The diet of young eaters: a specific requirement requiring a reorganisation of family eating habits

International audienceThe diet of young eaters: a specific requirement requiring a reorganisation of family eating habitsL’alimentation des jeunes mangeurs : un besoin spécifique entrainant une réorganisation alimentaire familialeWe decided to take a look at what children eat by focusing on some analyses and results from a research programme on the diet of very young eaters, i.e. children aged between 0 and 3 (Dupuy and Rochedy, 2015). By analysing the underside of domestic and parental production in respect of the diet of small children, the report will focus on the supply journey, storage methods, culinary techniques, table manners and post-meal practices, describing them in terms of different life stages and also in respect of the development and socialisation of children. From a sociological point of view, how can we analyse the parental practices related to the act of feeding alongside those related to the construction of the list, or even the register, of what young children eat as a result of diversification? The various aspects of the work of parents have been investigated (Vandelac et al., 1985): the material work (shopping, preparing food and feeding the child/children but also the rest of the family, etc.), the cognitive work (thinking about what to eat and how to prepare it and anticipating the shopping that needs to be done, etc.) and the sentimental and relational work (family cohesion, being together, conversations/discussions around the child's diet, pleasure, conviviality and the child's well-being, etc.). It then becomes possible to question the evidence of this social fact: studying the work of parents in respect of the diet of young eaters in order to understand the changes, the disparities and the inequalities as well as the construction of the dietary practices of young eaters and the impact of parental work on their socialisation. This line of questioning, which is situated at the crossroads of the sociology of food, childhood, the family, health and gender relations, demands that particular attention be given to the juxtaposition and the combination of several dimensions. Firstly, the social construction of childhood (and early childhood) with the current place of the child and the small child, of children and small children, of childhood and early childhood, in the family, in culture and, more widely, the society under examination, which creates understanding of the socialisation, and particularly the multiple facets (horizontal, vertical and inverse) of food socialisation and the underlying inter/intra-generational relationships. Furthermore, the life stages and diet of the child are taken into account in the process of constructing the list of food (construction of likes and dislikes, rejections, preferences, neophobia, pleasure and emotion) alongside the prevalent childcare norms today. Finally, the issue of domestic and parental work (mental and physical tasks and the division and inequality of work within the family) and the "care" aspect, i.e. "thinking about others", which includes tangible and intangible practices, such as "emotional" components, provide an insight into the complexity of this task.Several points concerning the study are worthy of particular attention. The first relates to the fact that it takes into account a change in the child's diet from birth with milk given to begin with (dietary diversification with the first purée and then textured food with the introduction of lumps) until the child is integrated into family mealtimes, both physically and symbolically, by being served the same food as the rest of the family. These changes require ongoing readjustments in the feeding environment. Furthermore, this study takes a look at the practices and representations of the young child's diet from the point of view of the feeding environment while also considering what the child does with what he receives. Next, transitory ritualisation processes will be considered in order to reflect on the issue of these small rites that enable the child's socialisation and to verbalise the unspoken organisational aspects of the feeding environment in terms of certain cognitive shortcuts that are far from insignificant in daily life, comprising a vital process for parental organisation and, more broadly, for the feeding environment. The "transitory" dimension made it possible to put change and the dynamics of child and adult adaptation at the centre of the ritualisation of daily life as a result of the swings and transitions at work during food socialisation leading the child towards a non-specific diet. Thus, by analysing the diet of young children in this way, it was possible to study the various mental and physical pressures present in the feeding environment and the disparities at work in the threefold work of acquisition-transformation, relationship and love involved in the feeding role. Here again, the plurality and the complexity observed made it possible to re-question the division of domestic and parental tasks in respect of food during early childhood both in practice and in terms of values. Finally, implicitly throughout this study, we looked at the effects of the various educational influences on the processes of food socialisation in the child. The more a person is involved in the feeding role, the more that person has an influence on the relationship between food and the child's health, pleasure, well-being, self-fulfilment and development (Dupuy, 2013, 2014). Consequently, the socialisation processes experienced with the child are complicated, even more so given the concerns that weigh heavily on early childhood, which are currently centred on the importance of feeding children tasty healthy food in the first 1000 days of their lives. Nutritional needs, dietary needs and emotional needs are combined and are translated into, among other things, a sense of catching up in the feeding methods used or by parental guilt and also by a "stencil effect" (Fischler, 1990) in terms of both the list of foods offered to the child and the way in which the child is fed depending on the circumstances, the place, the time, the effect produced, etc. These elements can influence the socialisation processes at work in the child, i.e. what the child receives, how he experiences it and relates to it emotionally and, more importantly, what he takes away from it. Consequently, in the first part, we will set out the context and the challenges of children's diets in order to set the stage for questions involving the concerns surrounding the relationships between diet and health and diet and transmission for early childhood as a result of the importance placed on the first 1000 days in the life of a child. This will provide an opportunity to put these notions back in the centre of individual, collective and social dynamics. The second part will deal with the unequal distribution of the feeding work in respect of the young child. A third part will look at the empirical data of this study, and will be broken down into discussions on the methodology employed and on the study populations in the two geographical areas of France: Toulouse, Paris and their respective suburbs. Finally, the fourth and fifth parts will revisit two particular results from our research. We will discuss the organisational logic and the processes of food socialisation in order to gain an understanding of the evolution of the dietary act by moving away from the specific in favour of the general. We will then suggest a description and an analysis of the complex and unequal feeding work undertaken by parents. Bibliography: Dupuy A., 2013, Plaisirs alimentaires, Socialisation des enfants et des adolescents, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes.Dupuy A., 2014, « Regard(s) « sur » et « par » l’alimentation pour renverser et comprendre comment sont renversés les rapports de générations : l’exemple de la socialisation alimentaire inversée », Enfances Familles Générations, p. 79-108.Dupuy A et Rochedy A., 2015, L’alimentation des O-3 ans.Compréhension des processus de socialisations alimentaires des enfants entre 0 et 3 ans et étude des logiques de co-socialisation et de co-éducation de l’entourage nourricier, Rapport de Recherche CNRS – Blédina. Fischler C., 1990, L’homnivore, Paris, Odile Jacob.Vandelac L., Bélisle D., Gauthier A. et Pinard Y., 1985, Du travail et de l’amour, les dessous de la production domestique, Québec, Saint-Martin

Sensible and latent heat flux from radiometric surface temperatures at the regional scale: methodology and validation

The CarboEurope Regional Experiment Strategy (CERES) was designed to develop and test a range of methodologies to assess regional surface energy and mass exchange of a large study area in the south-western part of France. This paper describes a methodology to estimate sensible and latent heat fluxes on the basis of net radiation, surface radiometric temperature measurements and information obtained from available products derived from the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) geostationary meteorological satellite, weather stations and ground-based eddy covariance towers. It is based on a simplified bulk formulation of sensible heat flux that considers the degree of coupling between the vegetation and the atmosphere and estimates latent heat as the residual term of net radiation. Estimates of regional energy fluxes obtained in this way are validated at the regional scale by means of a comparison with direct flux measurements made by airborne eddy-covariance. The results show an overall good matching between airborne fluxes and estimates of sensible and latent heat flux obtained from radiometric surface temperatures that holds for different weather conditions and different land use types. The overall applicability of the proposed methodology to regional studies is discusse

Detecting regional variability in sources and sinks of carbon dioxide: a synthesis

The current paper reviews the experimental setup of the CarboEurope Experimental Strategy (CERES) campaigns with the aim of providing an overview of the instrumentation used, the data-set and associated modelling. It then assesses progress in the field of regional observation and modelling of carbon fluxes, bringing the papers of this special issue into a somewhat broader context of analysis. <br><br> Instrumental progress has been obtained in the field of remotely monitoring from tall towers and the experimental planning. Flux measurements from aircraft are now capable, within some constraints, to provide regular regional observations of fluxes of CO<sub>2</sub>, latent and sensible heat. <br><br> Considerable effort still needs to be put into calibrating the surface schemes of models, as they have direct impact on the input of energy, moisture and carbon fluxes in the boundary layer. Overall, the mesoscale models appear to be capable of simulating the large scale dynamics of the region, but in the fine detail, like the precise horizontal and vertical CO<sub>2</sub> field differences between the models still exist. These errors translate directly into transport uncertainty, when the forward simulations are used in inverse mode. Quantification of this uncertainty, including that of inadequate boundary layer height modelling, still remains a major challenge for state of the art mesoscale models. Progress in inverse models has been slow, but has shown that it is possible to estimate some of the errors involved, and that using the combination of observations. Overall, the capability to produce regional, high-resolution estimates of carbon exchange, exist in potential, but the routine application will require considerable effort, both in the experimental as in the modelling domain

A simple modeling approach to study the regional impact of a Mediterranean forest isoprene emission on anthropogenic plumes

Research during the past decades has outlined the importance of biogenic isoprene emission in tropospheric chemistry and regional ozone photo-oxidant pollution. The first part of this article focuses on the development and validation of a simple biogenic emission scheme designed for regional studies. Experimental data sets relative to Boreal, Tropical, Temperate and Mediterranean ecosystems are used to estimate the robustness of the scheme at the canopy scale, and over contrasted climatic and ecological conditions. A good agreement is generally found when comparing field measurements and simulated emission fluxes, encouraging us to consider the model suitable for regional application. Limitations of the scheme are nevertheless outlined as well as further on-going improvements. In the second part of the article, the emission scheme is used on line in the broader context of a meso-scale atmospheric chemistry model. Dynamically idealized simulations are carried out to study the chemical interactions of pollutant plumes with realistic isoprene emissions coming from a Mediterranean oak forest. Two types of anthropogenic sources, respectively representative of the Marseille (urban) and Martigues (industrial) French Mediterranean sites, and both characterized by different VOC/NOx are considered. For the Marseille scenario, the impact of biogenic emission on ozone production is larger when the forest is situated in a sub-urban configuration (i.e.&nbsp;downwind distance TOWN-FOREST <30km, considering an advection velocity of 4.2 m.s^-1). In this case the enhancement of ozone production due to isoprene can reach +37% in term of maximum surface concentrations and +11% in term of total ozone production. The impact of biogenic emission decreases quite rapidly when the TOWN-FOREST distance increases. For the Martigues scenario, the biogenic impact on the plume is significant up to TOWN-FOREST distance of 90km where the ozone maximum surface concentration enhancement can still reach +30%. For both cases, the importance of the VOC/NO_x ratio in the anthropogenic plume and its evolution when interacting with the forest emission are outlined. In complement to real case studies, this idealized approach can be particularly useful for process and sensitivity studies and constitutes a valuable tool to build regional ozone control strategies

Mesoscale covariance of transport and CO2 fluxes: Evidence from observations and simulations using the WRF-VPRM coupled atmosphere-biosphere model

We developed a modeling system which combines a mesoscale meteorological model, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, with a diagnostic biospheric model, the Vegetation Photosynthesis and Respiration (VPRM). The WRF-VPRM modeling system was designed to realistically simulate high-resolution atmospheric CO₂ concentration fields. In the system, WRF takes into account anthropogenic and biospheric CO₂ fluxes and realistic initial and boundary conditions for CO₂ from a global model. The system uses several “tagged” tracers for CO₂ fields from different sources. VPRM uses meteorological fields from WRF and high-resolution satellite indices to simulate biospheric CO₂ fluxes with realistic spatiotemporal patterns. Here we present results from the application of the model for interpretation of measurements made within the CarboEurope Regional Experiment Strategy (CERES). Simulated fields of meteorological variables and CO₂ were compared against ground-based and airborne observations. In particular, the characterization by aircraft measurements turned out to be crucial for the model evaluation. The comparison revealed that the model is able to capture the main observed features in the CO₂ distribution reasonably well. The simulations showed that daytime CO₂ measurements made at coastal stations can be strongly affected by land breeze and subsequent sea breeze transport of CO₂ respired from the vegetation during the previous night, which can lead to wrong estimates when such data are used in inverse studies. The results also show that WRF-VPRM is an effective modeling tool for addressing the near-field variability of CO₂ fluxes and concentrations for observing stations around the globe

CO2 budgeting at the regional scale using a Lagrangian experimental strategy and meso-scale modeling

An atmospheric Lagrangian experiment for regional CO2 budgeting with aircraft measurements took place during the CarboEurope Regional Experiment Strategy campaign (CERES) in south-west France, in June 2005. The atmospheric CO2 aircraft measurements taken upstream and downstream of an active and homogeneous pine forest revealed a CO2 depletion in the same air mass, using a Lagrangian strategy. This field experiment was analyzed with a meteorological meso-scale model interactively coupled with a surface scheme, with plant assimilation, ecosystem respiration, anthropogenic CO2 emissions and sea fluxes. First, the model was carefully validated against observations made close to the surface and in the atmospheric boundary layer. Then, the carbon budget was evaluated using the numerous CERES observations, by upscaling the surface fluxes observations, and using the modeling results, in order to estimate the relative contribution of each physical process. A good agreement is found between the two methods which use the same vegetation map: the estimation of the regional CO2 surface flux by the Eulerian meso-scale model budget is close to the budget deduced from the upscaling of the observed surface fluxes, and found a budget between −9.4 and −12.1μmol.m−2.s−1, depending on the size of the considered area. Nevertheless, the associated uncertainties are rather large for the upscaling method and reach 50%. A third method, using Lagrangian observations of CO2 estimates a regional CO2 budget a few different and more scattered, (−16.8μmol.m−2.s−1 for the small sub-domain and −8.6μmol.m−2.s−1 for the larger one). For this budgeting method, we estimate a mean of 31% error, mainly arising from the time of integration between the two measurements of the Lagrangian experiment. The paper describes in details the three methods to assess the regional CO2 budget and the associated error

Mesoscale modelling of the CO2 interactions between the surface and the atmosphere applied to the April 2007 CERES field experiment

This paper describes a numerical interpretation of the April 2007, CarboEurope Regional Experiment Strategy (CERES) campaign, devoted to the study of the CO2 cycle at the regional scale. Four consecutive clear sky days with intensive observations of CO2 concentration, fluxes at the surface and in the boundary layer have been simulated with the Meso-NH mesoscale model, coupled to ISBA-A-gs land surface model. The main result of this paper is to show how aircraft observations of CO2 concentration have been used to identify surface model errors and to calibrate the CO2 driving component of the surface model. In fact, the comparisons between modelled and observed CO2 concentrations within the Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) allow to calibrate and correct not only the parameterization of respired CO2 fluxes by the ecosystem but also the Leaf Area Index (LAI) of the dominating land cover. After this calibration, the paper describes systematic comparisons of the model outputs with numerous data collected during the CERES campaign, in April 2007. For instance, the originality of this paper is the spatial integration of the comparisons. In fact, the aircraft observations of CO2 concentration and fluxes and energy fluxes are used for the model validation from the local to the regional scale. As a conclusion, the CO2 budgeting approach from the mesoscale model shows that the winter croplands are assimilating more CO2 than the pine forest, at this stage of the year and this case study

Bridging the gap between atmospheric concentrations and local ecosystem measurements

This paper demonstrates that atmospheric inversions of CO₂ are a reliable tool for estimating regional fluxes. We compare results of an inversion over 18 days and a 300 x 300 km 2 domain in southwest France against independent measurements of fluxes from aircraft and towers. The inversion used concentration measurements from 2 towers while the independent data included 27 aircraft transects and 5 flux towers. The inversion reduces the mismatch between prior and independent fluxes, improving both spatial and temporal structures. The present mesoscale atmospheric inversion improves by 30% the CO₂ fluxes over distances of few hundreds of km around the atmospheric measurement locations. Citation: Lauvaux, T., et al. (2009), Bridging the gap between atmospheric concentrations and local ecosystem measurements, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L19809, doi: 10.1029/2009GL039574

Atmospheric CO2 modeling at the regional scale: an intercomparison of 5 meso-scale atmospheric models

Atmospheric CO2 modeling in interaction with the surface fluxes, at the regional scale is developed within the frame of the European project CarboEurope-IP and its Regional Experiment component. In this context, five meso-scale meteorological models participate in an intercomparison exercise. Using a common experimental protocol that imposes a large number of rules, two days of the CarboEurope Regional Experiment Strategy (CERES) campaign are simulated. A systematic evaluation of the models is done in confrontation with the observations, using statistical tools and direct comparisons. Thus, temperature and relative humidity at 2 m, wind direction, surface energy and CO2 fluxes, vertical profiles of potential temperature as well as in-situ CO2 concentrations comparisons between observations and simulations are examined. This intercomparison exercise shows also the models ability to represent the meteorology and carbon cycling at the synoptic and regional scale in the boundary layer, but also points out some of the major shortcomings of the models

Three flavor neutrino oscillation analysis of atmospheric neutrinos in Super-Kamiokande

We report on the results of a three-flavor oscillation analysis using Super-Kamiokande~I atmospheric neutrino data, with the assumption of one mass scale dominance ($\Delta m_{12}^2$$=$0). No significant flux change due to matter effect, which occurs when neutrinos propagate inside the Earth for $\theta_{13}$$\neq$0, has been seen either in a multi-GeV $\nu_e$-rich sample or in a $\nu_\mu$-rich sample. Both normal and inverted mass hierarchy hypotheses are tested and both are consistent with observation. Using Super-Kamiokande data only, 2-dimensional 90 % confidence allowed regions are obtained: mixing angles are constrained to $\sin^2\theta_{13} < 0.14$ and $0.37 < \sin^2\theta_{23} < 0.65$ for the normal mass hierarchy. Weaker constraints, $\sin^2\theta_{13} < 0.27$ and $0.37 < \sin^2\theta_{23} < 0.69$, are obtained for the inverted mass hierarchy case.Comment: 7 figures, 3 table