From multidisciplinary perspectives, this volume explores the roles mothers play in the producing, purchasing, preparing and serving of food to their own families and to their communities in a variety of contexts. By examining cultural representations of the relationships between feeding and parenting in diverse media and situations, these contributions highlight the tensions in which mothers get entangled. They show mothers’ agency — or lack thereof — in negotiating the environmental, material, and economic reality of their feeding care work while upholding other ideals of taste, nutrition, health and fitness shaped by cultural norms. The contributors to Mothers and Food go beyond the normative discourses of health and nutrition experts and beyond the idealistic images that are part of marketing strategies. They explore what really drives mothers to maintain or change their family’s foodways, for better or for worse, paying a particular attention to how this shapes their maternal identity. Questioning the motto according to which “people are what they eat,” the chapters in this volume show that mothers cannot be categorized simply by how they feed themselves and their family.

After completing her PhD in the comparative study of religions at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), Florence Pasche Guignard joined the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto (Canada) as a postdoctoral researcher in 2012. Her work engages issues at the intersection of religion and gender, embodiment, ritual, media and material culture. Food and foodways also count among her research interests. Previously, she has published on topics such as religion and ornaments in devotional Hindu poetry, on religion and toys, games and dolls, and on religious rituals and representations on video sharing website. Her current research project, entitled “Natural Parenting in the Digital Age. At the Confluence of Mothering, Religion, Environmentalism and Technology” is supported through a fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her most recent and forthcoming publications focus on the intersection of religious discourses with motherhood, pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, with a particular focus on ritual and media.

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Tanya M. Cassidy is a Canadian sociologist who received her doctorate from the University of Chicago. Recently she has been awarded a prestigious EU Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship housed at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan). She continues to be an Affiliated Researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the Maynooth University in Ireland where she held her Cochrane Fellowship, as well as an adjunct Professor with the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Criminology at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Her doctoral research, from the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, USA, concerned a socio-cultural study of gender, family and alcohol in Ireland. Since then she has lectured in both Sociology and Anthropology in Ireland, England, and Canada. In 2005 she took a career break that has resulted in a new research trajectory that connects her long-standing theorisation of consumption and identity with a more urgent public policy agenda concerning premature birth and infant feeding.

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