“Let’s eat!” Commensalism practices of boys and girls in a Sala Cuna (Córdoba, Argentina)

Abstract

The Sala Cuna Plan is a childcare policy of the Government of the Province of Córdoba aimed at children between 45 days and 3 years old. In this work, we will focus on identifying and understanding the ways in which the attending children are addressed by the different adult actors who intervene at lunchtime: the cook, nutritionists, and teachers. To do this, we carried out an ethnographic approach. The intentional sample consisted of 30 boys and girls under 4 years old attending the afternoon shift. The techniques and instruments that we used were participant observations in the neighborhood and in the room, ethnographic interviews with the cook, the teacher, caregivers, mothers, and nutritionists. We were able to observe that in the modeling of the commensalism practices of boys and girls, adults intervene - who follow their own habitus in tension with the programmatic guidelines – as well as the peer group. The teachers are very much on top of children so that they finish eating the whole plate. They justify this action knowing the material living conditions of their families conditioned by poverty. This social fabric is conditioning the learning of ways of connecting with time, space, food, and others, and, also the ways of experiencing and inhabiting one's own body when children eat.