Abstract
Amy Best’s previous books, Prom Night: Youth, Schools and Popular Culture (2000) and Fast Cars Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars (2005), are models of rich ethnographic research on culture. I admire Best’s ability to take fun and quirky topics and make them radiate with sociological significance. She has done it again with Fast Food Kids, a thorough investigation of how American students engage with, and find meaning in, fast food culture.
Best illustrates how American kids are caught within three interpenetrating and at times competing worlds of food: the home, the school cafeteria, and the fast food restaurant. Best does the hard work of connecting these social spaces, and readers learn a lot about what’s going on with American teenaged food culture through the process.
It might be interesting for international readers to learn how the American school cafeteria system works. American public schools have no system for administering meals to students. There is no nationwide or state food budget, apart from reimbursements from a National School Lunch Program. Food directors are largely autonomous in their procurement, planning and preparation. According to one cafeteria manager Best interviewed: ‘Every district in this country is different. They have different unique needs, different budgets’ (p. 62). Readers see how the cafeteria director’s purview is at the intersection of disparate and at times competing logics of (a) parents/parent–teacher associations, (b) student taste cultures, (c) nutrition experts and trainers, and (d) administrative and policy logics both proximate and distant (e.g. Board of Educations, National School Lunch Program).
Fast Food Kids relies upon a variety of evidence, triangulating upon its subject matter. Chapter 1, for example, includes data from 260 one-page collected narratives on how students see the relationship between food and their own family’s rituals and daily life, comprising some of the most rewarding sections of the book. Systematic observations in two public schools and a handful of commercial settings complete the rest of the project. Best, armed with French fries, sits in school cafeterias and McDonalds and not-so-simply watches the flows of interaction. Interviews with school administrators and cafeteria managers are deployed strategically, but Best’s most exemplary method might be in her ability to model ethnographic eavesdropping. Ethnography has a long history of voyeurism and Best’s ‘fly on the restaurant wall’ is a model for students to learn how to just sit down, blend in, observe, and listen. Amy Best is our Jane Goodall of youth culture.
The appendix explains why this kind of voyeurism was not a preference but a methodological necessity. Best had near-impossible limitations set for her by school administrations: only students could initiate interactions and conversations. In restaurants, she carried the directive as well, only engaging when engaged. Many interactions seem to be left to awkward exchanges of smiles, but there are moments when curious students ask what she writes in her notebook, and enlightening conversations developed.
By triangulating these sets of data, Best examines youth food culture in almost all of its symbolic and economic nuance – as a gift, as a moral object, as a contested good, as an aesthetic item – as it relates to US teens’ everyday lives and to the wider landscape of American education, families, and health policy. As in her earlier books, Fast Food Kids mimics a Dorothy Smith-style ‘institutional ethnography’. This is an approach that privileges the ‘actual site of social existence, where people live and breathe’, and identifies the ‘extra-local organizations of everyday experiences’ (p. 170). As such, Best asks the reader: How could we possibly develop health policies around school food systems without understanding the meanings, practices, and lived experiences of kids in their own social worlds?
Best mentions how fast food franchises position themselves around schools. In my mind, they are like predators circling prey, but Taco Bells and McDonalds offer more than salts and fats. (Although yes, teens need to eat a lot.) Fast Food Kids demonstrates the real need for students to have places for critical social activity. Evoking Ray Oldenburg, Best describes how these restaurants are third spaces. A clear sociological prescription emerges: the demand for auxiliary after-school programmes for students to craft groups and identities, and stage interactions on their own terms.
Overall, Best is an exceptional empathizer, and it is in every page of this book. My own more critical voice crept in often – ‘Ugh! Domino’s is disgusting!’ ‘Commercialization and market influence in school cafeterias is really, really bad, everybody!!’ – but Best maintains a balanced position, as when she admits her own fondness for French fries. Best avoids alarmism on a topic that often rings people’s bells.