ABSTRACT
France and the United States began to evince new concerns about fat and weight, and a new penchant for dieting, in the nineteenth century. Despite many differences in specific settings, the French seemed to agree that childhood eating required serious discipline. In the case of children and food, the United States is an exception, at least compared with a major European counterpart, but in this case a largely undesirable one, as greater indulgence has led and continues to lead to measurably less salutary weight patterns at all stages of life. The particular moral quality of the American approach to weight control meshed uneasily with beliefs about children. For a number of reasons, American cultural values facilitated weight problems among many children in the twentieth century, once affluence and sedentary school roles altered the physical demands placed on childhood. The rootedness of the cultural construction of children's eating has significant implications, beyond the illustration of the power of values and complexities.
