This book explores the potential of school dining halls as spaces of social learning through interactions between students and teachers. Schools, Food and Social Learning highlights the neglect of school dining halls in sociological research and the fact that so much can be gained from fostering interpersonal relations with other students and the school staff over meals. The book focuses primarily on social and life skills that students develop during lunch-hour meetings, modelling behaviors while eating and conversing in the school space known as the ‘restaurant’. With case studies based in the UK, the book takes a social constructivist approach to dealing with the tensions and challenges between the aims of the school – creating an eating space that promotes social values and encourages the development of social skills, and the activities of teachers and catering assistants of managing and providing food for many students daily. The book carries snippets of interviews with children, dining hall attendants, teachers, parents and the school leadership team, offering a new way of thinking about social learning for both scholars and students of Social Anthropology, Sociology, Social Policy, Food Policy, Education Studies and Childhood Studies.

How did our children end up eating nachos, pizza, and Tater Tots for lunch? Taking us on an eye-opening journey into the nation's school kitchens, this superbly researched book is the first to provide a comprehensive assessment of school food in the United States. Janet Poppendieck explores the deep politics of food provision from multiple perspectives--history, policy, nutrition, environmental sustainability, taste, and more. How did we get into the absurd situation in which nutritionally regulated meals compete with fast food items and snack foods loaded with sugar, salt, and fat? What is the nutritional profile of the federal meals? How well are they reaching students who need them? Opening a window onto our culture as a whole, Poppendieck reveals the forces--the financial troubles of schools, the commercialization of childhood, the reliance on market models--that are determining how lunch is served. She concludes with a sweeping vision for change: fresh, healthy food for all children as a regular part of their school day.

In Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat, historian A. R. Ruis explores the origins of American school meal initiatives to explain why it was (and, to some extent, has continued to be) so difficult to establish meal programs that satisfy the often competing interests of children, parents, schools, health authorities, politicians, and the food industry. Through careful studies of several key contexts and detailed analysis of the policies and politics that governed the creation of school meal programs, Ruis demonstrates how the early history of school meal program development helps us understand contemporary debates over changes to school lunch policies.

There’s a problem with school lunch in America. Big Food companies have largely replaced the nation’s school cooks by supplying cafeterias with cheap, precooked hamburger patties and chicken nuggets chock-full of industrial fillers. Yet it’s no secret that meals cooked from scratch with nutritious, locally sourced ingredients are better for children, workers, and the environment. So why not empower “lunch ladies” to do more than just unbox and reheat factory-made food? And why not organize together to make healthy, ethically sourced, free school lunches a reality for all children? The Labor of Lunch aims to spark a progressive movement that will transform food in American schools, and with it the lives of thousands of low-paid cafeteria workers and the millions of children they feed. By providing a feminist history of the US National School Lunch Program, Jennifer E. Gaddis recasts the humble school lunch as an important and often overlooked form of public care. Through vivid narration and moral heft, The Labor of Lunch offers a stirring call to action and a blueprint for school lunch reforms capable of delivering a healthier, more equitable, caring, and sustainable future.

"Text first published in 1990 by Children's Press, Inc."

This book introduces the notion of culinary capital to investigate socialisation and school mealtime experiences in an academy school based in the UK. Drawing on interviews collated from children, teachers and staff within the school, the text sheds light on food insecurity in society and schools as being major issue in educational policy. The book examines schools as a microcosm for society with school food space being the playground for socialisation. It shows how forms of culinary capital can be extended in the school dining hall where social space is negotiated with notions of inclusion and exclusion during mealtime. The book uses gender, class and race to understand the school dining hall as a space where culinary capital can be exchanged and learnt. Thorough research accompanied by ethnographic visuals, field notes and observations, it also explores the sensory impact of school gardens. As such the book will be of interest to students, teachers, school leaders, educators and policy makers in the fields of Education, Sociology, Social Policy and Food Studies.

This book brings together a unique collection of chapters to facilitate a broad discussion on food education that will stimulate readers to think about key policies, recent research, curriculum positions and how to engage with key stakeholders about the future of food. Food education has gained much attention because the challenges that influence food availability and eating in schools also extend beyond the school gate. Accordingly, this book establishes evidence-based arguments that recognise the many facets of food education, and reveal how learning through a future's lens and joined-up thinking is critical for shaping intergenerational fairness concerning food futures in education and society. This book is distinctive through its multidisciplinary collection of chapters on food education with a particular focus on the Global North, with case studies from England, Australia, the Republic of Ireland, the United States of America, Canada and Germany. With a focus on three key themes and a rigorous food futures framework, the book is structured into three sections: (i) food education, pedagogy and curriculum, (ii) knowledge and skill diversity associated with food and health learning and (iii) food education inclusivity, culture and agency. Overall, this volume extends and challenges current research and theory in the area of food education and food pedagogy and offers insight and tangible benefits for the future development of food education policies and curricula. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, policymakers and education leaders working on food education and pedagogy, food policy, health and diet and the sociology of food.