Abstract
For readers who enjoyed Amy Best’s previous books on prom night and teen car culture, Fast-Food Kids: French Fries, Lunch Lines, and Social Ties will not disappoint. Diving into the fraught world of youth food consumption, Best expertly conveys the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings of young people’s everyday food lives. The book goes beyond individualistic accounts of the young eater to make a compelling case that “youth food consumption is less a discrete activity . . . and instead a sphere of meaning populated by a range of institutional actors, with youth among them” (p. 171).
This is a refreshing approach at a time when young people’s eating practices are the focus of considerable hype, met with either condemnation or praise. By contrast, Fast-Food Kids is neither judgmental nor celebratory. Instead, the book explores how young people (and the adults around them) negotiate overlapping institutional arrangements, including public education, familial care-work, and a powerful corporate foodscape. This layered story elides narrow constructions of “good” and “bad” characters. Readers encounter complex, sympathetic portrayals of people doing the best they can given particular constraints, such as the cafeteria director who mimics strategies from corporate marketers in an effort to make nutritious offerings more appealing to students. That Best’s clear commitment to empathic understanding is matched with institutional and structural critique is one of the book’s core strengths.
While Best leads readers deep into the interactional dynamics of the school cafeteria and post-school fast-food rush, this attention to everyday ritual does not prevent her from addressing big-picture issues like capitalism and inequality. The book develops a powerful political-economic critique of the corporate foodscape and raises pressing questions about responsibility for care-work in late capitalism. Is food a private good to be accessed through individual consumption and domestic food provision or a public good to be equitably distributed by state institutions like public schools? How can an understanding of youths’ food practices, relationships, and identities help us answer these questions? Best argues that in the current context, where youths’ eating practices have come under scrutiny, “it is important that we understand the social meaning young people themselves assign to food, and the cultural systems of value that organize those meanings” (p. 7).
According to Best, young people value food not (only) as a source of fuel or flavor, but as a “form of play that is central to the public display of youth culture and youth identity” (p. 2). Her ethnographic analysis uncovers practices of play in young people’s collective food experiences, from the rituals of exchange in the school cafeteria to the boisterous flow of bodies and french fries across booths in McDonald’s. Best also demonstrates how youth “play” with food categories generated within adult, middle-class worlds of morality. Junk food is not only delicious, but a resource for enacting a youth identity that is distanced from adult concerns about nutrition and the norms of a “proper” meal. Best reconstructs the meaning of food from young people’s perspectives, rather than putting youths’ food practices under the often-judgmental lens of an adult-managed microscope.
Drawing on several years of research in urban and suburban contexts in the Washington, D.C., area, the book incorporates a range of qualitative methods and data sources. A chapter on the family meal uses college students’ written family food memories to examine food’s continued significance for ideals of maternal care-work and familial intimacy. Interviews with school administrators and cafeteria directors serve as the main source of data for a chapter on the challenges of public food provisioning at a time when commercial markets exert considerable power in school lunch politics and in a broader context in which public services are increasingly privatized.
My favorite chapters were those that led readers deep into the everyday social worlds of youth, capturing food’s affective significance and embedding eating practices within the relations of inequality young people negotiate daily. We come to see how race and gender powerfully structure cafeteria dynamics, from the racialized geography of student seating to heteronormative rituals of food sharing, in which girls give valued items to boys in an expression of affection and feminine selflessness. Classed dimensions are explored in a separate chapter that examines how administrators and parents in an affluent school claim social status through distinction practices surrounding health and taste. Finally, a chapter on fast food argues for a shift in focus from the teen consumer to a Goffmanian analysis of the situation; through this lens, we come to see commercial food venues as “youth cultural scenes” that offer one of the few public settings in which young people can effectively claim space of their own.
Given the rich ethnographic analysis, readers may be surprised to learn that Best’s access to young participants was highly constrained by the institutional review board process. In a methods appendix, she speaks candidly about the increasing barriers faced by youth researchers and considers the implications of these restrictions for scholarship. Best was forbidden from initiating conversations with youth during field observations, and this resulted in adults featuring more centrally in the project than she’d planned. Beyond issues of access, the methods appendix shares useful insights on the practice of qualitative research, ranging from practical strategies for note-taking to relational efforts to preserve participants’ dignity, as when Best pretended not to notice a boy who was dining alone in the cafeteria. Best also reflects on how her position as a youth researcher has shifted with age. This appendix offers a wonderful resource for teachers and students of qualitative research, particularly those seeking to conduct reflexive, respectful research with young people.
While I am clearly a fan of this book, a few limitations are worth noting. Although the book discusses issues of income inequality and food insecurity, experiences of poverty and scarcity are rarely visible in the ethnographic and interview accounts at the heart of the analysis. Best describes how she was able to observe which students were eligible for free or reduced lunch as they swiped their meal cards in the cafeteria, but we do not hear from these youth directly. Similarly, in the chapter on the family meal, the tensions within students’ family food memories largely center on a lack of time or emotional connection arising from hectic work schedules rather than a lack of money or the challenge of stretching limited groceries through the end of the month.
Another area that receives less attention is the growing emphasis on engaging youth in food production, as seen in initiatives ranging from school gardens to full-blown urban farms, as well as broader movements for food justice. We learn in the appendix that Best did conduct observations in farm-to-school programs, but this research does not appear in the book. Finally, it’s worth noting that the book’s attention to the complexities of youths’ food lives does not always yield clear takeaways for practitioners. Those seeking direction within the thorny debates surrounding youth, food, health, and social justice will not find easy answers in this book. Depending on the audience, this complexity could be seen as a strength or limitation of the volume.
In the concluding chapter, Best describes how the years she spent conducting this research turned her into a more vocal advocate for school nutrition and food justice. She makes a forceful argument for conceiving of care as a public responsibility and for a curriculum of critical food literacy that interrogates systemic issues, rather than championing individual responsibility. Fast-Food Kids makes an analytically compelling and politically astute contribution to the charged discourse surrounding youth and food—one that takes seriously the complexity of young people’s social worlds and the meanings forged within them and uses this understanding to interrogate the institutions and injustices of late capitalism.