As you’ll know if you get a bus or train during school-run hours, lots of children take themselves to school on public transport. It’s very loud. Children and teenagers have their own strange and emergent ways of doing things – their own language, their own music, their own culture, their own tastes. The energy of a group of kids or teenagers on the bus or the train is astonishing and sometimes annoying, especially if you’re trying to read or listen to a podcast on your own. In ungenerous moments, you might look at kids with an othering eye, and wish they’d be quieter and not fill the bus with noise and the smell of hot food or bright wrappers for chocolate when you’re trying to focus on something else.
But a child eating is undoubtedly a good thing. If they’re eating of their own volition on the bus or the train, it’s because they need to, because they’re hungry, or for a sense of comfort, or to be part of a group, or for pleasure, or for whatever reason that is private to them. You can’t know why. Like any person, a child’s particular appetite for the food they are eating is meaningful to them, and it’s as private and sacred as their feelings, or who they love, or their other general wishes for life. To have an appetite is a sign of life.
On a London bus in the summer, I overheard two mothers talking to each other. They were discussing the stress of feeding their kids during the holidays, when free school meals weren’t operating. The cost and the logistics of feeding their kids while they were also working was difficult, they said. Everywhere in the UK, there isn’t enough food or enough ways to provide it. There are thousands of food banks which are also used by people who are in work because they cannot afford food. There are food deserts where fresh food is impossible to buy even if you could afford it. There are zero-hour contracts and low-paid jobs that don’t pay for someone else to feed your kids after school, or where shifts are cancelled so things don’t add up. There are people who stay in violent homes because they can’t afford to leave, who might want to encourage their children to eat elsewhere.
Public space is receding fast in the UK. Spaces in which you can eat your own food – rather than food purchased on-site – is in sharp decline. Spaces that look public, are increasingly in fact private and owned by property developers, who employ their own security guards. There is a proliferation of rules about loitering in parks and squares and streets. Spaces that were public are becoming like hotels where if you are not a paying guest, you aren’t welcome. Cafés and pubs where you might go as an adult with money are too expensive for kids, or serve alcohol. Places that kids and teenagers were allowed to hang out and eat, such as youth clubs and community centres, have been shutting down rapidly due to austerity-related cuts.
Malnourishment and poor access to fresh “home-cooked” food eaten at home (and not on the bus) is a structural, societal problem to do with the withering away of welfare provision, poverty, precarious parental and carer working conditions. Wealthier classes have traditionally relied upon unpaid female domestic labour to feed kids freshly cooked food (aka, stay at home/part-time-working parents). The time and resources to do food shopping and cooking like this is a luxury many would love to have but cannot afford.
If children shouldn’t eat on public transport, the implication is that they should eat at home. But what and where is home? Care relationships are varied and complex, and the spaces in which care happens – including self-care in the form of eating – are varied and complex too. Perhaps a child being given money to get something to eat on the bus is a solution to eating for that family. Perhaps it’s the child’s solution for themselves. You can’t know.
Who wants to tell a child to stop eating?
Who wants to ask a child, in public, if their parents are negligent?
Such acts of shaming are violent and traumatising. We need more ways to feed people, not fewer. On the other hand, the conservative government’s wish not to intervene isn’t good either. There is a problem with people being able to eat enough in the UK, and we need to find solutions. There should be free snacks and takeaway meals at schools, public canteens that do not serve alcohol and which are safe for children, better working conditions for parents and carers – a few ideas. Any problems to do with the nourishment of children is our collective responsibility, and it has nothing to do with banning children from eating on public transport: who knows, you might be taking away their most important meal of the day.
Rebecca May Johnson is a writer and academic