Part of
Language and Food: Verbal and nonverbal experiencesEdited by Polly E. Szatrowski
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 238] 2014
► pp. 257–278
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.
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Cited by
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Callahan, Kristin L. & Sebastian Del Corral Winder
2023. Preschool Development. In Tasman’s Psychiatry, ► pp. 1 ff. 
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.
Wiggins, Sally, Annerose Willemsen & Jakob Cromdal
2023. Eating Prickly Peas: Sharing Play Worlds During Preschool Meals. International Journal of Early Childhood
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.