Lifestyles have been highlighted as the main risk factor for noncommunicable diseases in the 21st century, often leaving aside the role of material conditions of reproduction of daily life in modeling of habits and behaviors. The article addresses the tensions and transactions in family nutrition in the city of Santiago, Chile, in which mothers do paid work and are simultaneously in charge of housework and family care. An ethnographic focus was used in interviews with mothers, in addition to passive and participant observation in 20 households in the years 2015 and 2017 to reconstruct the nutritional strategies and reconciliation of women’s paid work with family demands. Such strategies link material, cultural, class, and gender aspects on a daily basis at both the micro and macrosocial levels, in a kind of puzzle that stabilizes preferences, dispositions, and decisions (habitus). The results indicate that mothers model the family lifestyles through such strategies, modulating and taking responsibility for structural aspects that transcend them, producing tension and precariousness in their personal and family life.
Keywords:
Life Style; Working Women; Nutrition; Diet; Cultural Anthropology