Childhood memories of food and eating in lower-income families in the United States: a qualitative study

When participants were asked about food memories in childhood, for example about their favorite foods or about the influence their grandparents had on their childhood diets, they often gave responses that went far beyond food and eating habits. Barbara, grandmother of 5-year-old Connor, described her relatives and family traditions when she spoke about food. “My father was always very warm and loving”, she said, adding that she “did have a very loving family unit, and family was really important. We went to church every Sunday, a lot of family gatherings, and about food too”. The interviewer went on to ask whether she remembered what she used to eat and drink, to which she said: “Oh, of course! We had specific things each holiday we had. Thanksgiving was the normal Thanksgiving, but you know like Christmas we’d have prime rib, and on Sundays my dad would cook breakfast, birthday cakes.” Thus, Barbara connected food with familial relationships and with family practices rooted in United States and Christian traditions, and she also explained how she was disciplined into eating vegetables even if she did not like them. Russell, grandfather of 5-year-old Ethan, expressed similar memories about the educating role that food played in his childhood.

As a youngster, we lived close enough to school, so for lunch we came home from school. My mother would have soup, or peanut butter sandwich, or grilled cheese. She’d have lunch waiting for us when we got home from school. Then usually in the afternoon, I’d come home hungry and have a couple bowls of cereal. At 5:30 or 6 dinner was always a family sit down. My dad would be home and we would always sit down as a family.

[ … ]

My mom cooked fairly well. We had steak, that was kind of a big thing if we had steak. If you weren’t home on time, if everyone finished their meal … there wasn’t any guarantee that your steak wasn’t already going to be gone. So it was kind of a punishment to not get home when you’re supposed to.

The quotes suggest the meal as a standard family gathering as well as an arena for discipline. Neither Barbara nor Russell described the disciplinary aspect of the meal as unfair, however, but as a way of bringing up children within a cohesive family unit. Similarly, Linda, grandmother of 3-year-old Edgar, mentioned that, as a child, she “didn’t like animal meat”, except “Kentucky Fried Chicken”. She further explained there was a rule in her childhood home “that you had to eat whatever was on your plate”, leading to potential difficulties when meat was served. However, Linda’s mother gave her small pieces of meat so that Linda “didn’t get into trouble with [her] dad”. In Linda’s story, meals were venues for discipline, but also revealed her mother’s flexible and caring feeding.

Several participants considered the family an important unit for fostering healthy dietary habits. In a few cases, perhaps counterintuitively, this was expressed as a byproduct of poverty. Many participants described growing up in poor farming families and having no choice but to eat fresh foods from their gardens. Patty, grandmother of 4-year old Kyra, came from a family of poor migrant farmers and said she ate healthily as a child “because we couldn’t afford the other food in the stores”. Therefore, Patty’s family “ate a lot of mashed potatoes, pinto beans … fried potatoes, biscuits and gravy. And then when we did fruit and stuff, we would eat the fruit, and my mom would can it”. While Patty talked at length about the hardships of poverty and how the family was hurt by abusive behavior and addiction, food still seemed to elicit good memories of healthy familial practices within an otherwise difficult and distressing home life.

Another side of food and care was exemplified in the story of Eve, mother of 5-year-old Kelvin. On the one hand, Eve recalled “really well balanced meals that we ate together”, but, on the other hand, she also remembered how

we always had junk food at home so it was never like I had to go out and go get it or anything like that, or sneak or anything. Just if I wanted it, it was there and if I didn’t it wasn’t ever an issue.

Eve had positive memories of food in her childhood home. Meals were “well balanced” and eaten within the family unit, but there was also individual access to treats, which she seemed to consider a good thing. The addition about her never having to “sneak or anything” suggests a notion of “junk food” consumption as an otherwise normatively regulated vice, although this was not the case in her family. This exemplifies that meaningful food memories of familial care and nurturance can center both on food considered healthy as well as on “junk food” and the freedom to snack individually.

As hinted in some of the quotes above, participants described values and proper behavior – for example, what to eat or how to act – as disciplinary benefits of shared family meals. For example, Jane, mother of 5-year-old Kate, said that her family “always sit[s] down … and eat[s] dinner”. “[T]hat’s the best time to sit and talk too. It’s social”, she said, relating this contemporary routine to “how I was raised and that’s how the kids are going to be”. Her partner Sam (Kate’s father) shared the same sentiment. When asked about similarities between how he raised his daughter compared to how he was raised, he mentioned “the way, especially at mealtime, the value of the family”. He then continued:

Just carrying on the morals and the values instead of just creating your own. Both Jane and I have carried those same morals and values ‘cause we were both raised with very good morals and values, at least I think, otherwise we’d both be out killing and robbing.

Such conceptualizations of food and shared meals as devices for intergenerational connection were common, although expressed in varied ways. Jane mentioned how, as a child, she loved McDonald’s meals, especially chicken nuggets, a food that seemed central to her relationship with her father.

Chicken McNuggets … was a special thing and that’s how [my father] won my heart umm, yeah I don’t remember a whole bunch. I know that like everything was out of a box growing up. It’s like, it was never homemade. I just remember like, when I was learning how to cook everything like, Hamburger Helper, out of a box.

While food and mealtimes connected to positive memories of Jane’s family upbringing, hers was not a romanticized picture of particularly healthy food or idealized home cooking: the food shared was prepackaged and heavily processed, and Jane’s parents transmitted the knowledge of cooking “out of a box”. Similar to Eve’s story, described under the previous subthemes, Jane’s story exemplifies a complex association between care and feeding, in which food that might be labelled unhealthy is nonetheless associated with family cohesion.

Even when food memories were associated with impoverished or otherwise difficult life conditions, shared meals were often remembered positively. When Molly, grandmother of 5-year-old Kelly, spoke about her childhood memories of eating, these were imbued with disorder and idiosyncrasy, which she attributed to her parents’ relationship breakdown and her mother’s chronic illness. As an adult, despite living through much economic hardship, Molly valued the ordered family meals she did not have as a child. She had an ambivalent relationship to her being employed, since this meant a better financial situation but less time to cook and eat as a family. “[W]e were very poor but we did have decent food”, she said, adding that people around her might have thought otherwise since her family’s diet was low on meat and high in vegetables, something that “now I think it would be considered healthier”. She also mentioned having a

big dining room with a big table and all my kids sat at it together and I think things were okay then. It changed when I went to work, but I try to do that with my youngest one now and with Kelly when she’s there, because I would like her to have those memories.

The quote suggests a valuation of the shared family meal around a table, although this had become more and more problematic as Molly “worked [her] way up to the [manager’s] position which paid a lot more but took a lot more time”. And since this ideal was difficult to fulfil throughout her eldest children’s childhood, she now wanted to transmit this to her youngest child and her granddaughter, “because I would like her to have those memories”. As such, while Molly described food and meals as closely connected to ideals of family cohesion, these ideals had to be weighed against economic necessity. Her story therefore captured a gap between values and the ability to enact them, implicitly challenging family mealtime “prescriptions” whilst endorsing the assumptions that underlie them.

Given food’s close association with caregiving and well-functioning families, it is no surprise that memories of food and eating also capture the opposite. One example is Diane, step-grandmother of 3-year-old Seth, for whom the lack of mealtime sociality in childhood encapsulated a general lack of parental involvement. She said:

My dad worked all the time at the factory. … He would get off really early, at 3. But he would sit home and read the newspaper. And my mom, she wasn’t involved either. They were very much the, I guess just the family where the kids raise themselves. You sit down at the table and eat together but my brothers and sisters and I, we all talk about it.

When Diane said “it”, she referred to racial tensions at her school that neither she nor her siblings talked about with their parents. “I would drink nothing before I go to school”, she explained “[s]o that way I wouldn’t go to the bathroom. I wouldn’t get beat up.” But she kept it to herself. She continued, describing how “[m]y parents never knew anything going on with our school … they just kind of ran the house. My dad would work and read the newspaper, would sit and eat dinner together and go to bed.” Diane’s father’s working schedule and the absence of any meaningful interaction at the table exemplified lacking parental involvement and neglect toward his children’s life conditions. This seems to have affected Diane’s own parenting, with an imperative to be more involved and talk to her children: “I talk to my kids. My younger daughter talks to me a lot about what’s going on.”

In the previous section, we related Molly’s story of how family meals declined when economic need drove her to work more hours outside the home. David, Molly’s son, told the story from his perspective, detailing negative experiences at which Molly hinted. “So there was less family time and stuff like that”, he began, “and as far as eating habits, I think my mom had less time and she had a lot of kids at the time.” When his mother worked, David stayed at home with her partner at the time (not his father), who, according to Molly, had a drinking problem. “[H]e was a horrible influence as a parent”, David said:

I took nothing from him that was worth anything, I don’t think. But as far as eating habits, there was more canned vegetables, Hamburger Helper and more store-bought, quick prepared foods that didn’t provide as good as nutrients and is not as healthy. I try to live a much better lifestyle now that I have more choices.

The “canned vegetables, Hamburger Helper and more store-bought, quick prepared foods” illustrated a lack of parenting abilities and neglectful behavior, materialized through ultra-processed foods. David said he learned nothing from his stepfather in terms of food, and argued that the neglectful feeding he experienced inspired him to do the opposite as an adult.

Another example of low-quality diets being associated with neglectful parenting appeared in Bell’s story. Bell, 3-year-old Seth’s mother, grew up in a poor family with parents who emigrated from East Asia. When asked about what she used to eat, she recalled her childhood hardships:

We were really poor. So my parents weren’t around a lot. So I ate a lot of junk food. I don’t have any directions as far as food goes. What I should eat, what I shouldn’t eat. It was just like whatever was around the house or in the neighborhood. … I would go get junk food every day. When we sit down together for dinner together, but, aside from that, my mom didn’t really … she would cook and like “eat it or not”. So we didn’t really have structure. So we are just like really, really skinny. And people kind of make fun of me being so skinny. So that wasn’t cool. But yeah my eating habits were terrible and didn’t have much supervision because my parents weren’t around much.

In the previous section, we showed how “junk food” and snacks could be associated with caring relationships, but Bell’s story starkly contrasted with this. Elsewhere in her interview, Bell talked about how she was “[a]lways underweight” and “like anemic when [she] was younger”. Her story included more examples of neglect, often connected to eating and health and primarily focused on Bell and her sister, but also related to her parents’ self-care, or lack thereof. Notably, while other participants described being told to “clean their plates” as a form of nurturing discipline, Bell’s mother’s ambivalent “eat it or not” attitude exemplified how the family “didn’t really have structure”. However, Bell was not entirely judgmental toward her parents. She thought her parents were not “completely up there sometimes”, but connected this to their life conditions in the United States, the crisis of migration, and their background as poor farmers in their country of origin. This ambivalence – on the one hand, feeling that one’s parents neglected both themselves and their children, yet, on the other hand, understanding the circumstances that underlay their neglect – differentiated Bell from some other participants with stories of neglectful behavior.

While some participants remembered food-related discipline positively, other participants associated food-related discipline with adversity. These participants recollected events when food was rigidly restricted or became an instrument of dominance, such that food-related discipline compromised children’s well-being. The rigid restriction of food and eating, as opposed to a healthy setting of boundaries around food, was a form of parental control that participants described as oppressive and damaging. Barbara, who, in the previous theme, described a “loving family unit”, also talked about her mother having a disciplining side to her views on food, insisting on the children eating vegetables at every meal and not leaving the table until the food was eaten. Barbara did not characterize these rules as negative, but, later in the interview, recollected a more troubling form of discipline:

My mother was really concerned about weight and appearance. … She put me on a diet when I was 11, and I look at pictures, and I’m like, I always had a little belly. But it’s like, it was like a real diet. I remember going to the movie theater, and instead she would send me with a hardboiled egg. And I remember canned asparagus; it was like a low carbohydrate diet I think. And her telling me … I must have been six years old, she said, “Oh if only you could wear those cute clothes”. … That is one of the reasons I swore I would never, never say anything about my children’s weight. I would try and control it at home, but not say anything, because it has impacted me my whole life.¹

Although Barbara felt that some food discipline was worth transmitting, putting a child on a restrictive diet was out of the question. In another example, Jackie, mother of 5-year-old Ethan, described similar memories, which she said resulted in an unhealthy relationship with food and her body, leading to an eating disorder. She said her father “always said stuff” about her weight:

He was the commenter. My mom told him I was getting boobs when I was 10, and he was like “Oh, that’s just fat.” Stuff like that, cause he’s really judgmental, …

[ … ]

… because I was a girl, he was really judgmental about [my body]. So he’s been commenting about my weight constantly. My whole life.

[ … ]

As long as I can remember. I feel like he’s the one who gave me all my body image issues. Seriously.²

Jackie’s father’s rigid restriction of her eating was expressed through body-focused comments. This left long-lasting marks (“I feel like he’s the one who gave me all my body image issues”), and Jackie thought that if her brother had been “chubby” instead of her, “it wouldn’t matter. But because I was a girl, he was really judgmental about it.” Jackie’s mother Thelma (Ethan’s grandmother) further illuminated Jackie’s memories. She described her husband’s character as “strong [and] stoic” and talked about his “definite ideas” about meals, saying he is “more ritualized about food” and “has more rules around food, most of it is discipline kinds of rules”. She also confirmed the remarks about Jackie’s body and reaffirmed her view of him as particularly disciplinarian: “I remember him saying ‘Does she really need a bra, or is that just fat’ … He’s not going to preach to you about weight, he’s going to get you out and run you on the track”.

Another form of rigid dietary restriction, driven by neglect and abuse, appeared in the story of Wayne, Seth’s father, whose food memories were embedded in family conflicts and alcoholism. His parents Sally and Lance, who were both interviewed, separated when Wayne was 2 years old, and he said that Lance was verbally abusive both to him and to his mother. Wayne was always hungry when staying at his father’s house, he said, “because we’d get two bucks for school lunch and school lunch was never enough”. Furthermore, his stepfather Doug (also interviewed) used to “talk a lot about how I ate when I was younger. It’s funny, I never turned into a fat kid. I have never been an emotional eater. But my stepdad gave me a really hard time about how I ate.” Wayne’s interview represents a complex case in which food memories were interwoven with memories of hunger, addiction, conflict, and poverty, upending over-generalized notions of how food brings families together to the benefit of children’s health and well-being.