Connecting to food: cultivating children in the school garden

Abstract

School gardens are widely celebrated as spaces to promote health and sustainability by connecting children with their food. While scholars have assessed the effects of gardening in practice, media discourses play a key role in constituting this site. This paper examines how the school garden is discursively constituted within American and Canadian newspaper coverage. The analysis reveals specific forms of connection that are said to flourish in the school garden: between food production and consumption, between bodies and knowledge, and between the urban child and nature. While all children are said to benefit from connecting with their food, these connections are articulated differently in relation to particular bodies and spaces, evident in racialized and classed narratives of stewardship and salvation. As children’s relationship to food is invested with the hopes and fears of collective futures, the discursive construction of the school garden provides crucial insights into contemporary understandings of childhood.

Keywords:

• gardens
• food
• childhood
• consumption
• nature
• discourse analysis

Acknowledgement

The analysis was strengthened by feedback I received at the 2015 meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society in New York and the Association for the Study of Food and Society in Pittsburgh. I am also grateful to the reviewers and editor for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Postdoctoral Fellowship].