Structuring for Nutrition
Schooling Lunch: Health, Food and the Pedagogicalization of the Lunchbox
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Deana Leahy, Carolyn Pluim
In this paper we examine how the school lunchbox has become a contemporary site of governmental surveillance, intervention and reform. Drawing on Popkewitz’s (2008) concept of pedagogicalization, we describe how school lunches act as a kind of normalizing and regulating device to educate on what it means to have an acceptable lunch, be a responsible parent (Pike & Leahy, 2012) and have and/or be a healthy child (Evans, De Pian & Rich, 2011). Our international investigation considers school practices and policies in Australia, New Zealand, and United States. Drawing on the field of governmentality studies our discourse analysis of key policies, curriculum documents and program websites and materials reveals the widespread use of the school lunch experience as a (global) strategy to instill ideological and normative messages around health, consumption and responsibility. Our analysis then turns to examine the role of educators in this process and the various subject positions they are encouraged to assume with regards to the health and wellness discourses in circulation. We conclude by suggesting that the lunchbox has become a powerful governmental device that works to produce particular notions of the healthy self and parenting that are potentially problematic and may indeed produce counter effects.
Dietary Self-Examination in Childhood Nutrition Education: A CDA Analysis of Classroom and Policy Documents in Ontario, 1942-2017
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Janet Loughheed
Canadian childhood nutrition education was fundamentally changed with the introduction of the Official Food Rules in 1942. This study examines this nutrition knowledge for Everyman and how the dietary self-examination was employed in elementary nutrition classroom materials. Children are educated in the pass/fail binaries of a quantitatively defined diet based on the government-determined Food Guide. Discourse analysis of classroom and policy materials of Ontario reveals changing gender roles and the use of healthy eating education as a governmental technology to promote patriotism, multiculturalism and responsibility for the public healthcare system over the next 75 years. Focusing education on unrealistic personal obedience to food guides allows misdirection of attention from regulatory weaknesses in the food supply, as well as social, economic and environmental influences on health. Healthy eating education remains focused on indoctrinating children into personal responsibility for diet-related health issues.
Starving People is Bad or Starving People are Bad?: Institutional Racism and Classism in School Lunch Programs
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joshua Oliver
After the end of World War II the western world decided that the act of starving people is bad. The aftermath of Stalin's hunger based genocide in Ukraine, famine in India, and the ravages of the Great Depression prompted governments around the world to institute domestic and international food security programs, including school lunch initiatives. Currently the United States school lunch program focuses on feeding 30 million students each year. However, the foods that are offered to these students are notoriously unhealthy. Moreover, these programs, by design and impact, exist at the intersection of institutional racism and classism in American society today. Recent years have seen massive cuts to food based welfare programs alongside increasing negative public portrayals of the people who benefit from these programs. The combination of these cuts as well as increased stigma and stereotypes against those who benefit from these programs show a growing perspective that starving people are in and of themselves bad. This research will examine the racial and socio-economic biases exhibited by the U.S. school lunch program by analyzing Free and Reduced Lunch, demographics of Free/Reduced Lunch Participants, nutritional value and health consequences of U.S. school lunches, and how school lunch programs in different parts of the world operate. The research will also analyze what the goals of the federal government in the United States are with school lunch. Do they exist because starving people is bad or because starving people are bad?
