Recipes for mothering? Analysing UK blogs about feeding the family Heather Elliott, Rebecca O’Connell, Corinne Squire (Novella)Myrhh Domingo, Gunther Kress (MODE)

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Background

‘There is much to be learned from reading a cookbook besides how to prepare food – discovering the stories told in the spaces between the recipes or within the recipes themselves’ (Theophano, 2002:6)

Research questionsSubstantive

• How is mothering is articulated in, and narrated through blog posts about feeding families?

Methodological

• What are the methodological and ethical implications of working narratively and multimodally with blogs?

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Research strategyForeshadowed ideas:• Blogs as documents of family life • Narratives of everyday mothering practices and food provisioning• Foregrounding of scarcity (temporal and economic)

Sampling criteria:• Middle-ranking and well-established• Written by UK-based mothers of primary school age children (4-11 years)• Included blogs on feeding families + blogs about parenting which include food• Balance of visually and textually led blogs

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Research Strategy• 15 blogs sampled

• 2 closely examined over a six-month period, and over parallel posts

• These blogs archived by the British Library ‘UK Web Archive’

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‘Thinly Spread: Stretched but not snapped’

‘The Diary of a Frugal Family: Surviving the Credit Crunch’

Data: About Me

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Data: (Pancake day) recipes‘Perfect with homemade chocolate sauce (warmed Nutella mixed with a little milk) and squirty cream’

Wait until bubbles appear before you turn it over

I used to hate Pancake Day, mainly because I can’t flip a pancake to save my life and my efforts to make a pancake usually ended up in a scrambled egg style mush at the bottom of the pan! But then I tried making fluffy pancakes (like the ones they sell in McDonalds) and ever since then my pancake making skills have improved considerably! They’re really easy to make and although they’re actually based on a Nigella recipe, I like to let the kids think that I’m the Domestic Goddess who came up with them….

Data: ‘Everyday’ posts January 20137th – ‘I’m out tonight so it will just be

freezer tea for the kids. Probably chicken nuggets or fish fingers with beans and fries’

15th- ‘finding it difficult to make December’s early pay stretch for the five and a half weeks till January’s pay day … so I need to keep even closer control than usual over our food budget this month.. I managed to get a big bag of minced steak mince from Tesco just before closing yesterday reduced to just £2.64 so you can guess what’s going to feature very heavily in this week’s meal plan can’t you?  

Discussion and conclusionsMothering “involves the making of identities and relationships as well as more tangible entities such as family meals” (O’Donohoe et al., 2014:2).

The blogs as idealised performance of food/family/mothering identities• Narratives of family lives and eating practices as tools of family ‘display’

(Finch, 2007; James and Curtis 20210)• FF displays and reproduces normative identities of motherhood

But everyday nature of posts also reveals material and mundane e.g.• Mince padded out to stretch the month (food scarcity)• Expansion of meaning of ‘homemade’ (time poverty)• ‘Freezer tea’ for kids when going out (competing priorities)9

Conclusions• Analysis of blogs may shed light on food practices which are

simultaneously symbolic and mundane

• The blogs exhibit successful strategies for engaging predominantly maternal audiences around food and resource constraints

• They include contemporaneous, experience-near accounts which connect biography and history

• Potential application to other domains and longitudinally

• ‘Missing data’ and question of ‘sampling’ suggest most usefully employed as part of a broader design and alongside other methods10

www.novella.ac.uk

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Ethical considerations and approachBlogs as research ‘data’• A dynamic and heterogeneous field • AOIR advocate a practice and case based approach• Blogs are in the public domain but expectations of privacy are

ambiguous and changingOur Approach • Well established blogs• Informed the authors of the work (consent to archive blogs)• Analyse the authors’ public online identities• Descriptive accounts grounded in online material – not evaluative

or speculative about ‘off-line’ lives• Do not include followers or family members in analysis12

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