ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how family food practices operate pedagogically in relation to race and gender. Family food practices entail the cultural transmission of who does what in the kitchen, what foods mean, how power operates, how gender, class and ethnicity is done, what being a child means, and how to be a certain kind of family. It illustrates the idea of racial practices but in contrast to Slocum's concern with strangers in the public sphere of food markets and examines family members in the private sphere of the kitchen, with a particular focus on gender. Rachel Slocum's research on racial practices in food markets is one concrete way to analyse how food and bodies produce race in situ, and provide concepts which work well in tandem with Berliner's idea of cultural transmission. The chapter explains that food practices in families work pedagogically in dynamic and heterogeneous ways.