Making Food Labor Worthy: Familism Among School Lunch Workers in Urban Kolkata

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6. Care, Intimate Labor, and Social Reproduction

Abstract

Nationally-based public school lunch programs serve families, communities, and nations by making sure that the food being served to children is prepared with care and attention. However, metrics of care in school feeding programs are often measured in “knowable entities”, rather than in the embodied and emotional dimensions of carework that goes into preparing and distributing the food. In India’s school lunch programs (or Mid-Day Meal Scheme)—the site of this research—the focus similarly rests on student’s calorie-intake of students or worker’s hygiene practices, while tucking the labor of “feeding” a child under the framework of institutional care. In this paper, based on a study of a community kitchen of MDMS in Kolkata, we recast the labor of food production beside the stovetop as a site of “meaning-making” that has been overlooked in scholarship of feminized labor that categorize “intimate labor” women as either purely exploitative or as purely altruistic. Instead, we find that by drawing attention to the labor of lunch production itself—the physical labor and the coordination of tasks—and its value in feeding children, the women employ familial strategies to derive status from their activities.

Authors

• Jaita Talukdar, Loyola University-New Orleans

• Kelly Moore, Loyola University-Chicago