Research report Adult and child use of love, like, don’t like and hate during family mealtimes. Subjective category assessments as food preference talk ☆ Sally Wiggins * School of Psychological Sciences and Health, University of Strathclyde, Graham Hills Building, 40 George Street, Glasgow, G1 1QE ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 21 October 2013 Received in revised form 25 April 2014 Accepted 26 April 2014 Available online 30 April 2014 Keywords: Assessment Children Discursive psychology Food preference Liking Subjective ABSTRACT Food preference is now a ubiquitous concept in eating research, and closely associated with actual con- sumption, particularly in relation to children’s food preferences. Research in this area is beginning to reveal the effects of parent–child interaction on eating practices though relatively little attention has been paid to the discursive and lexical processes involved. Food preferences are typically associated with the terms ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ in food preference research. By contrast, adults and children typically use the terms ‘love’, ‘like’, ‘don’t like’ and ‘hate’ to construct and manage food preferences in everyday meal conversa- tions. A corpus of 270 video- and audio-recorded English and Scottish family mealtimes, involving chil- dren aged 1–17 years, was searched and analysed for any and all occurrences of subjective category assessments (SCAs; e.g., ‘I like X’), featuring the terms ‘love’, ‘like’, ‘don’t like’ and ‘hate’. Discursive psy- chology was used to analyse the transcripts and recordings, and illustrated the disparity between adult and child use of SCAs and food preference talk. Within the data set, parents typically made claims about what their children like, and in doing so claimed epistemic primacy over their children’s food prefer- ences. Children, by contrast, typically made claims about their own ‘don’t likes’ and likes, and these were frequently countered by their parents or treated as inappropriate claims. Implications for how parents and researchers might reorient to the food preferences lexicon are discussed. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction The concept of food preference is fundamental to understand- ing eating practices, particularly in relation to the literature on child feeding. It has become a ubiquitous concept, generating thou- sands of journal articles and entire academic journals (e.g., Food Quality and Preference). The importance of parental involvement in developing children’s food preferences has also been clearly documented. The main aim of this paper is to contribute to re- search on food preference by providing early evidence of how adults and children orient to and negotiate food preferences during ev- eryday family mealtimes. In doing so, it raises three interrelated issues that have not previously been addressed in the literature: (1) the potentially problematic way in which the term ‘like’ (as a noun, and as part of the food preferences lexicon) has been used in food research as a shorthand for a range of cognitive, sensory or physiological states, without any clear definition (or evidence) that people use or understand the term ‘like’ in such ways in ev- eryday practice; (2) use of the terms ‘love/like/don’t like/hate’ by adults and children – as verbs, and as examples of subjective cat- egory assessments (i.e., those assessments which foreground the subject/consumer and denote a broad category of food) – and their role in the construction of food preferences in family mealtime con- versation; (3) the role of epistemic access and primacy in claiming knowledge about another person’s physiological or cognitive state. The implications of the findings of this paper relate both to our understanding of parent–child management of children’s eating practices and of the concept of food preference more broadly. There is therefore both a theoretical and empirical focus to this paper. The first section of the introduction summarises the impor- tance of parental involvement in children’s food preference devel- opment and the need to focus on parent–child interaction during family mealtimes. Thereafter the concern is with the predomi- nance of the terms ‘likes/liking’ and ‘dislikes’ in the food preference literature, and the disparity between this and the lexical, discursive and interactional implications of the term ‘like’ ☆ Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank the families who gener- ously granted permission to record their family mealtimes, and to the children who made them so much fun. Thanks are also due to the individuals who assisted with data collection, transcription and coding: Kay Adams, Mike Forrester, Gillian Hendry, Clare McMaster and Kate Tobin. The author would also like to thank Kevin Durkin, Eric Laurier, the journal editor and reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper. * E-mail address: sally.wiggins@strath.ac.uk. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2014.04.024 0195-6663/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Appetite 80 (2014) 7–15 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Appetite journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/appet