ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some of the many intersecting identities children and young people experience and express through food. Drawing upon children’s and young people’s perspectives, as well as those of adults, it examines ways that food in children and young people’s lives articulates identities relating to family, culture, and class, moral and ethical views of the world, as well as generation and gender. Food identities can develop both at home and beyond, in peer groups, at school and in the wider world. At home, parents and other family members help transmit food and taste expectations, by training taste-buds in early life and shaping the foods and flavours that become considered acceptable or delicious, or indeed those that are disliked or considered disgusting. The importance of food from their country of origin in migrant children’s identity construction is further illuminated in a study of Mexican migrants to the United States.
