ABSTRACT
Food poverty has become a major moral and social concern in Britain. However, children’s perspectives of food poverty are largely absent from public discourse whilst research addressing their experiences often abstracts them from their family circumstances. Addressing this gap, the chapter takes a case approach to analysing children’s food practices in low-income families. Focusing on intra-household resource distribution, it analyses food shortage in terms of ‘parental sacrifice’ and child hunger before describing four cases in depth: two in which the mother’s sacrifice protected children from the experience of food poverty and two in which it did not. The chapter discusses the affordances and limitations of the methodological strategy adopted and the implications of the findings for policies that seek to address food poverty.
