Children’s food,care and the practices of da pei in urban China

Abstract

This article contributes to the growing sociological discussion on changing family relations in China. By conceptualizing da pei as a critical lens, it advances the emerging discussion of the interplay between food as materiality of care and intergenerational relations. Through critical engagement with a group of mothers’ food narratives in Hangzhou, the article explains how parents in China negotiate their responsibilities and expectations of good care through their everyday food practices. The article highlights the importance of thinking with ‘culture’ as an analytical tool to interpret the evolving landscapes of intergenerational care relations in urban China. In addition to examining the factors that influence family food choices and practices, the article identifies three layers of meaning in the mothers’ articulation of da pei: as ethical and moral choices, as practices of compromise and as practices for supplementation and collaboration. It argues for the need to engage with the ethics of care and values of everyday life to uncover the underlying tensions and power dynamics that shape the emerging forms of intergenerational relations explored in this monograph.

Introduction

The role of children in reshaping contemporary familial power relations is significant in making sense of the changing nature of the family and family relations in contemporary China (Jing, 2000), as lived out in people’s everyday life consumption and their negotiation of different values and ideologies. Within a context in which the Chinese government has placed strategic importance on health through its ‘Healthy China 2030’ plan, this article emerges from an interdisciplinary international collaborative project on addressing the double burden of childhood malnutrition in China. However, sociological analysis regarding the meaning of ‘good food’, the intricate ways individuals interpret it and how it is lived out in people’s everyday lives are under-researched. The lack of critical understanding of ‘good’ food and good food practices becomes more important when considering the changing societal culture and dynamic intergenerational relationships, both of which significantly influence people’s perceptions of good food practices, constituting an expected standard of care, such as being a good parent, often in relation to mothers as gendered subjects (Parsons, 2016). A more critical understanding of these sociological dimensions is essential for developing interventions that not only prioritize nutritional content but also resonate with diverse sociocultural perspectives on food, intersecting with changing family relations.

This article contributes to the growing sociological discussion of shifting family relations in China that are central in this monograph, focusing on the interplay between food practices, family and care (see Jackson, 2018; Pirani et al., 2022). It adopts a critical perspective by understanding food in terms of the ‘materiality of care’ (see Buse et al., 2018), seeking to unpack the mutability and mutuality of intergenerational caring relations and to unravel the intricate ways in which the provision of ‘good’ food becomes a tangible expression of good care. Through an engagement with the ‘cultural landscapes of care’ (Lin et al., 2022), the article focuses on how mothers with young children in urban China understand ‘good’ food and how intergenerational care practices are lived out through their accounts of da pei, deploying different resources.

Da pei is a Chinese term that can be translated as the practices of ‘matching up’ and ‘combining’ that signify the notion of ‘doing’ by bringing together different things, people and resources. It can also be understood as a new form of assemblage, signifying the notion of ‘becoming’, as a result of the negotiation and creativity that modern parents in China practise in constructing their food narratives for their children. The accounts below exemplify three meaningful layers of da pei that carry the theoretical capacity to capture three elements of tensions within their ‘care-full’ practice as ethical and moral choices, compromise, as well as for supplementing and collaboration. Thus, da pei is a relational form of doing and becoming that brings to light the negotiation and transformation of ethics of care as both responsibilities and obligations.

This article engages critically with the theme of this monograph, exploring emergent forms of care (see Choi, 2025) that stem from everyday food practices. These practices reflect how families navigate contemporary China’s evolving economy and society. The primary objective is to address underlying forces contributing to tensions in relation to food practices within urban families with young children. By developing the lens of da pei, the article examines the interplay of good food and good care from mothers’ accounts of how they prepare, justify and engage in various ‘good’ food practices. Through this analysis, the article seeks to illuminate changing landscapes of care among urban families in China.

There are multiple factors that influence the mothers’ narratives on what to cook for their children. The practice of da pei comprises different and sometimes ambiguous ideologies, discourses and values with which parents in China currently engage. The active negotiation and justification of da pei reveals the cultural values and the material constraints that underpin mundane food practices for parents in urban China. Thus, we explore the dynamics of ‘family routines’ of preparing food for their children within everyday activities that may seem to be common sense at first glance but hold valuable insights into the meanings of the practices and justifications involved, and the efforts individuals put into nurturing their children. In addition to observing the actions taken within family food practices, it is equally valuable to understand how participants account for these ‘care-full’ practices, as they may appear ambiguous. A focus on this mundane level enables us to reflect on a more social side of how parents ‘do’ care with food.

Theoretical framing: Culture, care and mundane food practices

Food serves as a critical cultural tool for unpacking complex power relations underpinning family practices. James and Curtis (2010) explore child–adult relations through the lens of food, treating eating practices as a critical tool for family analysis and for understanding how wider societal concerns of childhood obesity help display parents’ care. Morgan (2011, p. 80) maintains that ‘family practices are conducted within time and space and involve the use of time and space’. Thus, rather than dismissing grandparents’ affection and love as potential barriers for tackling childhood obesity, it is of critical importance to make sense of the simultaneity of different factors, values and ideologies in guiding family practices in relation to providing ‘good’ food for children in their everyday lives. N. Zhang et al.’s (2015, p. 484) study in China suggests that ‘the grandparent generation tended to emphasise the importance of starchy foods for children’s growth due to their own past experiences during the Great Famine . . . the parent generation paid more attention to protein-source foods including meat, eggs and milk’.

By considering the nexus between food, care and interpersonal dynamics, the aim here is to comprehend the link between the ontologies of good food and the practice of care among urban families with young children in China. Warde (2016) acknowledges that food is ‘a primary tool of medical intervention’ (p. 93), in order to maintain and improve health; food also provides a cultural lens in capturing the transformation of ideologies of good food and the relationality of how the meanings of good food are shaped in practice in both private and public domains. This approach transcends conventional nutritional discourse to explore the deeper dimensions of food-related practices, viewing them as meaningful acts of care that extend beyond mere sustenance.

In more recent years, we have seen the highlighting of ‘culture’ in the discussion of care as an ‘enabler’, which facilitates care, as well as a ‘dis-enabler’, which constrains the achievement of good care (see Lin et al., 2022). Lin et al.’s (2022) conceptualization of ‘cultural landscapes of care’ argues for the importance of thinking with culture, in order to make sense of the mutability and mutuality of care. Such an approach is important for us to engage more critically with the neoliberal self-governmentality paradigm, shifting the focus primarily on an individual’s self-internalized care strategies through food (see Lin, 2022), to a more nuanced discussion that pays attention to social and cultural conditions. This article furthers engagement with the concept of culture as a ‘way of life’ that intersects everyday encounters of care (see, Lin et al., 2022) occurring within mundane spaces (Power & Hall, 2017). It maintains that the culture of da pei serves as a critical realm for understanding meanings of care as negotiable and as an ‘assembled’ articulation of value, condition and a way of being (Lin et al., 2022).

In line with sociological insights on practice, the rationale of this study is not about seeing family as a potential site of intervention for childhood health. Rather, we investigate how parental food practice might serve as a cultural tool for understanding familial care-full practices in China. It is through investigating everyday practices, such as preparing ‘good’ food for children, that notions of the family and family relations can be more clearly understood, sensitive to the negotiation and reproduction of new meanings through such practices (Morgan, 2011). Of equal importance, the lens of familial practice in relation to food enables us to examine what good parenting might mean and how it is presently constructed with possible projections into the future. Sociological studies of food practices and childcare in families have highlighted food as the materiality of negotiating meaningful intergenerational relations (Jackson, 2018). For example, Jackson’s (2018) study illustrates changing family relations and food in the context of social and personal changes with ‘specific circumstances providing a vehicle for wider arguments about the role of cooking and caring in modern family lives’ (p. 2513).

Critical studies tend to focus on practices and interactions among family members as relational (Jackson, 2018; Morgan, 2011). Food practices are ‘not automatically “transmitted” from one generation to the next; they are adapted, adopted, transformed or generated in the practices of everyday life’ (Forero & Smith, 2010, p. 79). Liu’s (2017, p. 580) study observes that ‘food knowledge is not only handed down generation by generation, but is also renewed all the time’. This important insight captures how ‘good’ food is subject to active shaping and reshaping within everyday care-full practices. Existing research highlights how intergenerational family life is subject to negotiation in light of changing gender practices within the family, as a result of both parents’ active participation in the workforce, leading to less time spent on preparing meals (Pirani et al., 2022), bringing to light the role of mothers in preparing and distributing ‘good’ food, in order to reproduce ‘proper’ families.

Changing material conditions of family relations might serve to unsettle how people make sense of the meanings of food as materiality of care. For example, convenience food or eating outside are often considered as less healthy, leading to the moral disapprobation of transgressors (Meah & Jackson, 2017), in line with public health concerns about obesity, diabetes and nutrient insufficiency. Thus, snacking and other casual eating activities appear to be in contrast to the values of healthy eating. Warde and Yates (2016, p. 15) acknowledge the limitation of such common negative evaluations that ‘have failed to appreciate the range and character of adjunct eating events, and the degree to which they form part of aggregate patterns and individual routines’. How parents justify their food practices, including eating main meals outside or seeking convenience, will provide opportunities to uncover new insights into a more culturally and relationally sensitive understanding of healthy and appropriate food practices and to make sense of embodied care-full practices in light of different life circumstances. What is of significance here is to further investigate changing family roles in facilitating meals for children within the wider context of rising public concern for food safety and parents’ feelings of trust and non-trust with reference to children’s food. Considering the issue of trust, Qi (2022, p. 599) maintains that ‘trust may be sociologically understood as a continuous process, requiring renegotiation, re-articulation, and even redefinition, rather than as a resolved and final commitment’.

MacDonald et al. (2018, p. 790) maintain that ‘interventions need to take account of the social and relational dimensions of food, and a stronger appreciation of the way in which food is imbued with emotions and care-giving is likely to resonate with families’. The article highlights shifting caring relations by unpacking the ontological understandings of good food articulated through parents’ food practices in urban China. It argues for the need to make sense of the interplay of different factors, including intergenerational support, various sociocultural resources and the re-institutionalization of food and nutrition in schools, which shape the contemporary landscape of childcare in China.

Methodology and data collection

This article pays particular attention to the practices of da pei as food provision, which are ‘internally differentiated such that persons in different situations do the same activity differently’ (Warde, 2005, p. 146), in order to make sense of how mothers in present-day China experience and negotiate different power dynamics and material conditions underpinning the seemly ‘private’ affairs of feeding children, with the resulting changes of intergenerational relationships effectively transforming society.

Following research ethics and data collection training delivered by the author, data were collected by three local interviewers with 30 groups of urban families (including mothers and fathers) in Hangzhou, conducted between December 2022 and January 2023. The interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese, following a protocol designed by the author and adhering to institutional ethical approvals obtained from the lead institutions in both the UK and China. The invited families were requested to keep food photo diaries (Wills et al., 2016) for one week and maintain a record of how they sourced and cooked food for their children. Subsequent follow-up semi-structured interviews with the contributing parents were conducted alone with the interviewers to discuss the photographs, examining the choices and decision-making processes involved in selecting and preparing food for their children. The local interviewers also asked supplementary questions to encourage participants to elaborate further on their narratives. Mundane food practices were recorded regarding how parents make informed decisions about their children’s food, including their concerns and anxieties.

The data include 10 families with children aged 6–24 months (Group A: complementary feeding stage), 10 families with children aged 3–6 years (Group B: nursery stage) and 10 families with children aged 7–11 years (Group C: primary school stage). Some families had children in more than one age group. Some of the participants had migrated from rural areas and maintained rural connections, which often led to grandparental support for childcare. Families within the sample also had different socioeconomic resources, leading to differences in how they understood good food and their access to it, as revealed in their narratives and interview responses.

Despite efforts to recruit both fathers and mothers for the project, the majority of the photos and narratives were contributed by mothers, including the 17 selected mothers featured in this article. Only 13.8% of the contributors in the project were fathers. The data suggest a clear gendered division of labour in food provision, aligning with other studies in this monograph that acknowledge women’s roles in care provision (see Thomason, 2025) and various types of care relationships (see Peng, 2025), considering the shifting dynamics and structures within Chinese families (see Barbalet, 2025). The mothers’ narratives also demonstrate a wider network of care involving intergenerational support and fathers’ involvement in childcare according to different life circumstances, such as employment. As a result, the article highlights mothers’ roles as main mediators in negotiating meaningful care practices of da pei. These accounts highlight not only the mothers’ active negotiations, which do not necessarily emerge from a gendered body, but also involve wider social and cultural networks, expectations and values. It aims further to demonstrate, through the mothers’ accounts, how different resources are involved in their food practices, in response to the research questions:

1. How do mothers conceive ‘healthy’ or ‘good’ food?

2. How do mothers make sense of everyday encounters and their food practices within the context of rising concerns of childhood obesity?

Nettleton and Uprichard’s (2011, p. 99) conceptualisation of ‘food narratives’ suggests that ‘personal food narratives draw upon shared cultural repertoires, generational memories, and tensions between age cohorts’. The narratives of the participating mothers provide insight into their perspectives and knowledge of sourcing and distributing food for their children. In the analysis, I paid particular attention to the sociocultural meanings that underscore mothers’ views of ‘good food’ and their practices. MacDonald et al.’s (2018, p. 789) study demonstrates the merit of a diary-interview approach, in order to make sense of the relationships of food, emotion and care, and their implications for reinvigorating family relations. Thus, the food narratives included mothers’ accounts of how they prepared food for their children and what they thought was appropriate food for them to cook; places where they bought their food and why; and other food-related activities, such as eating out. In this article, the selected mothers’ narratives were not simply descriptions, but assemblages of feelings, strategies and actions. The evidence of how mothers arrange good food enables us to think with culture, so that we can tease out the shifting negotiation of care-full food practices. In the following sections, I will show how da pei is lived out as meaningful care-full practices and unpack how the parents’ narratives are simultaneously shaped by different cultural values and material conditions. Thus, the article focuses on how the sociocultural dimensions of interviewees’ everyday lives as mothers impacted their practices of sourcing and cooking food and how multiple dimensions of care (see B.-W. Chen et al., 2022; Mol, 2008) are enabled and disenabled.

Findings and analysis: Care-ful(ly) da pei

The most common theme that emerged from the data regarding the types of food the mothers prepare was the notion of hun su da pei (a combination of meat and vegetables). From the words they use, the combination of hun and su entails the uncertainty and fluidity of the ‘nutritional’ substance of food, but also implies transformation and creativity in practice. Hun su da pei might appear reductive and simplistic, being a combination of meat and vegetables. However, such an interpretation misses the complex negotiation of other factors, such as time and place, in the materiality of preparing such a ‘combination’. What underpins the idea of da pei are the processes of decision-making and becoming, in relation to making sensible choices and justifying their practices for the performance of an ethical and moral outcome. Yan (2009) acknowledges the moral challenges inherent in Chinese society and the continuous development of novel ethical subjects, which are constantly being shaped and reshaped by significant socioeconomic transformations. J. Y. Zhang (2018) maintains that ‘the mundane yet intimate concern of putting “good” food in one’s dinner bowl already presses actors to form new social solidarities that are cosmopolitan in nature’ (J. Y. Zhang, 2018, p. 68). The purpose of da pei aims for an outcome of good care, as well as (re)negotiating the ‘standard’ and expectation of ethics of care, and self-representing themselves as ‘moral’ subjects. Their narratives about their practices of da pei imply the value of relationality, reciprocity and different forms of encounters, resulting in new practices of childcare, underscoring different forms of constraints and compromise.

Da pei as both ethical and moral choices

The data reveal a number of qualities in food that the mothers considered as ‘good’. Knowing how to da pei is a performance in the ethics of care. For example, the responsibility of seeking ‘fresh’ and ‘healthy’ food sheds light on how the discourse of food quality intersects with the value of ethics for the mothers, both as a form of choice that enables mothers to practise their agency, and as a form of moral ‘control’ in performing their care-full practices as mothers. Thus, da pei in this context is regarded as making ‘ethical’ choices, lived out as safeguarding the ‘quality’ of food, in order to perform their moral obligations. Practising care is often associated with the negotiation of ethics and morality and what individuals perceive as the ‘right’ thing to do. These performances of being ethically and morally right are lived out in their understanding of ‘qualities’ of food that they believe are good, as in references to ‘natural’, ‘fresh’, ‘purity’, ‘home-made’ and so on. The following data show the mothers’ particularity regarding the quality of food for their children. The choices of ‘fresh’, ‘good quality’ and ‘nutritious’ food are fragmented, usually as a combination of symbolic elements, such as time (regularity, frequency, timing) and place (local, distance, proximity). These da pei practices demonstrate the social and moral expectations entailed in being and becoming a ‘responsible’ parent. Their notion of good da pei of food for their children draws upon different expectations, discourses and ideologies, often underscored by intergenerational support. Thus, the articulation of good food is a reference to their capacity to navigate time, space and social relations; these are the factors that serve to articulate their notion of good food. One of the examples is their practice of seeking ‘freshness’:

Mother 3A (6–24 months): Every day I go to the fresh food market to buy something fresh, once a day . . . so it is all about going to buy fresh every day, so that we can have a variety of food and it is fresh . . . I had some requests to the grandparents [who also do the daily food shopping] . . . and we must have fruit for two meals, it should include three types of fruit and they should have different fruit for the two meals.

Mother 3A’s accounts provide insight into the logistical and temporal dimensions of sourcing fresh ingredients, emphasizing a strategy of daily procurement to ensure optimal freshness. This practice reflects a deliberate engagement with materiality – where perishability and quality are managed through frequent market visits – as well as an embedded temporal rhythm in household food provisioning. While Mother 3A serves as the primary food procurer, her narrative underscores the role of intergenerational support as an extension of da pei – a practice that could share care labour across family members. This dynamic highlights how intergenerational support does not only serve as a pragmatic resource-sharing mechanism but also as a means of fulfilling moral expectations tied to nurturing future generations. The recurrence of this theme among other mothers suggests such a cultural norm, in which care work is distributed to align with collective values surrounding family responsibility and continuity. Of importance, Mother 6B’s accounts further suggest that a family with rural connections can offer better resources for their da pei practice.

Mother 6B (3–6 years): For ingredients, to be honest, we rarely go to the fresh food market. Many of our vegetables are brought over from the village, and sometimes because we go back quite regularly, sometimes we bring over some vegetables for the week from my hometown, and they’re a little better, and some of the farmers raise their own . . . something like eggs, I’ll also take some from them. Over here, I basically da pei a little (more) food, and sometimes when we don’t bring enough, then I can buy some, such as fish and things like that, I usually go and buy them [here] as well.

For Mother 6B, the preference for food from the rural area suggests that there is a shifting hierarchy in relation to origins of food due to concerns for food safety. It also highlights that some families with rural connections due to their origin were more resourceful in securing ‘better’ quality food and how the meanings in relation to rural and urban attached to food are manifest in their accounts. This shift, however, is not merely about taste or tradition but is deeply embedded in structural inequalities and families with rural ties leverage kinship networks to access what they construct as ‘better’ food.

Meanwhile, Mother 6C’s reliance on selective sourcing (e.g. choosing specific stalls to avoid chemical contamination) underscores a classed and geographically contingent form of da pei. Without rural connections, her strategies remain constrained by urban market conditions, requiring vigilant labour to ensure the safety that others secure through social capital. This disparity highlights how food safety is not just a matter of consumer choice but of unequal resource distribution, where rural ties function as a form of privileged access.

Mother 6C (primary school group): For vegetables, I buy them at the vegetable stalls more often, or from neighbours who grow their own vegetables. [Since] they grow their own, they don’t use pesticides, and the neighbours’ small children eat [the vegetables)] too, so it’s a little safer.

As maintained in Fihl’s (2020, p. 262) study, ‘food risks are tackled with individual strategies aiming towards a feeling of peace of mind (fangxin), and that buying, preparing, and eating safe food is a moral issue within the family’. Although Mother 6B’s and Mother 6C’s accounts of sourcing food from different places might appear that they are strategic choices of managing risks, a moral dimension was clearly underpinning their da pei practice, interplaying with good motherhood and moral responsibilities of ensuring the children can grow up healthily. It is crucial to recognize that food serves a dual role, not only as a means of demonstrating affection but also as a tool for asserting control. This control is intricately connected to the ethics of care, which manifests itself differently based on diverse life circumstances and constraints. One of the circumstances appears to be associated with different age groups, by which their practices of da pei were informed. The following narratives suggest a different combination of food and supplements that mothers with children from different age groups prioritised.

Mother 3A (6–24 months): . . . because I would like him to grow taller, so [he] eats more pork, [we also] have prawns and other seafood.

Mother 9B (3–6 years) I don’t give him calcium all the time, depending on the season. He sweats a lot in the spring and summer, which causes zinc deficiency. I give him zinc supplements at that time and calcium supplements are in the spring when he is growing his body.

Mother 1C (primary school): I am not very particular . . . I just think ‘It doesn’t matter if I give him a little bit of lean meat, fat meat’, but I’ll try to make sure that he doesn’t eat much of it.

While the three mothers’ narratives reflect individualized, child-centric food strategies, a more critical interpretation reveals how their practices of da pei are deeply embedded in discourses of self-regulation and moral accountability. Their careful selection of supplements (Mother 9B), emphasis on dietary diversity (Mother 1C) and food combinations (Mother 3A) are not merely personal choices but disciplined enactments of ‘good mothering’ – where nutritional decisions become a site of ethical negotiation. These accounts expose a contradiction at the heart of da pei: while mothers frame their actions as rational, often appearing to be scientifically informed, their practices are equally shaped by moral obligation and the pressure to perform credibility in providing good food. Mother 3A’s belief that food combinations ensure healthy growth aligns with Punch et al.’s (2010) observation that food operates symbolically, as a proxy for maternal love and future health. Paradoxically, this symbolic significance also highlights how a food safety issue becomes a private problem that requires vigilant maternal care practices in contemporary China. Pirani et al. (2022) rightly note that care must be ‘morally acceptable’, but this moral framing disciplines mothers into constant self-auditing, ensuring their da pei practices align with dominant health ideologies. Importantly, these mothers retain a sense of control over food provision. This ‘power’ is double-edged as it embeds care within a cycle of obligation and surveillance. Thus, da pei is not just an act of nutritional balance. Rather, it is an ethical and moral practice, where maternal bodies and labour become the primary sites for managing broader societal anxieties about children’s futures and potential practices of compromise, as the following section will examine.

Da pei as compromise

Existing critical studies on feeding early years children and intergenerational relations in China focus on such themes as ‘risk’, particularly around food safety problems. As Yan (2012, p. 705) maintains, they ‘constitute a new, urgent, and multifaceted challenge to Chinese people, society, and the state, involving a number of social, political, and ethical issues beyond those of food safety, nutrition, and health’. The mothers in the study believe it is their responsibility to ensure good health for the children’s future. Thus, their practice is based on a sense of their trustworthiness in providing healthy food, as they interact in different social spaces, such as the neighbourhood, school and social media, which serve to generate multiple new cultural ‘ideals’ of good food and practices that both enable and disenable the parents to develop the right practice of da pei. The following discussion pays particular attention to how parents negotiate their practices in living up to the standard of care. Thus, their practices of da pei, in order to demonstrate their care, are conditioned by different circumstances in the negotiation of the proximity/distance to the material and familial relations that marked the transformation of culture and society in contemporary China. It is not possible to determine which types of food or which practices/factors are the best. Rather, their da pei practice of compromise and adjustment serve as a critical lens to make sense of the drivers and barriers for their care-full food choices. Their narratives of obtaining nutritional information are often underpinned by a sense of anxiety and inadequacy that requires strategies to negotiate the uncertainties. For example,

Mother 1A (6–24 months): . . . [I have learnt] something about what to eat from Xiaohongshu and Douyin [social media apps] for quite a long time, things such as what kind of food is better for children . . .

Mother 10B (3–6 years): Sometimes you see people posting on the friends’ groups on the social media, such as what [nutritional] supplements are needed for the summer months, and then you see the mother care shops posting on their social media too. Then you think it is possible that our child hasn’t taken them, or needs to take them, then I might order some online.

Mother 10C (primary school): [I think] the style of breakfast is too limited. I see people sometimes posting [their breakfast] to the friends’ group on social media and see them baking their own cakes for breakfast. I can’t do that, and it’s too much of a hassle for me.

The three mothers’ narratives reveal how digital platforms reconfigure feeding practices into sites of moral scrutiny. Their accounts of breakfast inadequacies – whether nutritional gaps or limited diversity – reflect not just dietary constraints but structural inequities in food access and temporal resources for some mothers. Social media operate as a disciplinary force, circulating idealized standards of ‘good parenting’ that mothers internalize through competitive peer comparisons. Mother 10C’s self-criticism exemplifies this dynamic, where care becomes a performative act subject to public judgement, and perceived failures are individualized as moral shortcomings. Thus, their practice of da pei requires mothers to reconcile expert-endorsed dietary ideals with material limitations, such as time, financial constraints and food availability. This mediation process masks structural inequities by framing feeding compromises as personal responsibility. The exhaustion embedded in their narratives underscores how digital moral economies intensify maternal labour, demanding constant self-auditing against unattainable standards. These accounts expose a paradox: while da pei is valorized as traditional care work, its digital iteration idealizes neoliberal self-monitoring and normalizes such maternal dilemmas. Their accounts reveal how late-modern parenting converts structure-based violence into individualized moral crises.

One important inequality suggested by their narratives is that they had to negotiate time and in many cases, they needed to make compromises and adapt according to their material conditions and life circumstance. For example, the notion of time was highlighted in different cases in the data. Sociologists have developed wide discussion on time and temporality in relation to food and family practice (see Pirani et al., 2022; Yates & Warde, 2017), illustrating working mothers’ struggle in preserving time to care and navigate through different time frames in relation to schooling, care and work (see Pirani et al., 2022).

Mother 8C (primary school): Because it’s sometimes too late to go to the fresh food market after work. Yes, TMall half-day delivery to the company is quite convenient. Because after work we need to pick him [the son] up and then go home to cook, we may not prepare the dishes, as abundant as those [parents] who are staying at home . . . [Thus] Sunday, then, we may cook a hot pot at home.

Mother 8C’s careful orchestration of food shopping and cooking times by using an online service exposes the hidden burdens of da pei, where feeding practices become a temporal field between work and domestic care imperatives. Her experience, shared by many working mothers, reveals time poverty and time compromise for working families with children. The need for time management as a practice of da pei underscores how China’s economic transformation has left mothers to negotiate work schedules and culturally validate gender and kinship norms, including seeking intergenerational support. Mother 1B’s account further reveals how private means of intergenerational support serve to normalise inequality of childcare:

Mother 1B (3–6 years): Because we are usually at work during day time, so we can just do a quick visit to the fresh food market after work. If it is too late for the fresh food market, we just go to the supermarket. Because we are raising our child by ourselves. We don’t live with the elderly [parents], so when it comes to buying groceries, we can only go after work, and I say wherever there is food, I would buy.

Mother 1B’s account of struggling with food shopping during ideal times and her reflection that grandparental support could have resolved this reveal how care compromises become normalized as solutions to ‘deficiencies’ in food provision. Her experience demonstrates that these ‘compromises’ are strategic negotiations of care standards under structural constraints, where mothers must reconcile institutional expectations with material realities, such as work. By highlighting these temporal struggles, the analysis exposes the invisible, unpaid labour of women and grandparents who bear the burdens of an unequal care labour that is naturalized through cultural narratives of familial obligation. This normalization process obscures the internalization of privatization of care responsibilities, transforming structural gaps into private family matters, while framing adaptation as cultural tradition rather than exploitation.

Da pei for supplementing and collaboration

Sociological research has highlighted familial collaboration across different generations in negotiating childcare ethics and responsibilities in China (see F. Chen et al., 2011; Xiao, 2016; C. Zhang et al., 2019). In the mothers’ accounts, da pei may be understood as practices of collaboration and mediation between the family and the school. According to the data, it appears that there is a shift to the re-institutionalization of children’s food provision, as many of the primary school children have their main meals at school. The family’s role as a main site of food provision and feeding appear to have been moved to the school. Thus, the mothers in the study appear to take on the role of mediator, rather than in a primary ‘feeding’ role, in collaborating with this institutional provision. There appears to be trustworthy relations between the parents and the school, as the mothers rarely directly criticized the quality of school food. The following data can be understood as how they da pei food after school, in order to ensure that sufficient good food was provided for their children, so that nutritional standards were met and any possible ‘deficit’ avoided. Simultaneously, the ambiguities regarding these institutional responsibilities were addressed in the parents’ accounts regarding school–family relations in their everyday food practices. Their accounts suggest that family food might become ‘supplementary’ and the role of the parents might serve as a mediator in complementing the institutional distribution of food. The ambivalence between the private and public, as well as responsibility and obligation play a part in making sense of the changing landscapes of familial food practices in urban China. For example, Mother 7B’s account suggests a shift that the institution of the family as a food provider might become precarious, as the shifting responsibility of providing nutritional food.

Mother 7B (3–6 years): The school meals are quite bland. [But] there is quite of lot of variety for the food they provide, and it’s not too repetitive five days a week. And the kid likes it. Yes, the nutritional combination is good. I don’t just cook for him exclusively, because he likes to eat.

Considering the apparent ‘trust’ in school meals, as their accounts often appear to justify what they cook outside the school as a form of collaboration with the school as supplementary, the mothers were often seen to develop subtle but critical ‘strategies’ in maintaining the importance of family-based care as a way of enabling good care and good food provision. Mother 5B’s account below illustrates the rationale and their strategies of cooking similar types of food to the school meals.

Mother 5B (3–6 years): . . . So our family prepares our daily food based on the daily menu used by the school [which] sends out daily recipes. We make sure a dish from the school will be on our table every day. But in different styles of cooking. Their teachers will also feed back to us every day, whether children have eaten all the food today, and any food that children left over, or do not like it. They will give us feedback. Yes, we pay attention all the time.

Mother 5B’s strategic practice of combining family cooking with school dishes as a way of practising attentive care reveals how institutional food regimes extend their governance into domestic space, transforming family meals into an extension of pedagogical discipline. The school’s daily menu does not merely inform household cooking but structures it, creating a feedback system where maternal care is calibrated to institutional metrics of consumption (‘whether children have eaten all the food . . . or do not like it’). This case reveals how urban Chinese families serve as intermediary sites where state educational systems, neoliberal food governance and gendered care expectations converge. As Mother 9B suggests:

At school, the da pei (the combination) of the food must be made by the bao jian (health maintenance) teacher, but he might not be used to many of the dishes served [by the school]. (Mother 9B)

The school’s menu operates not as neutral guidance but as a disciplinary technology, while maternal adaptations, such as both Mother 5B’s and Mother 9B’s narratives relate, both represent compliance with and imply subtle resistance to these governing logics through their own creativity to da pei the school menu. Mother 7C (primary school) describes her practice of combining school meals and family cooking through attentive consideration of her son’s preferences, combining different types of dishes:

Because he usually eats rice at school, and then on weekends, he wants to eat noodles, and then the noodles he eats are very simple, either noodles with spring onion oil, or noodles in soup, and then there aren’t a lot of vegetables. For breakfast and dinner, we try our best to have a better da pei of food. For lunch, he sometimes feels that he has to have rice every day at school, and he wants to eat noodles at home on weekends.

Mother 7C’s narrative reveals a contradiction in contemporary food governance: their so-called ‘collaboration’ with the school masks a care dynamic, where maternal care labour becomes the invisible infrastructure within institutional feeding systems. This arrangement constitutes a double dispossession – where mothers’ domestic labour is simultaneously appropriated and depoliticized under the neoliberal logic of care. Such a collaborative notion of care might also be understood as means of control and power, as illustrated in their accounts of concern about the lack of flavour and familiarity with the children’s tastes. Mother 1B’s (3–6 years) response to the institutional fixed menu might be understood as attentive care as well as control in relation to eating snacks, demonstrating a strict parental style that might be stereotypically interpreted.

For snacks, just control it, basically don’t buy it for him. In kindergarten there is no way [to control], because kindergarten has a fixed menu, eat some snacks such as biscuits for convenience. Basically we have been quite attentive at home and not to give him biscuits. I don’t buy them.

Her account also implies a structural tension between the institutional care provided by the kindergarten and parental care within the family. Her proclaimed control suggests a resistance against institutional feeding regimes, rather than simply an autonomous care strategy. It is important to make sense of how these acts of da pei serve to maintain the mother’s role as primary food provider, as is culturally assigned to her, and how ‘attentiveness’ of control naturalizes the cultural expectation that mothers should monitor and mitigate any systemic nutritional deficiencies. The dynamics of intergenerational care in da pei practices reveal a hidden mechanism of social reproduction, where families’ socioeconomic positioning transforms routine food provisioning into a site of class distinction and cultural capital accumulation. Mother 2C’s account contrasts with Mother 6A’s narrative of mundane food practice support – ‘Usually [maternal] grandma goes to pick the relatively fresh food quite early in the morning’ – which is shared by many families with intergenerational support. It reveals another dynamic of how intergenerational collaboration operates not merely as care collaboration, but as a stratified system of nutritional socialization that perpetuates class advantage. As Mother 2C relates:

Mostly from Monday to Friday, he eats at school for breakfast, lunch and dinner. . . . Then on Saturdays we eat at home, and when we eat at home, we still pay more attention to the da pei. If I feel they are not nutritious enough, we will make up for it with other ingredients. But we don’t eat that kind of specialist nutritional supplements. Because his grandfather is a medical doctor, sometimes he gives advice to the child’s nutritional da pei through the use of ingredients.

The neoliberal restructuring of parenting under market-oriented ideologies has engendered a stratified landscape of institutional care collaboration, where families with more social and economic resources strategically mobilize their ‘capitals’ to practise more ‘attentive’ care. While all mothers in the study exhibited pragmatic adaptations to schooling demands, families with fewer resources like Mother 6A deploy intergenerational support for labour supplementation, whereas professional families like Mother 2C leverages grandparents’ cultural capital to engineer performance-enhancing nutrition. This divergence reveals how institutional food systems silently reward hidden investments, where ‘appropriate food’ provision outside the school becomes differentially coded as either compensatory labour (for time-poor households managing basic needs) or human capital cultivation (for resourced families optimizing extracurricular schedules). The shared rhetoric of da pei thus obscures a classed dynamic: where mothers with fewer resources fear insufficient nutrients, their more resourceful counterparts appear to demonstrate a more competitive edge. Thus, the school–family da pei model functions less as an egalitarian collaboration than as an unacknowledged mechanism of social reproduction, transforming shared meals into yet another place for the intergenerational transmission of class advantage. Mother 3C’s account furthers a ‘classed’ dimension in her design of combining extracurricular activities with food practices in cultivating good taste for her children.

Mother 3C (primary school): . . . we take them to, such as strawberry farms, or sometimes the vegetable fields with friends and show them how to dig lotus root [out of school time]. . . . Maybe now I don’t tell them deliberately to eat something with this or that, because a lot of things they just naturally think that’s the way it should be [eaten together] . . . when he eats dumplings, he knows that he has to dip it in vinegar and when he eats crab, he knows that I will tell him that [crab] is Han ‘chill/cool’, and he may not know what ‘Han’ means, but he will know later on that it doesn’t mean physically cold.

Mother 3C’s narrative exemplifies Peng’s (2024) findings on conjugal negotiations over children’s organized extracurricular activities, suggesting that parents do not unconditionally follow the cultural and ideological scripts of good parenting, with diverse interpretations of the meanings of children’s extracurricular activities. There are ambiguous boundaries between responsibilities of the family and the school. The activities the mothers engage with privately, such as growing fruit and vegetables with their children and food literacy education, seem to resonate with existing sociological debates of the performance of cosmopolitan sophistication, in order to cultivate a classed future generation within the discourse of education for suzhi (quality) (see Jacka, 2009). As Mother 3C implies, the children’s out of school time was filled with extracurricular activities. Importantly, sociological studies acknowledge that parents in a more resourceful socioeconomic position are more likely to interact with teachers than their working-class peers (see Li et al., 2017). This is also evidenced in how the variety of resources, in relation to social, cultural and economic factors, tend to be central in their da pei practices in becoming a ‘collaborator’, rather than just a ‘mediator’ or ‘practitioner’ of institutional rules and guidance, such as school meals. Such accounts resonate with urban middle-class parents’ elaborations on how they engage with the school and collaborate with institutional provisions outside the school. This includes consulting other family members for credible nutritional advice, as well as arranging family activities to cultivate children’s food literacy for possible good health in the future.

Conclusion

This article highlights the conceptualization of da pei as the practice of ‘doing’ care, particularly in relation to preparing and arranging food for children, while also serving as a critical lens for understanding the manifestation of evolving familial care culture as a form of ‘becoming’ (see De la Bellacasa, 2017) in contemporary China. These practices facilitate an exploration of what constitutes good food and good parenting, shedding light on how neoliberal values of governmentality become internalized, negotiated and manifested in their narratives, concerning the unequal allocation of resources for the da pei of food. Consequently, da pei serves as a culturally sensitive analytical tool to elucidate how ‘good’ care is understood and manifested in parents’ everyday interactions with food for their children. The article reveals various sociocultural factors and meanings that underlie the articulation of parents’ food da pei practices. This exploration reveals that different values and ideologies underpin the meanings of intergenerational care practices, as seen in this monograph (see Choi’s article). The research demonstrates that there are unclear boundaries regarding what is good or healthy food. Exploring the accounts of parents and caregivers becomes pivotal in understanding the complexities involved in the provisioning of food to early-years children. Such an investigation not only unravels the diverse perspectives on what constitutes good food but also provides a nuanced understanding of the symbolic and emotional dimensions attached to these culinary practices, as well as the social dimension underpinning a healthy eating agenda. Moreover, it offers a platform to examine how these practices serve as a medium through which interpersonal bonds are strengthened, and intergenerational relations are negotiated.

The notion of da pei is of sociological significance in enabling us to make sense of changing family relations and the landscapes of childcare in contemporary China. Preparing good food for children is no longer a private family affair. Rather, it appears that traditional parental practices have become a complex social process involving active negotiation with different factors that help shape parents’ understanding of good food, in order to deliver good care for their children. Thus, considering rising public anxiety about food safety and healthy food, the notion of da pei is an active negotiation of doing care in relation to food. It is shaped by the interplay of ethics, values and other social factors. It is equally important to explain how the practices of da pei embody characteristics of childcare within a context where consumerism, the (re-)institutionalization of food provision and traditional care responsibilities intersect. This intersection gives rise to new meanings for family roles and intergenerational relations in a Chinese context.