University students’ discourse about food practices at home in the UK: children’s accounts.

This paper investigates university students’ discourse about their food practices at home to address two technical issues in the existing literature about family and food. First, it provides adult children’s accounts about family food practices, which have not received much scholarly attention in comparison with women’s accounts. In the process, the paper attempts to address a problem in the existing studies about family food, which too often treat what is reported by respondents as what actually happens. It is based on an analysis of twenty-nine semi-structured interviews conducted with university students. Two types of images constructed in students’ discourse are noted: the institutional and individual image. The institutional images of students’ families were highlighted while their individual images were rarely constructed in students’ discourse about their family food practices. This paper suggests that children can provide a different perspective to women’s accounts about family food practices and the interaction between the researched and that the researcher has been overlooked in the current studies about family food practices.