Food, Motherhood and Foodwork: Eating Practices During Pregnancy

This study aims to examine eating practices during pregnancy as socially organized everyday labor (foodwork) embedded in daily life. Drawing on the sociology of food, it analyzes how pregnancy reshapes eating routines, food classifications, procurement practices, and care responsibilities. The research is based on in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with 38 pregnant women living in Türkiye. The findings demonstrate that eating during pregnancy becomes a multilayered social practice shaped by normative expectations, structural inequalities, and identity construction. First, eating routines emerge as a central site for the construction of maternal identity, as women regulate their food practices through expert advice, risk discourses, and norms of “good motherhood.” Second, body-related norms concerning aesthetics and weight control discipline eating practices under conditions of public surveillance and self-monitoring, shaping everyday eating arrangements. Third, pregnancy functions as a social lens that intensifies concerns related to food safety and food security; pesticides, additives, regulatory uncertainty, and economic access become central elements of everyday foodwork. By moving beyond medical and ideological approaches to pregnancy nutrition, this study foregrounds eating practices as foodwork and contributes to the sociology of food by linking motherhood, care labor, and food systems.