating was promoted asthe day in which eating came closest to the 'ideal' and Saturdaysas a day of flexible eating patterns. Mrs Banks describedSaturdays as 'pizza' day and Sundays as the 'family' meal day. Itwas also 'our sort of binge day, it's our naughty day, I try tokeep our sweet things for that day'. Mothers of Fieldgate childrenalso spoke of the ways in which they tried to develop, as well asaccommodate their children's changing eating preferences, and ofthe growing popularity both of eating out and of bringing homefood cooked elsewhere (the take away). This was seen in terms ofthe development of adult eating habits as well as a temporaryrelease from women's cooking duties. Weekends were also theperiod when pupils of divorced parents might join the non-resident parent in another household. Here, several children madethe point of noting in their food diaries variations in eatingarrangements rather than differences in food choices.

In such ways, eating was an essentially social affair in which thecontents were not the only definers of a proper meal and in whichparents (predominantly women) were shown as promoters of fam-ily harmony. The data offers support, albeit from the perspectiveof children's eating, to previous research into food as an importantpart of the social reproduction of the family. But, in other respects,the main meal event differs from Mintz's (1986: 201) definition ofthe meal as an event in which the same food must be eaten byeveryone at the same time and in the same order. His interpreta-tion of commensality is one in which it is impossible to exerciseeveryone's individual preference during a meal; the research datapresented here, however, suggests that commensality is becomingredefined to accommodate, when possible, individual preferencesincluding those of children. This involves eating bargains and com-promises but does not mean that commensality is in terminaldecline. Rather that families do not always share the same foodwhen they eat together; neither do they always eat together whenthey share the same food. The complex web of family support andmutual obligations is being redefined in relation to power and con-trol over food consumption and food choices; more enduring is thecentral role of women in its process and outcomes.

Among parents were those who were prepared to go to extraor-dinary lengths to fulfil their roles as providers of the family meal.

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With four children under the age of 11 and three at Fieldgateschool, the Pointer family live in a large, new detached house onthe outskirts of the school catchment. Mrs Pointer has a dress-making business which she runs from home, and her husband'sbusiness involves long working hours. She told me:

Well my children are very very faddy eaters. I don't know why.They were all breast fed and I made all their baby food,nothing out of jars.

On the evening of our interview Mrs Pointer had prepared fourdifferent meals in order to accommodate the food preferences ofher husband and children with the combination use of an oven,four hobs, and a micro-wave. Then they all sat at the tabletogether. She laughed as she described her daily 'nightmare':

It's a pain in the arse, but I don't know what I've done. I keepthinking where did I go wrong with these bloody kids.Someone said 'well, I wouldn't do it' and I said 'but they'dstarve' and I said 'they won't eat it'. What's the point ofserving up food just to throw it away? I don't think people canafford to do that.

As two of her children joined her for a cuddle on the sofa shecompared her family's eating experiences at the table with whatwas shown on television:

Quite often it's all about, because you've got the little oneplaying up, then it's 'I don't want this dinner' and she's the oneI'm working on to try and get her to eat veg. and what haveyou and 'I don't want that' or there's something on the tellyand 'I want to watch that' and I think 'oh for God's sake'.Sometimes there can be real battles but I've got four closetogether and they haven't all got to the real conversation stageyet. I mean, you do see it on the telly don't you, these verywell-to-do parents having really like civilised conservations withtheir children at the table and I sort of think 'well, where arewe?' [laughter] and quite often it's a bit more like CoronationStreet.



Women's relationship to food

A woman's relationship to food also presents further dilemmas(see also Mennell et al., 1992). As previous research indicates, notonly does food planning and provision take time, she is alsoacutely conscious of herself as female. There were several exam-ples in the data of women neglecting their own preferences inorder to pay greater attention to their social and nutritionalresponsibilities for family eating. Mrs Banks commented that:

I don't eat a proper meal until the evening and quite often I gomost of the day without eating anything at all which is totallywrong because I know I should eat something. My diet isprobably the poorest of the family and yet I'm the mostconcerned about it. It seems silly doesn't it. I seem to providefor them. I always make sure my husband and my children arealright. I don't often think about me.

Mrs Ame, who worked part-time in the evening when her hus-band 'took over' the children, hid chocolate biscuits in herwardrobe to ensure that after her weekly visit to the supermarketall the biscuits were not consumed by her two children at once; incontrast she extolled the value of fruit to the extent, she told me,that her children were prone to diarrhoea which arose from unre-stricted access to fruit. During the interview, concern that her twodaughters did not become overweight was expressed repeatedly,as indicated in the following extract:

MM: So you're stricter with the children?Mrs A: Yes, than I am with myselfMM: Is that just being motherly do you think orMrs A: I don't want them to be fat . . . I know I'm overweightand I think I'm not going to touch that Club but I do. I meanit's easier, I don't have time to do it [cook a meal] during theday so I don't do it . . . It's just the fact that junk's readyprepared isn't it.

As Charles and Kerr (1988) pointed out 'although eating can be apleasure for everyone, it is a pleasure that many women have dif-ficulty in allowing for themselves; indeed, eating often enducesguilt in the face of cultural definitions of what a wife should doand what a woman should look like' (Mennell et al., 1992: 109).


Marlene Morrison

Teaching and learning about eating

In interviews with parents and teachers, frequent reference wasmade to a sense of 'partnership' between home and school inteaching and learning about food and nutrition. This was usuallyexplained in terms of parents being responsible for laying thefoundations for sensible eating and teachers answering the whyquestions - by offering children more sophisticated forms ofknowledge and understanding than some parents felt able tooffer. A minority of parents at Fieldgate and Brook Street schoolsconsidered that there were far more important things for teachersto be doing than involving themselves in food-focused education('I mean a chocolate bar is a chocolate bar. There's no need toteach about it' - Mr Singh), but the majority of parents acknowl-edged the growing importance of health education. As MrsBaxter commented:

It should be the responsibility of both home and school, bothreally. I mean we need food to grow so that should be aneducational thing and also put into practice at home via theparents. Food needs to be taught properly.

From the perspective of several family members of pupils atBrook Street School, there was the view that teaching and learn-ing about food and eating should extend beyond an ethnocentricfocus, to multi-cultural patterns of both eating and food prepara-tion. Mrs Gupta looked to specialised education in specific areasfor both children and adults:

I think it's difificult because you've got to grow in societieswhere there are a lot of ethnic minorities, be it Asian or anyother national and most of the ethnic minorities are clusteredin certain parts of the country . . . you don't have to go toCheltenham to give a lecture on indian meals because it won'twork there because the majority are white . . . So it's actuallytargeting areas and actually getting the information to them. Imean, a lot of indian meals are good for your health and a lotare bad. It's about balancing the two.

In the data, references to the need for adult education (asacknowledged by Mrs Gupta) were rare, and were discussed onlywhen members of extended families referred to the occasional



problematic relationship between mothers' attempts to controlwhat their children ate alongside the wishes and actions of olderfamily members, frequent contact with whom, for example, mightresult in higher levels of sweet consumption than the parent mightotherwise consider appropriate. Here, the view was that commen-sality promoted multiple, and on occasion, conflicting as well ascohesive influences. In the interviews with parents of Fieldgatechildren, discussion of sweet consumption was more usuallydescribed as a fall from nutritional grace, as a form of reward forgood behaviour, and as a signifier of social belonging with otherpeer group members. Rationales were not infrequently discussedsimultaneously, and offer further support to Charles and Kerr's(1988) findings that sweet consumption contributed to family har-mony whilst engendering anxieties about children's healthy devel-opment.

Sununary and conclusions

Sharing food is thought to signify 'togetherness', 'an equivalenceamong a group that defines and reaffirms insiders as socially sim-ilar' (Mennell et al., 1992: 115). Sharing meals together, both interms of common understandings about their construction andthe social rules which govern behaviour, is thought to be the veryessence of sociality. The individualisation of our eating habits, itis claimed, means that both meals, and by implication, criticalaspects of our sociality are disappearing (Burnett, 1989). Inresponse, education has been advocated as a mechanism to halt atrend which is thought to threaten our health, our family life, andour sense of social cohesion. Set at the interface between homeand school, this paper has explored commensality at home andschool, and has considered the overlap between the two, usingdata which prioritise the views of parents and, to a lesser extentchildren, rather than the perspectives of educationalists, nutrition-ists, or teachers. Advocates of nutritional improvement in chil-dren's diets have stressed the importance of a school mealsservice. The discussion of eating provision in school highlights thecomplex issues underpinning this assertion, not only in terms ofnutritional impact but also in relation to the sociality of eatingand the cross-cutting effects of institutional practice, socio-economic advantage and disadvantage (discussed also by Dobsonet al., 1994), and cultural preference. Rarely in the data are there


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indications of solo eating, except in the case of those chargedwith most of its preparation, namely women, or when schools'personnel make eating in isolation a deliberate strategy. On thebasis of the evidence presented, the decline of the 'proper' sharedmeal is also contested. Instead, the data show commensality beingproduced and reproduced in different forms, in particular thosewhich prioritise children's evolving relationship with parents andtheir position within the family, and of parents with schools.Speculatively, it is possible to argue that through food we arebeginning to see the development of changing constructions ofchildhood.

'Inclusion implies exclusion' (Mennell et al., 1992: 117). As theschool-based data suggest, those who diverge from common stan-dards - as slow eaters, as vegetarians, as meat eaters, as socio-economically disadvantaged - risk becoming 'outsiders' becauseof what is construed as dietary non-conformity. Moreover, where'parental choice' has become a political buzzword, the accountsby women recorded in this paper confirm the significance of foodand eating in symbolising the essential, if slowly changing, respec-tive roles of men and women in the home. In such ways, packedlunches not only increase parental influence over eating at school,they also increase the workloads of women.

Above all, ethnographies of food and eating illustrate the waysin which the home/school interface is an important context forassessing the ambiguities and contradictions of food consumptionwhich are features of adult populations in general, and which, fora variety of reasons, we find replicated in the institutions of homeand school at a critical phase of the human life cycle.

Warwick University Received 22 January 1996Finally accepted 22 April 1996

Acknowledgements

This is an amended version of a paper first presented at the European Conferenceon Educational Research, 14-17 September 1995 at the University of Bath and inan abridged form as a keynote address at the Tenth Anniversary Meeting of theFinnish Society for Nutrition Research: Current Topics in Nutrition Research,held at the University of Helsinki, Finland, 24-35 November 1995. I wish tothank the Economic and Social Research Council for the funding of the Nation'sDiet Programme of which the project 'Teaching and Learning about Food andNutrition in Schools' (ESRC Grant No. L 209252006) forms part. My thanks alsoto project director Professor Robert Burgess and to parents, dinner ladies and



pupils of Brook Street and Fieldgate Primary Schools, whose contributions to thepaper are major, but who remain anonymous. Helpful comments from a refereeare also gratefully acknowledged.

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Sharing food at home and school: perspectives on commensality

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