Educational Dimensions of School Lunch: Critical Perspectives - Paperback

by Suzanne Rice (Editor), A. G. Rud (Editor)

Provides an overview of significant philosophical understandings of food and eating from the ancient to the postmodern
Critiques two aspects of school lunch, food provided at school and the pressures on students who bring home-prepared or store bought lunches thought by school personnel to be inappropriate
Argues that there is a need for curricula explicitly addressing the food students eat at school-where it comes from, how it is produced, processed, and distributed, as well as its nutrition, cultural dimensions, and bearing on environmental concerns

Back Jacket

School lunch is often regarded as a necessary but inconvenient distraction from the real work of education. Lunch, in this view, is about providing students the nourishment they need in order to attend to academic content and the tests that assess whether content has been learned. In contrast, the central purpose of this collection is to examine school lunch as an educational phenomenon in its own right. Contributing authors--drawing from a variety of disciplinary traditions, including philosophy, sociology, and anthropology--examine school lunch policies and practices, social and cultural aspects of food and eating, and the relation among school food, the environment, and human and non-human animal well-being. The volume also addresses how school lunch might be more widely conceptualized and practiced as an educational undertaking.

Author Biography

Suzanne Rice is Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Kansas, USA.
A.G. Rud is Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies and Social Thought in Education at Washington State University, USA.