“Small wonder that now everyone eats the same junk food and watches the same junk programmes, in a culture where children’s tastes came so conspicuously to dominate.”
Quote: Mary Warnock, The Observer, 20 March 1983.
Photograph: Science Museum, 1999-278.
In the 1980s, newspapers decided to put what children ate on the table. “The children’s economy is booming in ways good and bad,” wrote Lesley Gerard, and went on to list what children bought: crisps, sweet treats, fizzy drinks, fast food. According to the journalists’ observations, children’s increasing consumption power, combined with liberal child rearing practices, the dissolution of two parent households, the increase in the number of working mothers, and the decline of home-made food, resulted in a drastic change in food choices, from elaborate family meals to “junk” food.
The reports found this tendency disturbing not only because of more obvious health concerns like child obesity, but there was another dimension: that of taste. The assumption was that given the power to choose what to eat, children would instinctively go for unhealthy, bland, and easy alternatives, whereas they needed adult guidance to grow into higher tastes. The lack of said guidance alarmed the observers because as Wendy Wills and colleagues point out, food was not simply about what children ate. Eating was a classed practice, and the table was also where “distinctions of taste” were produced.
In this narrative, children’s relation to junk food was also an analogy of “lower” taste, and growing up was defined as transitioning from childish impulsiveness to control, and from comfort food to acquired tastes, like cheese, wine, and classical music. Thus, it was particularly worrying that adults were also consuming “junk” food, a sentiment that echoed the antipathy against adults adopting childlike fashion codes and leisure activities. “When I was younger, I used to think that at some unidentifiable point in the future I would become adult overnight, and that various urges – the urge to buy quarters of toffee bonbons, the urge to buy pop records every time I passed a shop, the urge to skive off, the urge to eat chips for tea every day – would leave me, but this hasn’t happened,” teased Nick Hornby.
Others were not as sympathetic to adults who gave in to their urges. Green complained that “being an adult is no longer an obstacle to liking things aimed at children,” and his list of such things included junk food, sugar-coated cereals and lollipops, re-branded as “private adult indulgence.” This, some commentators argued, reflected a drift away from adulthood as a state of cultivation and sophistication. It was hardly surprising that these notions were lost in the new culture of the late twentieth century according to Seabrook, who exclaimed: “it is unnecessary to have attained a reading age beyond that of seven or eight to be able to assimilate the complexities of the world of grown-ups as conveyed through the tabloid press.” Children and adults, underclass and middle-class alike converged in the same mass culture whether by consuming the same food, the same shoes, or the same cultural products.
As pointed out by Buckingham, the discussion of children’s consumption was built on two tropes of the child consumer, either as incompetent and vulnerable, and/or as powerful and autonomous. It is important to note that this framework equated eating with consuming food in the free market. In doing so, the discussion disregarded other socioeconomic factors that determined what children had to eat, especially in the context of Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, when children’s access to food was severely affected by several intersectional inequalities.
Quoted news:
Mary Warnock. “End of play.” The Observer, 20 March 1983.
Lesley Gerard. “What kids want and what they get.” The Independent, 21 September 1996.
Nick Hornby. “Hope I’ll grow up before I get old.” Independent on Sunday, 17 April 1994.
Dave Green. “Just kidding.” The Guardian, 25 November 1995.
Jeremy Seabrook. “Child abuse and the loss of innocence.” Sunday Telegraph, 18 January 1987.
More on children, consumption and food:
Wendy Wills, Kathryn Backett-Milburn, Mei-Li Roberts and Julia Lawton. “The Framing of Social Class Distinctions through Family Food and Eating Practices,” in The Sociological Review 59(4), 2011.
David Buckingham. The Material Child: Growing Up in Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.
Tim Lang. “Dividing up the cake: food as social exclusion,” in Walker A , Walker C (eds), Britain Divided: the Growth of Social Exclusion in the 1980s and 1990s. London: Child Poverty Action Group, 1997.
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