Imprinting the body with food practices: contributions to thinking about the relations between children, bodies and food in pediatric narratives

Aportes para pensar la vinculación entre infancias, cuerpos y alimentos a partir de narrativas pediátricas

Abstract

This paper seeks to assess knowledge about child nutrition in Primary Health Care Centers, in connection with senses about the body and feeding practices of children who attend these centers. This work conducted a research on the literature on anthropology of food and childhood, together with in-depth interviews in three Health Care Centers located in the outskirts of the urban area of the city of La Plata. These focused on the discourse of the pediatricians, from a relational discursive logic, incorporating conceptions of the health personnel. Firstly, some biomedical regulatory devices of children’s bodies are discussed, with their ways of measuring, classifying and moralizing non-adult bodies, and thus providing notions about childhood. In a second moment, I analyze the links with the people in charge of their upbringing and their child rearing practices. Finally, the specific senses of the pediatricians about food and the infantile dietary practices of the people who attend the center are presented. I seek to analyze the way in which these discourses are trying to recover the specificity of pediatrics in the first level of attention.