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Language and Food: Verbal and nonverbal experiences
Edited by Polly E. Szatrowski
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 238] 2014
► pp. 257–278

“I needa cut up my soup”

Food talk, pretend play, and gender in an American preschool

American English-speaking preschoolers reinscribe implicit understandings of gender prescriptions in their food-related talk and pretend play. Girls discussed and coordinated complex, sequenced meal preparation, sometimes explicitly as mother or child. Boys’ food-as-comestible play was shorter and less developed. They imaginatively transported themselves to places outside of the home setting (to a swamp, a spaceship), planning and enacting scripts of gender normative adventure and danger, in which food was symbolically transformed for use in nondomestic, noncomestible activities, e.g., a piece of bread becomes a camera. Boys also style-shifted linguistically, but usually in non-family roles. This study contributes to research on preschooler’s gendered social language and spontaneous symbolic play, and to research concerned with the meanings children ascribe to food and eating.
Published online: 10 January 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.238.11she
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Cited by (4)

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Callahan, Kristin L. & Sebastian Del Corral Winder
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Callahan, Kristin L. & Sebastian Del Corral Winder
2024. Preschool Development. In Tasman’s Psychiatry, ► pp. 249 ff. DOI logo
Wiggins, Sally, Annerose Willemsen & Jakob Cromdal
2023. Eating Prickly Peas: Sharing Play Worlds During Preschool Meals. International Journal of Early Childhood DOI logo
Karrebæk, Martha Sif, Kathleen C. Riley & Jillian R. Cavanaugh
2018. Food and Language: Production, Consumption, and Circulation of Meaning and Value. Annual Review of Anthropology 47:1 ► pp. 17 ff. DOI logo

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