Book review: food, families and work by Rebecca O’Connell and Julia Brannen

Rebecca O’Connell and Julia Brannen’s Food, Families and Work presents a fascinating account of the relationship between parental paid employment and family food practices in contemporary British households. The book has two central missions: to advocate and develop the use of mixed methods in research into food practices and to defend working mothers from the moral judgement of media and governments over alleged failings in their children’s diets. These apparently disparate aims in fact dovetail neatly. The authors’ mixed-methods approach reveals dimensions and linkages missed or underplayed by previous studies. What emerges is a more rounded understanding of the complex influences on British children’s diets in the twenty-first century. Reviewed by Patricia Hogwood.