Fast‐food Kids. French Fries, Lunch Lines, and Social TiesBy Amy L.Best. New York: New York University Press, 2017 ISBN 9781479802326, 245 pp, US$26 (pb)

In this ethnographic study, sociologist Amy Best aimed to elucidate ‘what kids eat and why’ (p. xi), noting that unless policy-makers attend to the meanings of young people's food choices, attempts to address them are likely to misfire. Drawing on a variety of sites, informants and methods, Best has crafted a fluid, immensely readable and thoughtful account of young people's contemporary food meanings, practices and relationships in urban and suburban settings in the USA. Best incorporates material from a number of sources: several hundred written narratives and interviews about family and food with young adults; extended observations in the cafeterias in two public high schools (with contrasting student intakes, academic achievement, and free school lunch eligibility); interviews with cafeteria managers; and extended field work in commercial fast food settings frequented by young people in the USA such as Baskin Robbins ice cream parlours, McDonalds, Chipotle, Taco Bell and others. Her analyses focus on ‘cultural and situational dynamics’, and she also draws deftly and extensively on theoretical insights and empirical studies from a wide range of anthropologists, sociologists and historians (almost all also from the USA) to contextualise, situate and enrich her findings. Best argues that food, a key cultural object in youth worlds, fulfils social ends as a ‘gift, identity marker and object of play’. Young people, she concludes, utilise and desire commercial foods as an expression of their belonging in youth worlds, as part of a teen gift economy in which both social status and friendship ties are communicated, and interestingly she also finds that young people often play with food in youth settings such as cafeterias and fast food outlets. The recognition of play is a welcome addition to studies of young people and food, as play is a form of individual and social activity often only explored in observations of younger children. The analysis unpicks the place of food in family, as both sacralised and everyday, a moral site that is also interwoven with fast-food offerings; class and gendered differences in responses to and meanings of food among young people in the United States and the many aspects of young people's lives in which food is involved including their social bonds, social distinction, status play, identity needs, memory, emotion and others. Although this volume articulates generational perspectives by virtue of its focus, and does note lacunae in (for example) Bourdieu's consideration of how tastes and practices might be formed in childhood and youth, it is surprising that it has (almost without exception) not drawn on theory or empirical findings from Childhood and Youth Studies (CYS) and in particular the small and growing body of work on children and food in this field. Perhaps this reflects sociology's failure, to date, in the United States to interact with CYS as articulated, for example, by Allison Pugh's (2014) note of mainstream sociology's ‘relative imperviousness’ to children's perspectives. As befits an ethnographic study it is firmly situated in its context and Best recognises that it is limited in not reflecting experiences of rural youth. Yet at times I wished for a framing of attitudes, contexts, meanings and behaviours of these young people and their social surrounds that more overtly recognised the geographically bounded nature of the setting within the USA, and that considered possible links and contrasts with others. But perhaps this is too much to ask for. Overall this is a lively, thoughtful, rich and most enjoyable addition to a small body of work that seeks to go beyond the mantras of public health exhortations that children and young people should be healthier, and to understand the meanings and roles that food plays in their lives.

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