Moving Meals and Migrating Mothers: Culinary cultures, diasporic dishes and familial foodways explores the complex interplay between the important global issues of food, families and migration. We have an introduction and twelve additional chapters which we have organised into three parts: Part I Moving Meals, Markets and Migrant Mothers; Part II Migrating Mothers Performing Identity through Moving Meals; Part III Meanings and Experiences of Migrant Maternal Meals. Although these parts are not mutually exclusive, they are meant to emphasize socio-cultural and economic considerations of migration (Part I), the food itself (Part II) and families (Part III). We have a wide geographic representation, including Europe (Ireland and France), the USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Korea. In addition, we have contributors from all stages of career, including full professors, as well recent doctoral graduates. Overall the contributions are interdisciplinary, and therefore use a variety of methodologies, although most make use of traditional social sciences methods, including interviews and ethnographic observations.

This book provides a social and cultural framework for understanding strategies for the critical feeding and nutrition of the world's most vulnerable citizens. Ensuring that infants have access to breastmilk is one of the greatest global healthcare challenges of the twenty-first century, one that cannot be understood in exclusively biomedical terms, but demands an awareness of complex lived experiences. The familiar slogan breast is best' is skilfully and impressively annotated by this volume with an understanding of the practical and varied experiences of working women and the degree of support (or opposition) that larger communities may provide. How and when infants can be fed is not simply a matter of individual maternal choice, but has large structural implications. The international and interdisciplinary essays in this book amply illustrate the need to transcend a narrow and unfair emphasis on the success' or failure' of particular nursing mothers and seek greater societal understanding in order to effect positive societal change. Furthermore, this volume not only has significant public policy implications, but is of great value in the university classroom, illustrating how many of our most basic assumptions about healthcare and maternity need to be rethought in light of a more complex understanding of how human milk ties communities as well as individuals together.

From multidisciplinary perspectives, this volume explores the roles mothers play in the producing, purchasing, preparing and serving of food to their own families and to their communities in a variety of contexts. By examining cultural representations of the relationships between feeding and parenting in diverse media and situations, these contributions highlight the tensions in which mothers get entangled. They show mothers' agency - or lack thereof - in negotiating the environmental, material, and economic reality of their feeding care work while upholding other ideals of taste, nutrition, health and fitness shaped by cultural norms. The contributors to Mothers and Food go beyond the normative discourses of health and nutrition experts and beyond the idealistic images that are part of marketing strategies. They explore what really drives mothers to maintain or change their family's foodways, for better or for worse, paying a particular attention to how this shapes their maternal identity. Questioning the motto according to which "people are what they eat," the chapters in this volume show that mothers cannot be categorized simply by how they feed themselves and their family.

What's Cooking, Mom? offers original and inventive narratives, including auto-ethnographic discussions of representations, discourses and practices about and by mothers regarding food and families. These narratives discuss the multiple strategies through which mothers manage feeding themselves and others, and how these are shaped by international and regional food politics, by global and local food cultures and by their own ethical values and preference, as well as by those of the ones they feed.