Exploring Foodscapes at a Danish Public School: How Emotional Spaces Influence Students’ Eating Practices

Abstract

Promoting healthy eating among children has high priority in Nordic countries but remains complex. With the purpose of contributing knowledge to inform efforts to promote healthy eating environments in schools, this article explores how children feel and reflect about eating at school and seeks to nuance understandings of how food and eating are situated in school life. The article draws on ethnographic studies carried out at a Danish public sports school following two classes from fifth to seventh grades (age 11–14). By adopting a practice perspective and the analytical concepts of foodscapes and emotional spaces, the article analyses how emotions (affects and feelings), discourses, materialities, and social relations within the school interact. The findings show that many students find eating at school unpleasant. Students want to eat in an un-stressful place away from the gaze of others. They want to eat in “a safe space”, which is difficult to find at school. Students’ accounts reveal how eating at school, intersected by the transitional life-phase of youth, is affected by normativity, control and (self-)discipline, which shape and constrain their eating habits. The article points to the importance of addressing the emotional dimensions of eating in efforts to promote school health.

Keywords:

• Institutional foodscape
• emotional spaces
• eating practices
• ethnography
• school lunch
• school eating environment
• children
• youth
• health

Acknowledgements

The article is based on a PhD study that is part of the SULIM Research Project—Towards Sustainable Healthy Lifestyle Interventions for Migrants—managed by the Danish Research Centre for Migration, Ethnicity and Health and financed by the Innovation Fund Denmark.