ABSTRACT
In order to analyse the way in which food provision is shaped by social identities including gender, social class, ethnicity and migration, this chapter examines the narratives of migrant parents interviewed as part of a broader study of parents preparing lunchboxes for their children. We focus on three cases; Jasmeen, originally from India, who gets up at 5am to prepare home-made chapatis for her daughter’s lunchbox, Danijela a mother from Croatia who hates lunchboxes and sees them as ‘very English’ but continues to prepare them, and Luiz, a middle-class father originally from Latin America whose involvement in preparing nutritious lunchboxes is symbolically crucial to his claim as a ‘good father’ within his household. By exploring these accounts, we can see how the biographies of family members intersect with cultural and structural influences such as gender, social class, ethnicity and migration, to influence the food going into children’s lunchboxes.
