Growing Up as Cooks and Sensible Eaters: Recipes and Nutritional Advice for Kids

This chapter examines how food-related discourse addresses children through two complementary genres: recipes for young cooks and nutritional advice. Drawing on discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study investigates a corpus of 93 recipes from the BBC Good Food website and 100 multimodal texts on children’s nutrition, including institutional guidelines, school materials, parent-directed resources, child-oriented media, and public health campaigns. The analysis reveals that recipes combine instructional, promotional, and educational functions, positioning children as active but supervised participants in food preparation while simultaneously addressing adults as facilitators and guardians. Nutritional advice, by contrast, displays marked differences according to audience: institutional and parent-directed materials rely predominantly on authoritative, restrictive, and risk-oriented language, whereas child-focused resources emphasize exploration, enjoyment, and empowerment. Across both datasets, the study identifies recurring ideological patterns, including adult mediation, cultural bias, and socioeconomic assumptions, reinforced through both verbal and visual strategies. The findings suggest that while contemporary food discourse increasingly seeks to engage children as informed and responsible eaters, it continues to construct them primarily as novices requiring guidance. More inclusive, culturally sensitive, and child-centred approaches are therefore needed to promote healthy eating in ways that acknowledge children’s agency while recognizing the broader social and cultural contexts of food.