Food Pedagogies

Rick Flowers, Elaine Swan, Rick Flowers, Elaine Swan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317134282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Política de salud

In recent years everyone from politicians to celebrity chefs has been proselytizing about how we should grow, buy, prepare, present, cook, taste, eat and dispose of food. In light of this, contributors to this book argue that food has become the target of intensified pedagogical activity across a range of domains, including schools, supermarkets, families, advertising and TV media. Illustrated with a range of empirical studies, this edited and interdisciplinary volume - the first book on food pedagogies - develops innovative and theoretical perspectives to problematize the practices of teaching and learning about food. While many different pedagogues - policy makers, churches, activists, health educators, schools, tourist agencies, chefs - think we do not know enough about food and what to do with it, the aims, effects and politics of these pedagogies has been much less studied. Drawing on a range of international studies, diverse contexts, genres and different methods, this book provides new sites of investigation and lines of inquiry. As a result of its broad ranging critical evaluation of 'food as classroom' and 'food as teacher', it provides theoretical resources for opening up the concept of pedagogy, and assessing the moralities and politics of teaching and learning about food in the classroom and beyond.

1 Food Pedagogies: Histories, Definitions and Moralities

Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan

DOI: 10.4324/9781315582689-1

From the Slow Food Movement to the World Street Food Congress and Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food and the ‘healthy eating’ campaigns of government and non-government agencies, efforts to ‘teach’ us about food have intensified. In this book we apply the concept of ‘food pedagogies’ to analyse the proliferation of teaching and learning about food, the diversification of food educational processes, the rise of new food pedagogues and the shift in expertise and knowledge about food. In essence, in this collection the term food pedagogies denotes a congeries of educational, teaching and learning ideologies and practices carried out by a range of agencies, actors, institutions and media which focus variously on growing, shopping, cooking, eating and disposing of food. This definition points to various forms, sites and processes of formal, informal and incidental education and learning, inside and beyond the classroom. Scholars in the field of adult education use the adjectives formal, informal and incidental to typologise, roughly speaking, the degree to which learning is programmatic; led by teachers; and undertaken purposely by learners (Flowers, Guevara and Whelan 2009). Examples of formal food pedagogies include cooking masterclasses, health education in schools, nutrition workshops in food security programmes, and permaculture courses; instances of informal food pedagogies are food programmes on television, community gardening, and social marketing campaigns led by food social movements or supermarkets; and incidental food pedagogies cover learning from social occasions, eating and drinking with friends, families and on holidays.

As these examples suggest, food pedagogies entail significant and asymmetrical relations of power, authority and expertise. They reproduce ‘moral economies’ (Coveney 2006) of knowledge and food practices reproducing categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers/eaters/consumers: those who look after their health and those who put their children’s health at risk; those who have refined taste and those who eat indiscriminately; those who care about animal welfare and environmentalism and those who buy cheap food regardless of where it comes from; those who have cosmopolitan sensibilities and try new ethnic foods and those who are unadventurous, even racist, in their eating. Often classist, sexist and racist, food pedagogies are grounded in the assumption that the main determinant of ‘bad’ food choice is lack of knowledge, ignoring the social, political and cultural complexities of food in people’s lives (Guthman 2008a and b; Hayes-Conroy 2009). As a result, food pedagogies position women as bad mothers and cooks; responsibilise individuals and ignore wider structural inequalities and social hierarchies; perpetuate universalist assumptions about what constitutes ‘good food’; overemphasise nutritional scientific knowledge; and privilege bodily health over mental well-being (Coveney 2006; Guthman 2008a/b; Berlant 2010; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2014).

Food pedagogies elevate those ‘in the know’ and their ‘good intentions’; and shame classed and racialised forms of food knowledge, lifestyle and embodiment. Moreover, middle-class food pedagogies such as permaculture workshops and cooking classes, voluntarily paid for as leisure pursuits, reproduce status distinction and consolidate classed and racialised hierarchies of taste, ‘healthism’ and ‘doing good’ (Guthman 2008a and b; Flowers and Swan 2012c). Indeed, garnering new knowledge about food constitutes the core of middle-class foodie, locavore and food adventurer identities (De Solier 2013; Johnston and Baumann 2010).

The proliferation and intensification of food pedagogies means that there is a plethora of pedagogues with a mission to ‘educate’ us about food:

• farmers and small food producers;
• cultural intermediaries, such as celebrity chefs, cookbook and food writers, food bloggers, lifestyle and nutritional practitioners, and food marketing, public relations and advertising professionals;
• school teachers, doctors and nurses, health educators;
• activists in diverse social movements from animal welfare, food justice, permaculture, slow food and organic farming;
• government bodies, local councils, and health agencies with their policy instruments such as national food plans, school curricula reform, labelling and nutrition guidelines;
• large corporate food producers and retailers.

Some of these clearly have extensive economic and cultural power to define meanings about ‘good’ food, health, and ways of consuming, and authors in this collection, in particular, discuss the politics of the food pedagogies of supermarkets, school teachers and health educators.

This list of food pedagogues underlines how wide the range of food pedagogies circulating across different sites is, and gives us a sense of the heterogeneity of their curricula including their specific educational aims, content, pedagogical relations, and learning processes. In spite of the power of pedagogues and the intensive, even invasive, nature of food pedagogies, we should not underestimate the agency of targeted ‘learners’. As this book shows in detailing the effects and efficacies of various food pedagogies, learners do not simply slurp up the lessons on offer. Whether it is supermarkets trying to instil certain food lifestyles, shoppers reading labels, viewers watching food programmes on TV, school pupils being given nutritional edicts, French consumers of alcohol advertising, authors suggest that pedagogies can ‘fail’.

The Pedagogical Turn

Having outlined the nature and extent of food pedagogies, in this next section we introduce how the concept of pedagogy has been used in education studies, the ‘turn’ to pedagogy as an analytic in cultural studies, and three approaches within this ‘turn’. Narrowly speaking then, ‘pedagogy’ is a foundational concept in education studies, deployed to characterise teaching, learning and assessment practices in schools, colleges and universities (Lingard 2009; Hickey-Moody, Savage and Windle 2010 a/b). Thus, educational theorist, Bob Lingard (2009) states that in its most traditional usage, pedagogy refers to ‘teachers in classrooms’: i.e. instruction, teaching, and curricula. He calls, however, for pedagogy to be extended to the social and political context of classroom practices including macro discourses of learning, teaching and assessment. For feminist educational theorists, analysis of pedagogy must include how gender underpins the context of the classroom and wider educational discourses (Luke and Gore 1992; Kenway and Modra 1992).

A burgeoning body of work outside education studies has turned to the concept of pedagogy to analyse the educational effects of cultural and social processes beyond the classroom (Luke 1996; Giroux 2004a; Watkins, Noble and Driscoll 2015; Hickey-Moody, Savage and Windle 2010; Flowers and Swan 2012; Kenway and Bullen 2011; Swan 2012). Thus, Jennifer Sandlin, Michael O’Malley and Jake Burdick make clear that pedagogy:

involves learning in institutions such as museums, zoos and libraries; informal educational sites such as popular culture, media, commercial spaces and the Internet; and through figures and sites of activism, including public intellectuals and grassroots social movements. (2011: 338–9)

Broadly speaking, theorists use pedagogy to study, in particular, cultural and social processes which attempt to modify, or transform how we act, feel and think (Noble 2012; Watkins, Noble and Driscoll 2015). Anna Hickey-Moody, Glen Savage and Joel Windle (2010) gloss this body of work as ‘pedagogy writ large’ to underline the extension of pedagogy as an analytic to a diversity of cultural practices from health promotion, screen technologies, food activism, Disney films, marketing and advertising to children, reality TV, cosmetic surgery, through to shopping and community arts; and to highlight the range of theoretical traditions and methodological approaches being used in these analyses (Hickey-Moody, Savage and Windle 2010; Sandlin, Schultz and Burdick 2010; Sandlin and McLaren 2010).

To trace the development of this body of work, in this next section, we demarcate and describe three distinct, but related approaches: ‘public pedagogy’; ‘pedagogies of everyday life’ and ‘cultural pedagogy’.

Public Pedagogy

Fundamentally, for theorists who examine public pedagogy: ‘culture can and does operate in pedagogical ways’ (Hickey-Moody, Savage and Windle 2010: 227). Although there are various lineages in the scholarship on public pedagogy, it is mainly a Northern American body of work based on neo-Marxist ideology-critique and heavily influenced by Henry Giroux (Hickey-Moody et al. 2010; Sandlin et al. 2011; Watkins et al. 2015). Using the term ‘public pedagogy’ first in 1998, Giroux a prolific writer, sees his project as putting an analysis of pedagogy in dialogue with cultural studies (1998, 1992, 2004a/b). More concretely, he deploys public pedagogy, first, to challenge what he sees as the educative project of capitalism transmitted through popular culture; and secondly, to refer to public intellectuals such as writers, journalists and artists who can teach citizens to transform the oppressive conditions in which they live. Thus, for Giroux, public pedagogy can be repressive and resistive; popular culture a site of social reproduction, and contestation. For example, he writes:

the media, as well as the culture they produce, distribute, sanction, have become the most important educational force in creating citizens and social agents capable of putting existing institutions into question and making democracy work – or doing just the opposite. (2005: 45)

Studying a diverse range of cultural and social practices from Disney films, Calvin Klein and Benetton advertising, rap music and media coverage of Abu Graib, his recent work focuses on the repressive power of public pedagogy: how popular media ‘teach neoliberalism’ and corporations extend their influence on public spaces and ‘harness the resources of “the public” for corporate gain’ (Hickey-Moody 2013: 28).

Studies of public pedagogy, however, are not limited to Giroux or ideology critique. North Americans, Jake Burdick and Jennifer Sandlin, by far the most prolific synthesisers of the field, edited a Handbook of Public Pedagogy (2010) with 65 chapters and a smaller volume entitled Problematising Pedagogy (2014). These go beyond Giroux’s approach by expanding the range of cultural sites studied, extending the role of public intellectuals to include social activists, grassroots organisations, and artist collectives; and drawing on post-structuralist theories of power. Burdick and Sandlin’s extensive scholarship does important definitional work in the field and builds on the Girouxian view that public pedagogy can be about resistance as well as social reproduction (Sandlin, O’Malley and Burdick 2011).

Their frustration (like others) is that theorising on public pedagogy does not make clear what makes a space or process ‘pedagogical’. Thus, pedagogy is cited frequently ‘without adequately explicating its meaning, its context, or its location’ (Sandlin, O’Malley and Burdick 2011: 339). Accordingly, they argue ‘more work needs to be conducted on how the various sites, spaces, products and places identified as public pedagogy actually operate as pedagogy’ (2011: 359). As a result, their more recent work turns to the topic of pedagogical processes: what they defined as ‘the mechanisms and interactions that enable an individual’s capacity to learn’ (Burdick and Sandlin 2013: 143). Surveying literature on pedagogy, they chart (2013) three ‘schools’: transfer, relational and post-human – and identify the pedagogical processes associated with each. Transfer pedagogies are humanist and thus reproduce a view of learners as autonomous, susceptible to the transmission of meanings and ideology in culture from mechanisms such as images, music, dialogue and sounds. Influenced by feminist arts scholarship, Relational pedagogies emphasise non-cognitive learning such as embodiment, movement, sensations and aesthetics. Finally, Post-human pedagogies challenge ‘anthropocentric liberal subjectivity’ centring animals, nature and the ‘fabulous’, rupturing modernist ideas of individual autonomy and control and dissolving binaries of sense/cognition and nature/culture/animal (2013: 167–8). This work is significant for researching food pedagogies on several counts. First, it elaborates a range of pedagogical processes outside transmission models of education; secondly, it challenges the idea that public pedagogy operates hypodermically, with culture as an ‘educational force’ working on unsuspecting humans; and thirdly, it shows how learning can be unpredictable, dynamic and relational. In sum, their work prises open the category of pedagogy, showing how people learning about food goes beyond cognitive, information transfer or ideological influence, and calls for more attention to be given to the concrete processes and interactions through which people transform how they cook, shop, and eat, and including senses, emotions, bodies and non-humans.

Pedagogies of Everyday Life

Not all pedagogy studies focus on public pedagogy. At the same time as Giroux started his writing on public pedagogy, Australian educationalist Carmen Luke, edited an interdisciplinary feminist book in 1996 to examine how the domestic and private sphere work pedagogically to teach children and women about gender, class and race. Influenced by feminist and Foucauldian theories of power and discourse rather than neo-Marxian ideology critique, and somewhat overshadowed in accounts of public pedagogy, Luke describes the aim of her project as the interrogation of the ‘pedagogical project of everyday life’ (1996: 1). In the collection, authors explore popular culture in the home, from television programmes, computer games, parenting magazines, and toys; and discuss how friendship, mothering, and parenting constitute pedagogical relations. Her work matters for food pedagogy scholarship because contra Girouxian writing on the public sphere as a site of pedagogy, the book emphasises the salience of the domestic sphere as an arena of pedagogical relations and activities; and provides feminist detailed empirical studies of the relations between everyday life, learning, and identity formation in the home. In a prescient study of ...