Children’s Food Consumption: Digital Age Eating Practices

This book explores the meanings embedded in children’s everyday food consumption practices. It highlights how materiality, particularly the television and its contents, become an inseparable part of everyday eating practices, while also focusing on the television as an agent of cultural change when intermixed with family mealtimes. Using a multiple-methods approach, the meanings embedded in children's food consumption practices are revealed. In addition to these practices, the impact on wider social institutions traditionally designed to control and regulate children’s conduct is revealed. The primary objective of this book is to reveal the intersection of digital materiality with mealtime rituals. Revealing a transfer of mealtime practices from the formal environment into the informal environment, and vice versa, the book shows how mealtime rituals are altered and changed in form when mediated by the television, but not ultimately abandoned. This contributes to an understanding of broader issues in society, surrounding consumption of technologies (e.g. iPods, iPads, smart phones, and laptops) that encroach on everyday life and transform the home, workplace and communities.