Defining, Managing, and Dictating Children’s Bodies: Discourses of “Good” Food and the Politics of “Growing”

In the discourse regarding fat bodies and the construction of “obesity” and “overweight” signifiers, Deborah Lupton suggests that the increased focus on children’s bodies in relation to their size functions as an attempt to “regulate and manage” (42) children generally. In particular, the rhetoric of such governmental interventions as mandatory educational curricula and school lunch programs implemented in elementary and junior high schools has shifted from a focus on fitness and “healthy” food options to a focus on weight control (42). This shift is also apparent in national media outlets such as the Globe and Mail, which published in 2012 an extensive, three-part series on “children’s fitness and education,” beginning with a discussion of “the war on child obesity” as the cornerstone of the series (Hammer and Baluja). Serving as an example of how pervasive the conflation between health and body size is in general public discourse, the article functions to normalize and concretize this conflation as though it is based on empirical evidence. While claims such as “Canadian children are suffering an epidemic of inactivity that contributes to rising obesity rates and weaker academic performance” (Hammer and Baluja) generally are unsubstantiated and contradicted by academic research (Lupton 43), the ideology that grounds them is sustained by the fear associated with the threat of the fat or “obese” child.

A number of children’s picture books focusing on “healthy” food choices recently published in Canada can be read usefully within the context of this public anxiety. These books, among them The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough by Katie Smith Milway, Potatoes on Rooftops: Farming in the City by Hadley Dyer, Down to Earth: How Kids Help Feed the World by Nikki Tate, and Why Are You Doing That? by Elisa Amado and Manuel Monroy, aim to educate children on what is “healthy” to consume, with the ultimate goal of affecting children’s eating habits. My detailed analysis, from a fat studies perspective, of two such books—Up We Grow! A Year in the Life of a Small, Local Farm and Watch Me Grow! A Down-to-Earth Look at Growing Food in the City, both by Deborah Hodge—raises questions as to who is responsible for addressing, defining, or substantiating the notion of “childhood obesity” (Lupton 41) and how they implicate both the children who are to read these books and the adults who purchase them. These texts, published a year apart from each other, can be compared easily in terms of how they communicate the value of food in the context of health while featuring very different contexts, that of eating in the city and in rural communities. While the two books reviewed here do not discuss issues of fatness directly or purport to function as weight-controlling programs for children, they nevertheless are teaching tools for children to learn about food and food production, and both distinguish between food items that are to be valued and considered “healthy” and those that are not. This ascription of value judgments to particular food consumption and production practices works to dictate to children the appropriate way to grow—that is, to grow up and not out.

Organized around each season, Hodge’s Up We Grow! provides readers with lots of information regarding the cycle of food production and consumption at a small, community-based farm in Abbotsford, British Columbia. The book, which features full-page, high-quality photographs of the farm and its inhabitants, attempts to bridge an assumed gap in knowledge of readers regarding how food is made and why is it important to foster an “appreciation of the importance of small, local farms...