The construction of taste beyond multiple constraints: an ethnography of food practices of children in asylum seeking situation in the Walloon region (Belgium)

Food is often at the core of a lot of social exchanges, sometimes helping, or on the contrary, hindering the integration process for migrant children who often travel between different socialization food spheres. Of the 26.4 million refugees have arrived in Europe in 2020 (HCR, 2020), many of them were children. Nevertheless, migrant children’s food practices seem to be less studied in social sciences. From this observation, it is particularly important to document children’s practices and opinions, and their agency in the social environment they frequent, to understand the migration and integration process in all its complexity. More than ever, the migration situation leads many changes and children have to mobilize their adaptation capacity to apprehend the host society food model. In this context, how children deal with food constraints in the different food socialization spheres?
Based on fieldwork with children in asylum seeking situation, living in a reception center in the Walloon part of Belgium, as part of ongoing doctoral research, this paper aims at situating children’s food experience at thecrossroads of creativity and institutional or parental constraints. How children develop their relation with food in a migration context? As opposed to a vertical vision of transmission, in this paper, we will focus on how children socialize with food, and how they teach food knowledges to adults and to their peer group, contributing to the enrichment of their taste criteria and to their daily social exchanges in Belgium.