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Food Inequality

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Definition

Studies of food and childhood offer critical insights into the unequal social systems that structure young people’s lives, with significant implications for their physical, emotional, and mental well-being. Food is at once deeply personal and fundamentally social: a reservoir of individual tastes, memories, and identities, and enmeshed in markets, institutions, and historically constituted relations of power. Children’s food lives take shape in a landscape of stark inequalities, including economic injustice, structural racism, and gendered care responsibilities and body pressures. These systemic issues deeply impact young people’s well-being yet are seldom acknowledged in dominant discourses of healthy eating that emphasize individual choice. Connected to understandings of self and culture, food is also a powerful resource in the everyday work of negotiating identities and forging connections through interactions with others.

Introduction

That food is vital to a child’s...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University-Camden, Camden, NJ, USA

    Kate Cairns

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  1. Kate Cairns
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Correspondence to Kate Cairns .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Counseling & Educational Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Jessica Nina Lester

  2. The Greenwood Institute, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Dr. Michelle O'Reilly

Section Editor information

  1. Teacher Education & Administration, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

    Tran Templeton

  2. Rhode Island College, Providence, RI, USA

    Victoria Restler

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Cairns, K. (2021). Food Inequality. In: Lester, J.N., O'Reilly, M. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Critical Perspectives on Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12852-4_22-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12852-4_22-1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-12852-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-12852-4

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