Contrasting Approaches to Food Education and School Meals

Abstract

This study builds on a fieldwork in a Danish school class, where pupils were observed while preparing and eating school meals. It shows that the children encounter conflicting approaches to food education depending on the context. While eating, an authoritarian approach to food education dominates and food is ascribed instrumental value. While preparing the school meal, a democratic approach dominates and food is ascribed intrinsic value. The aim is to show how these conflicting approaches reflect not only different social and cultural expectations to eating and preparing meals, respectively, but also a conflict between food educational ideals and actual school meal practices. To illustrate this an analytic model is introduced, the Integrated Food Pedagogy Model, and the ways in which this model could help promote better food education among schoolchildren are discussed. 

Keywords:

• children
• cooking
• eating
• food
• learning
• pedagogy
• school lunch
• school meals
• teaching

Notes

1. The age of the children in these studies ranges from 7 to 12 years. However, in the Danish study the children were 3–6 years old.

2. Again, these studies include both preschool and school children.

3. One might question the democratic potential of the sensory position. The position’s purpose is to change children’s taste, since children’s current taste and preference are conceptualized as wrong (for example Puisais’ uses the normative term McDonaldization to describe the current state of children’s taste). The position outset is therefore somehow moralizing (Wistoft and Leer 2015); however, the idea about letting the individual child become aware of her/his personal taste through sensory experiences is profoundly democratic.

4. During some of the interviews a research assistant was present too, taking notes and following up on questions.

5. IFPM is an analytic illustration. Approaches to food and pedagogy during school meals might differ by type of children, schools, and cultures. Persson Osowski and colleagues (2013), for example, describe how teachers are more inclined to use dialogue-based pedagogical approaches when with smaller children.

6. The distinction between instrumental and intrinsic is inspired by philosophy, where it is common to distinguish between two kinds of value or goodness, often named intrinsic and instrumental. Activities, things, and such like that are intrinsically valuable are valued for their own sake, whereas instrumental value is when things are valued for the sake of something else (Korsgaard 1983).