Abstract
“Can’t a french fry just be a french fry?” asks a student in Amy Best’s new book Fast-food Kids: French Fries, Lunch Lines, and Social Ties (p. 163). While admittedly a tasty staple for many, Best shows how fries in school cafeterias and at home are about more than biological dispositions. Liking french fries is related to how food and food spaces are marketed, how the family meal has changed, how youth navigate social relationships through food, and how institutional policies reproduce or challenge the status quo. In Fast-food Kids, Best puts the intertwined worlds of youth and food under a social lens, where positionality and meanings shape how youth relate to food symbolically and materially. Through extensive fieldwork and analysis, Best demonstrates how this occurs in both the public and private sphere; examining specific economic, cultural, and political forces that continue to shape the foodscape and what young people eat.
For Fast-food Kids, Best spends time in school cafeterias and fast-food restaurants in close proximity to public high schools. The school-based observations, interviews, and focus groups occurred at two urban public high schools—both with varying levels of free and reduced lunch, nonwhite students, and academic performance. Written narratives about family food memories also help Best depict the practical and symbolic dimensions of young people’s food worlds. The author provides a detailed appendix about the ethnographic methods used over the course of the research. Best also regularly reflects upon her own positionality throughout the book. Exploring, for example, the changing role that food and cooking have played in her life as a result of the research.
The book centers around three interlinked tensions. First, food as a private good—part of home life and more intimate, durable relationships—and food as a public good—a piece of a public provisioning system of care. Second, food as gift in opposition to food as commodity. Third, food as an object of play—playing a central role in the cultural worlds, identity, and commercial lives of youth—and food as an object of care in which connections between home and social networks are tied to schools.
Chapter 1 begins with examining changes in modern families as it relates to food provisioning, particularly the tension between food as gift exchange and expression of care between parents and children, on one hand, and the increasingly commodified social relations, on the other. While there is a collective “longing” for home-based food, the way this plays out in changing public and private spheres reflects the increasingly blurred line between home and the market. For example, eating McDonalds can be an expression of care.
Chapters 2–4 focus on the food lives of students at schools, especially how social inequities organize student relationships to cafeterias and food. In Chapter 2, Best follows a school food director, Brenda, as she pragmatically works to improve the cafeteria experience. While remaining aware of the broader political landscape of food, Brenda conducted focus groups and followed other evidence-based research to create healthier and more desirable menus for students. For instance, in response to students desiring more ethnic foods, baked yucca was placed on the menu to help newly arriving South American immigrants feel a sense of belonging. Chapter 3 calls attention to how food forges social relationships—a process examined through observing the relationships between spatial and sociocultural characteristics of school cafeterias. Social boundaries, and the performances therein, are reproduced in how students organize and interact in cafeterias. Who brought lunch and who bought lunch often highlight these boundaries. Chapter 4 moves the analysis to the other, comparatively more privileged high school, paying particular attention to how social class patterns the food provisioning system.
For the work described in Chapter 5, Best observed commercial food settings, such as McDonalds and Chipotle, that youth go to after school. Youth perform lyrical raps in the drive-through and upload these to YouTube, further highlighting Best’s point about the relationship between play and food. Drawing on Erving Goffman, as Best does repeatedly throughout the book, the “situation” found after school at fast-food restaurants is arguably more important to shaping eating behaviors than dispositions toward particular foods. In other words, it is argued that, unlike school cafeterias, the more spontaneous situations created at McDonalds keeps students coming back and not growing tired of the menu. In fact, going to McDonalds and Chipotle is less about the menu and more about “heightened intersubjectivity.”
One thing that really stands out about Fast-food Kids is the depth of fieldwork and analysis that Best has tied together. While much of the food literature can be focused upon macroscopic slices of a foodscape—political economic analysis, for instance—Best weaves together policy and economic patterns with the lived, often symbolic experience of youth in fast-food restaurants, cafeterias, and kitchens. Recognizing that “food change is the means, not the end” (p. 167) to address food system disparities, Best emphasizes potential in the dialog and action food work can spur. With broad coalitions, schools can enact a critical food literacy rather than nutritional education. Critical food literacy would engage not only with health and diet but sustainability, food production, the culture(s) of food, well-being, community empowerment, and public space.
Future studies could be improved by also considering rural settings and possibly younger, elementary school populations. For instance, how might the symbolic role of food be different for youth who are more spatially and socially proximate to agriculture? Best acknowledges such limitations and the fruitful potential such journeys may find.
In sum, Best helps us see that young people’s relationship to food is the result of systems of meaning and values, affective ties, symbolic boundaries, status rituals, and play. I thoroughly enjoyed Fast-food Kids and would recommend it to others searching for exemplarily cultural approaches to understanding food worlds. The book would also be useful for qualitative methods classes and social science courses related to food, agriculture, youth, and/or community.