This blog post is based on some ideas I presented in my inaugural lecture in March 2023. You can find the video recording of that lecture on the Author page.
There is a crab named Howie, who lives in Nebraska, eats cheese, and wears hats. It was the video of Howie1 eating a banana that got me thinking about feeding and what really happens when we give food to other people and animals. And why we need to stop feeding the kids.
Before you start wondering just what kind of heartless person I am, hear me out. In a world where hunger is still so prevalent that its eradication is the second of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, I don’t take this lightly. I’m not suggesting that we stop providing food for our kids, or anyone else for that matter. It’s the word ‘feeding’ that is the problem here: it has distorted our ideas about how children eat and doesn’t give due credit to how active they are even from their first moments of eating.
Things we feed
Howie is just one example of millions of other ‘pets being fed’ videos. Watching animals while they are eating is a spectacle not only of the internet but also of petting farms and zoos worldwide. The ‘feeding times’ at zoos are guaranteed to pull crowds, though they may have a questionable impact on the animals’ welfare. There is even a premium on the experience if we can do the feeding ourselves. Not only does it offer the thrill of providing for another, but we can get close enough to interact with an animal that would not otherwise have been possible. This is not just giving food: it’s a moment of shared contact with another creature. My family know not to leave me lingering too near the goat enclosure for this very reason. They are far too interesting an animal not to want to hang out with them.
But we don’t just feed animals in zoos, nor only the pets in our homes. We feed our minds and souls, our children, the birds, even vending machines and photocopiers. We feed fires with fuel. As far as the optimism of the 1980s was concerned, we could also feed the world2. The word ‘feeding’ is therefore used in a whole range of different contexts but is essentially a verb to denote the action of giving something to someone (or something) else for consumption. One gives, the other receives. Its straightforward in grammatical terms, but we hit a snag when we start to consider what might be the collective noun for the subject and object of the sentence. While there is a collective noun for people who give food (feeders), there is none for those who receive it.
The closest we might get is ‘feedee’. And that just sounds weird.
Feeders vs. eaters
Herein lies the issue. The language we use for one of the most fundamental aspects of life–providing food for our loved ones–is weighted toward the role of the person giving the food. The word ‘feeding’ shapes our understanding of eating as primarily a one-directional process where the giver is agentic (i.e., acting with agency and purpose) and the receiver is not. The word obscures or deletes the agency of the eater (thanks to Charles Antaki for suggesting this phrase). To give food implies some action is being taken, to receive food is to be the recipient of that action. When we’re being fed, though, we’re doing more than simply receiving food. It’s something of an understatement to say that eating is a lot more complicated than that. And I haven’t even considered the gendered, class-based, and racial inequalities and systems within which feeding can be understood. I’m focusing here only on those moments in which food enters our mouths.
When we consider the people who we don’t feed that the issue becomes clearer still.
The act of eating begins with the phase in which food is transported into the mouth, typically using our hands or utensils. It’s a deceptively mundane part of the process, but one which can be rendered impossible for many people due to a whole range of cognitive or motoric challenges. In these cases, help from another person is required. Eating in such situations is not called feeding. In the field of dementia studies, for instance, it is referred to as assisted eating. Just by changing the words that we use, the eater gains a little more dignity and humanity. This is not about being fed, it’s about being assisted in being able to eat as a basic human right.
We can start to see, therefore, something of a problematic imbalance when we use the word ‘feeding’. It places the focus on the part of the feeder, that the part played by the eater is obscured, and the interaction between both parties is reduced to a simple transfer of food. And every parent knows that is simply not the case. Nor is it just about an imbalance of power, either. When we’re feeding other people or animals, it is almost always done out of love or a duty of care. Otherwise, the word ‘force-feeding’ wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t need an extra word to show that feeding can be done against someone’s will if that was part of the verb in the first place.
So, we need to zoom in on what happens when infants are eating to understand a little more about why the word feeding doesn’t really capture reality.
Eating as interaction, feeding as communication
Infants play a central role in eating from the very start. All new parents quickly learn that it is not simply a case of placing food into their mouth: it requires co-ordination and co-operation. Mouths need to be open, heads turned in the right way. The infant needs to actively take the food. If you ever tried, like I did, to sneak a tiny spoonful of puree into your infant’s open mouth while they were distracted, you’ll know that it rarely works. Once food goes into the mouth, it then needs to be processed by the infant. If not, it simply comes back out. Even before we get to solid food, with milk-feeding, whether via bottle or breast, there is a process through which caregiver and baby need to learn and co-ordinate their actions.
Research using video-recordings of infants eating, with the help of their parent or other caregiver, has shown the minute co-ordination of this process. Learning to eat is a skill, and like any skill it takes practice. Hours upon hours of practice. When researchers examine these many hours of eating and focus on them in the same way that a biologist might study things under a microscope, clear patterns emerge. Over time, a synchronisation emerges in which the caregivers’ and infants’ movements become more smoothly co-ordinated as mouths, hands, and bodies work in motion together to ensure food ends up in the mouth. Like dancers learning to move in time with one another, so caregiver and infant constantly adjust their own movements to match that of the other. There are even early indications that this synchrony might even be related to the infant’s willingness to eat.
It is not only the infants’ mouths and caregiver’s hands which are co-ordinated; research has also shown how caregivers themselves will open their own mouths as if they were the ones who were eating. This happens just before or after the infants themselves take the food, and regardless of whether the infant is watching the caregiver or whether the caregiver realises that they are doing it. Similarly, caregivers might also produce a series of short lip-smacks in a pace and rhythm that can be seen to match the infants’ own chewing of the food. This kind of synchrony between caregiver and infant has long been known in research on talk and interaction, but evidence is gaining momentum to show similar patterns in eating situations.
When we examine infant eating at this fine-grained level of detail, we see how it is co-ordinated between two active participants rather than simply passing between a giver and a receiver. We can think of the difference between the words ‘feeding’ and ‘eating’ as being like the difference between the words, ‘communication’ and ‘interaction’ as they are used in language research. The word communication is typically used to suggest that language is the transmission of a message from one person to another: between a sender and a receiver. Many psychological theories of language are based on this concept. Another word, interaction, is typically used to suggest that language and its meanings are co-constructed within a specific context or situation. That there is no ‘message’ but rather a mutual understanding that evolves while people are talking and interacting with each other. In this analogy, using the word feeding is like using the word communication where the food (message) is passed from one to the other, without change. Instead, eating is a bit more interactional; the food becomes meaningful (and even, we might argue, becomes recognised as food) through the different interactional processes that take place when infants are eating. The word thus feeding obscures not only what the eater does but also, crucially, the co-ordinated interaction between the caregiver and the infant.
Let the kids eat
Watching a crab eating a banana is as bizarre as it sounds. Their pincers pick off, or rather ‘smoosh’ small pieces, and delicately place them into their mouth, taking tiny fragments at a time. It is compulsive viewing. Which brings me to wonder why ‘feeding time’ in the home is not nearly as entertaining as watching animals being fed, nor why I rush to feed the goats at the petting farm but am not always so enthusiastic to cook the family dinner. Then again, I don’t have to feed the goats every day.
We are unlikely to get rid of the word feeding any time soon. It is far too useful a word for that. But we can focus a bit more on what happens when we’re eating with our kids (or our pets), and how they are doing much more, at a much earlier age, than we might ever have expected. And that independence in eating is, surely, what we are striving for.
Research references
The following are the research papers that are referred (and linked) to in the blog post:
Costantini, C., Akehurst, L., Reddy, V., & Fasulo, A. (2018). Synchrony, co‐eating and communication during complementary feeding in early infancy. Infancy, 23(2), 288-304.
Fielding‐Singh, P., & Oleschuk, M. (2023). Unequal foodwork: Situating the sociology of feeding within diet and nutrition disparities. Sociology Compass, 17(4), e13067.
Hydén, L. C., Majlesi, A. R., & Ekström, A. (2022). Assisted eating in late-stage dementia: Intercorporeal interaction. Journal of Aging Studies, 61, 101000.
Koene, P. (1999). When feeding is just eating: how do farm and zoo animals use their spare time. Regulation of feed intake. CAB International, Wallingford, UK, 13-19.
Negayama, K. (1993). Weaning in Japan: A longitudinal study of mother and child behaviours during milk‐and solid‐feeding. Early Development and Parenting, 2(1), 29-37
Toyama, N. (2013). Japanese mother–infant collaborative adjustment in solid feeding. Infant Behavior and Development, 36(2), 268-278.
Trevarthen, C. (1979). Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity. Before speech: The beginning of interpersonal communication, 1, 530-571.
Vacaru, S. V., S. Ma, H. T. van Schie, and S. Hunnius. “Eating in synch: an investigation of parent-infant behaviour coordination during feeding interactions.” Infant Behavior and Development 66 (2022): 101669.
van Dijk, M., van Voorthuizen, B., & Cox, R. F. (2018). Synchronization of mother-infant feeding behavior. Infant Behavior and Development, 52, 97-103.
Wiggins, S., & Keevallik, L. (2021). Parental lip-smacks during infant mealtimes: Multimodal features and social functions. Interactional Linguistics, 1(2), 241-272.
- You can find Howie the crab on YouTube or, if you prefer, on Instagram or TikTok. We won’t judge you here. Even researchers hang out on social media now and again. ↩︎
- I’m referring here to a line in the song ‘Do they know its Christmas?’ by the charity supergroup BandAid, founded by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure in 1984. We thought we could stop famine in Ethiopia by buying the record (or cassette tape). If only eradicating famine could be so easy. ↩︎
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
Mouth: full 