Food Price Volatility and the Worrying Trend in Children's Snacking in Indonesia

Rising food prices, increasing urbanisation, rising numbers of working women and reduced time for care has led to more children eating more pre?prepared and instant food in Indonesia. Besides the durability of much packaged food, its price is also less volatile and often cheaper than fresh food. The rising consumption of pre?prepared and instant food is a worrying trend for Indonesia because this newly middle?income country faces a problem of hidden hunger. Among households who took part in the Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility study, we found widespread concerns about the quality, nutritional value and safety of snacks and other instant foods eaten by children. We also heard about the effect on children's relations with their elders. This article looks at links between food prices and changing food habits and argues that children's snacking, while appearing micro, is creating macro?dynamics related to nutrition security and social wellbeing

Responsible Adults-in-the-Making: Intergenerational Impact of Parental Migration on Indonesian Young Women's Aspirational Capacity

In the developing economies in Southeast Asia, labour migration is increasingly seen not simply to generate income to meet short-term livelihood needs but to secure the family's future, often by investing in children's education. While much work has been done studying the impact of parents' remittances on children's wellbeing including education access, the impact of parental migration on children's (educational) aspirations has received less attention. Viewing youth as social actors, this paper interrogates how they make meaning of their parents' migration, and how this consequently influences their decisions to activate, delay or reshape their hopes and plans for their own educational and work trajectories. With the increasing feminisation of labour migration in Southeast Asia where gendered regimes in care and domestic work make it easier for women to work overseas, this paper focuses attention on the aspirations of young women at the cusp of adulthood from a migrant-sending area in rural East Java, Indonesia. These young women's 'navigational capacity' (Appadurai, 2004) is not only shaped by tangible obstacles such as the lack of sufficient resources, but is also more subtly moulded by an emerging discourse of self-responsibilisation in the making of 'dutiful daughters'. Drawing on conceptualisations of multiple 'logics of aspiring' operating within spatial contexts (Zipin et al., 2015), we show how young women unsettle, inflect and challenge the normative linear education-work transitions by expressing their desire to replace their parents in accessing labour migration as a livelihood option, and reflect on the dialectical relationship between agency and aspirations