Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T06:08:23.814Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

14 - Who Is Responsible for Children’s Food?

from Part II - Our Lives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2022

Daniel Scott Souleles
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Johan Gersel
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Morten Sørensen Thaning
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Get access

Summary

At school, what should kids eat for lunch? Mundane as this question seems, this chapter suggests that the answer we give can put us anywhere along a political and ideological spectrum. On the one hand, if we feel that people should choose their own meals and that parents, not schools, should police what their kids eat, we run the risk of bringing the larger society’s inequalities into the lunchroom. If, on the other hand, we allow for state-sponsored meals, we run the risk of losing control over a basic aspect of our lives, and ceding it to the whims of outside political actors. What to do?. Patico argues that as things stand, in the United States enshrining individual choice and responsibility around student eating habits has led to a situation in which much school food is suspect and wealthy parents are able to separate their own children from eating it. In the context of a society shaped increasingly by market imperialism, this is the downside of privileging an ideal of consumer choice as well as the ideal of taking individual responsibility for optimizing your children’s meals. One possible corrective to this is to consider what school lunches would look like under several different types of collective planning and alternative moral scrutiny which challenges structural inequalities and corresponding differences in the purchasing power of parents.

Type
Chapter
Information
People before Markets
An Alternative Casebook
, pp. 281 - 302
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allen, Patricia, and Guthman, Julie. 2006. “From old school to farm to school: Neoliberalization from the ground up.” Agriculture and Human Values 23 (4): 401415.Google Scholar
Blad, Evie. 2021. “Citing Pandemic, USDA Waives School Meal Regulations Through June 2022.” Education Week, April 20, 2021. Accessed at Citing Pandemic, USDA Waives School Meal Regulations through June 2022 (edweek.org).Google Scholar
Blad, Evie. 2021. “The Pandemic Brought Universal Free School Meals. Will They Stay?” Education Week, June 1, 2021. Accessed at The Pandemic Brought Universal Free School Meals. Will They Stay? (edweek.org).Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Congress.gov. 2021–2022.“H.R.3115 - Universal School Meals Program Act of 2021117th Congress (2021–2022).” Accessed at H.R.3115 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Universal School Meals Program Act of 2021 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress.Google Scholar
Ganti, Tejaswini. 2014. “Neoliberalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 89104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guthman, Julie. 2007. “Can’t stomach it: How Michael Pollan made me want to eat cheetos.” Gastronomica 7 (2): 7579.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huisman, Kim, and Joy, Elizabeth. 2014. “The cultural contradictions of motherhood revisited: Continuities and changes.” In Intensive Mothering: The Cultural Contradictions of Modern Motherhood, edited by Ennis, Linda, 86103. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press.Google Scholar
Jung, Yuson. 2014. “(Re)establishing the normal.” Gastronomica 14 (4): 5259.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jung, Yuson. 2016. “Food provisioning and foodways in postsocialist societies: Food as medium for social trust and global belonging.” In Handbook of Food and Anthropology, edited by Klein, Jakob and Watson, James, 289307. New York: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Karrebaek, Martha Sif. 2012. “‘What’s in your lunch box today?’: Health, respectability, and ethnicity in the primary classroom.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22 (1): 122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karrebaek, Martha Sif. 2016. “Rye bread for lunch, lasagne for breakfast: Enregisterment, classrooms, and national food norms in superdiversity.” In Engaging Superdiversity: Recombining Spaces, Times and Language Practices, edited by Arnaut, K., Karrebaek, M., Spotti, M., and Blommaert, J.. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
MacKendrick, Norah. 2018. Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ortiz, Erik. 2022. “Free School Meal Program, Set to Expire, Would Be Restored Under Senate Bill.”  NBSnews.com, March 31, 2022. Accessed at Free school meals program set to expire would be restored under Senate bill (nbcnews.com).Google Scholar
Osowski, Christine Persson, Göranzon, Helen, and Fjellström, Christina. 2010. “Perceptions and memories of the free school meal in Sweden.” Food, Culture & Society 13 (4): 555572.Google Scholar
Patico, Jennifer. 2020. The Trouble with Snack Time: Children’s Food and the Politics of Parenting. New York: NYU Press.Google Scholar
Poppendieck, Janet. 2010. Free for All: Fixing School Food in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Reese, Ashante, and Garth, Hanna. 2020. “Black food matters: An introduction.” In Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, edited by Garth, H. and Reese, Ashante. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shotwell, Alexis. 2016. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×