This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2012.
The essays in School Food Politics explore the intersections of food and politics on all six of the inhabited continents of the world. Including electoral fights over universally free school meals in Korea, nutritional reforms to school dinners in England and canteens in Australia, teachers' and doctors' work on school feeding in Argentina, and more, the volume provides key illustrations of the many contexts that have witnessed intense struggles defining which children will eat; why; what and how they are served; and who will pay for and prepare the food. Contributors include reformers writing from their own perspectives, from the farm-to-school program in Burlington, Vermont, to efforts to apply principles of critical pedagogy in cooking programs for urban teens, to animal rights curriculum. Later chapters shift their focus to possibilities and hope for a different future for school food, one that is friendlier to students, «lunch ladies,» society, other creatures, and the planet.
The essays in School Food Politics explore the intersections of food and politics on all six of the inhabited continents of the world. Including electoral fights over universally free school meals in Korea, nutritional reforms to school dinners in England and canteens in Australia, teachers' and doctors' work on school feeding in Argentina, and more, the volume provides key illustrations of the many contexts that have witnessed intense struggles defining which children will eat; why; what and how they are served; and who will pay for and prepare the food. Contributors include reformers writing from their own perspectives, from the farm-to-school program in Burlington, Vermont, to efforts to apply principles of critical pedagogy in cooking programs for urban teens, to animal rights curriculum. Later chapters shift their focus to possibilities and hope for a different future for school food, one that is friendlier to students, «lunch ladies,» society, other creatures, and the planet.
«An extraordinarily valuable contribution to the growing literature on school food, 'School Food Politics' will both engage your intellect and nourish your activism. Its theoretical framework of policy ecologies will expand your conception of school food reform, and its concrete accounts and case studies will remind you of why this challenging undertaking is worth pursuing with energy and creativity.» (Janet Poppendieck, Professor of Sociology, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York)