Cooking up the “gastro-citizen” through school meal programs in France and Japan

ABSTRACT

School meal programs in France and Japan have become sites of bio- and gastro-politics in what amounts to a project of creating gastro-citizens. In the past fifteen years public health and education administrators have revamped school meal programs to promote nutritional health, food safety, quality, and national culinary traditions. Even though in both countries school meals are financially accessible to students of all income levels, lack of choice in terms of food options means that those who do not conform to national culinary homogeneity are denied gastro-citizenship. Such a denial, as communicated through the “gastro-politics” of school meal programs, is one more way that certain individuals are socially excluded in these societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Gastro-citizen
• school meals
• France
• Japan
• culinary nationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Even in a country like Canada that has never had a national government-funded school meal program, a recent article in a Canadian national newspaper urged the Government to fund a school meal program under the following headline: “To Build Better Citizens, Canada should Start in the School Lunch Room” (Picard 2014).

2. Assman (2015, 173) points out that this emphasis on local foods occurred after the 2011 nuclear disaster, but they are still portrayed as safe in the food education campaign.

3. Despite the fact that milk has never been part of Japanese cuisine and that many people of Asian descent are lactase intolerant—i.e., they lack the genetic variant that enables digestion of lactose in milk after early childhood (Wiley 2011)—every school meal is accompanied by a carton of milk, a practice begun after World War II with American food aid to Japan (Assman 2015). This has perhaps been maintained in the meal program because of the rising trend in the promotion of milk in East Asia as a health and growth-promoting beverage for children (Wiley 2007). Given the recent impetus to move away from Western food items and toward more traditionally defined Japanese meals (Assman 2015), it will be interesting to see if milk maintains its place in Japanese school meals in the future.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tina Moffat

Tina Moffat is an Associate Professor at Department of Anthropology, McMaster University. She studies food insecurity, children’s food and nutrition, and food culture. She is co-editor of the volume (with Tracy Prowse) Human Diet and Nutrition in Biocultural Perspective: Past Meets Present (Berghahn Books, 2010).

Danielle Gendron

Danielle Gendron is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her doctoral research focuses on heritage narratives, senses of belonging, and imaginative landscapes in the context of Canadian National Historic Sites.