Guest editorial
Article Type: Guest editorial From: Young Consumers, Volume 11, Issue 2
In a number of countries, the relationship between food and children has been the focus of much public attention. This raises many questions of a cultural,political, legislative, health and economic nature relating, among others, to issues such as the role of the family and parents in children’s food consumption habits and practices, public health policies, choices in education,media regulation and the responsibility of food companies.
Today, food for children can be defined as a complex ensemble encompassing diverse aspects: the search for healthy ingredients with particular nutritional value (this is increasingly evident in the field of contemporary food ethics),the exploration of a variety of multisensory experiences (touch, taste, smell,color, shape, handling potential), and a range of symbolic and cultural significations that establish unexpected links between children, food and the worlds of fun and play characteristics of the child culture.
Anthropological analysis shows that the association between play and food has ancient origins in ritual and festive practices centered on childhood. During the last few decades fun food has been gradually removed from the festive sphere and incorporated in the everyday life of children. In defiance of that educational rule which says “you don’t play with food”, the pleasures of fun and play have been combined to strengthen marketing strategies and more and more extended beyond the traditional confines of the world of toys to invade the food sector. The fun or play dimension of a product is now typically to be found in the name, colour, taste, packaging, shape, the gadgets associated with it, as much as in the way it is marketed and consumed. Strategically placed to catch the child’s eye, the shelves in the supermarkets present a wealth of goodies: biscuits in the shape of zoo animals,fluorescent lollypops, two-colored yoghurt that will mix like paint, cartons that can be made into masks, tents, airplanes, Mickey Mouse shaped sandwiches,ice-lollies the child can make Spiderman weapons out of, caramel that pops in the mouth, small-scale worlds and characters for eating, handling and collecting.
The broad aim of this issue of Young Consumers is to examine the relationship between children, food and the child culture, focusing in particular on those products specifically designed to emphasize the play and fun relationship with food. Where does fun food come from? What is its lineage? What are the connections between fun food and the child culture and media industry?What strategies and practices characterize how it is designed, produced,promoted, marketed, purchased and consumed? What are the parents’expectations? What is fun food for children? How do they perceive, handle and appropriate it? The following contributions seek to provide answers to these questions.
The articles in this issue present the main results of the three-year project“Children and fun food: analyzing the tensions between pleasure, risk and education” funded by the French National Research Agency under the aegis of the National Program for Research on Food. Seven French research laboratories,each with a different disciplinary approach (history, anthropology, marketing,communication sciences, psychology, sociology, educational research) took part in the study.
I would like to express my sincere thanks to Brian Young for his enthusiasm for this project and for his advice, assistance and encouragement during the whole period of editing and publication of this special issue of Young Consumers. I also owe a debt of gratitude to all the members of the project“Children and fun food” who shared their work with me. Finally, I would like to thank the authors for their interesting contributions. Without their patience and support this special issue would never have come out.
Simona De IulioUniversity of Strasbourg, France.
