As of fall 2016, about 50.4 million students attended public elementary and secondary schools in the United States and an additional 5.2 million attended private schools (National Center for Educational Statistics 2015). Essentially every student eats lunch during the school days, and yet this multifaceted noontime phenomenon has received less attention in the education literature than practically any other school activity. Interestingly, the most widely cited books on school lunch in the United States are written by scholars outside the broad field of education (Levine 2008; Poppendieck 2010). The relative lack of educational scholarship on food more broadly and school lunch in particular is highlighted by two groundbreaking essays.
In her 2007 Presidential Address to the Philosophy of Education Society , Susan Laird draws attention to the fact that food, a most basic human need and the âobjectâ around which, historically, most humansâ lives have been organized (and many lives are still organized today), is now rarely a topic of discussion or scholarly inquiry in education. This has not always been the case, Laird notes, recalling the works of Plato , Locke , Rousseau , Wollstonecraft , and Dewey among others, who discussed food and practices related to food in educational terms. At the very least, nearly all discussed some aspects of the relation between food and studentsâ physical and mental well-being. Most went some distance beyond that to address such topics as the educational significance of various food-related practices, such as farming, cooking, and serving, and the role of food (and eating) in the formation of attitudes, tastes, desires, and habits. Laird adopts the term âfoodways ,â which in her account covers âwhat, how, with whom, when, where, how much, by what labors and whose labors, from what markets and ecosystems, and even why and with what consequences people eat and drink (or do not eat and drink)â (Laird 2008, p. 1). Given their centrality in human experience, foodways , Laird argues, should again become foci of educational inquiry.
In an article published in Educational Researcher three years later, Weaver-Hightower addresses school food in particular (2011). When most adults reflect on their experiences with school food, images of compartmentalized trays, vending machines, or a cherished lunchbox may come to mind. Perhaps memory turns to especially pleasant or painful lunchroom interactions, special treats offered around the holidays, or the aroma of fish sticks on Fridays. While among the most common, such memories concern only a small fraction of the ways in which food is presented in schools. Weaver-Hightower points out that school food is related, centrally or peripherally, to practically every aspect of schooling, including (but not limited to) student health , achievement, and attainment; teaching, administration, and educational politics and policy; businesses that produce and supply food and the farm environments and animals upon which they depend. Further, he argues, school food teaches children about eating and food practices, provides a window into identity and culture, and reflects understandings of and commitments to social justice . Weaver-Hightower concludes his essay much like Laird , arguing that the pervasiveness and significance of school food and the many practices making school food possible should capture the attention of education scholars.
Directly or indirectly, each chapter in this book answers Lairdâs and Weaver-Hightowerâs calls for inquiry into food and school lunch. The essays collected here are diverse in terms of their particular interests, theoretical orientations, and value commitments. What unites this eclectic collection is its central purpose: to examine school lunch as an educational phenomenon. Education is a multifaceted process, connected with every dimension of the human experience. The authors contributing to this volume are interested in how various aspects of school lunch affect the health , the intellectual, moral, and emotional development, and the overall well-being of those whose lives are affectedâdirectly or indirectlyâwith this aspect of schooling. We are interested not only in the near-term educational effects of particular school lunch practices, but also in those that are long-lasting. Education, by its nature, tends to live on in each of us. Our preferences, choices, and conduct in the current moment embody traces of educational events that occurred earlier, sometimes much earlier, in our lives. To pick a familiar example, we may be unable to identify an âaha momentâ when reading became second nature, but each time we encounter the written word, we are connected with educational events undergone long ago in elementary school where we learned to make sense of certain kinds of symbols. While education lives on in us as individuals, it also, in a way, stretches out beyond the individual; the effects of education are far reaching. We are accustomed to thinking about education in terms of its consequences for those most directly involved, especially students (and also sometimes parents, teachers, and administrators), but it is important to recognize that education has consequences for many other beings and entitiesâhumans, animals, the environment, and the world as a whole.
What we eat and how we eat, and how we think about food and eating, are of course partly a result of our nature as a species, but to a very large extent, these are also a result of education. This education comes from many sources, one of which is the school. Learning to eat certain foods and learning about food and eating in school are learning that occurs in a particular social context. That social context leaves its mark on what is learned, and while much of that learning concerns food, it also concerns social relations between those who eat, the students, and beyond that, to all those who make school food possible and those who are indirectly affected by school food, which include, to some extent, pretty much everyone.
As the bookâs title may suggest, the chaptersâ authors take a critical stance toward the topics they examine, questioning and investigating often taken-for-granted assumptions that arise in relation to school lunch. Indeed, the basic premise of this bookâthat school lunch is an educationally significant phenomenonâdeveloped out of a critical examination of the widespread assumption that school lunch is little more than an interruption to the actual work of schooling. But the critical orientation of the book does not manifest as mere rejection of existing ideas, policies, or approaches. While the authors are critical of the different understandings and undertakings they address, they also offer alternatives to them. These alternatives range from radically rethinking established conceptions of education and ways of engaging with food to working within existing parameters of both while making curricular and/or pedagogical changes and other adjustments in the direction of progressive reform.
Susan Laird builds upon her previous work (2008) on the educational significance of food, elaborating the metaphor âeducation as healthy nourishment.â Central to Lairdâs chapter is a discussion of the educational significance of Alice Waters Edible School Yard project in Berkeley, California. Waters , a former teacher , turned her attention to a public middle school in Berkeley and transformed it into a place where food production, preparation, service, consumption, and appreciation are all central educational activities. The currently dominant educational ideology, characterized by assessment, measurement, and control, has supplanted once canonical educational thought from Pestalozzi , Froebel , Dewey , and Montessori . Watersâs example reminds us of strands in this earlier thought and reframes school lunch as central rather than peripheral to schooling and its educational project. Cautioning against trendy school gardening that occurs without critique of school authoritarianism, Laird looks to Waters where we as educators can âstudy and take seriously the deep-rooted wisdom in her imaginative rethinking of public-school lunch as an educational institution that can transform taken-for-granted school cultures with its own nourishment ethos, aesthetic, ecological values, aims, curricula, pedagogies, and problems.â
We have reprinted an essay by the late Matthew T. Lewis that seeks new avenues for theorizing school lunch (2013).1 Lewis begins by exploring the school lunchroom as a site of disciplinary power. The modern lunchroom came into being in the Progressive Era but remains, in certain respects, much the same to this day. The room is nearly always square or rectangular and is designed so that bodies will move predictably through its space; it is designed and governed in such a way that disruptions to its order can be easily seen and corrected by teachers and administrators. By these and other means, the lunchroom, Lewis argues, is structured to produce obedient, docile bodies. Next Lewis explores the ontological status of food. School lunch is part of our contemporary foodscape , which is characterized above all by simulation. On Lewisâs account, within this foodscape the eater is a passive spectator of simulated âFrankenfood,â constrained in her ability to enact an effective revolt or to achieve alimentary freedom . Finally, reflecting his belief in the possibility that our bodies can be reclaimed and liberated, Lewis outlines a form of practice he calls âalimentary freedom .â The Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School (discussed by Susan Laird in this volume), is seen by Lewis as challenging the food policies he criticizes. Beyond efforts to involve students in the production and preparation of good food, Lewis believes that we need a new dietetic rooted in ethical habits of eating. Cultivating such an ethic will require fundamentally rethinking school lunch:
With respect to lunch, then, we need to eschew nutritional guidelines and circumscribed food choices, which position the eater as object of nutritive management, and reconceptualize lunch as an educative moment. Why not teach children, first and foremost, that foods are a source of pleasure and, secondly, a pleasure that must be managed? These two simple suggestions would have the effect of transmogrifying food from an instrument to a pleasure and shifting the locus of power from external authorities to the properly educated and empowered alimentary subject.
Carolyn Pluim, Darren Powell, and Deana Leahy bring an international perspective to bear on school lunch, examining school lunch policies and practices in United States, Australia , and New Zealand . Certain of these policies and practices, they find, are animated by a desire to regulate consumption and to engender particular values, especially in respect to what constitutes healthy and unhealthy food choices. These diet-related values are embedded in an ideology the authors call âhealthism ,â according to which health and illness are largely results of individual choices. Under this ideology, the myriad social, political, and ...