Food Pedagogies

At the same time, we all have some way to go to understand the others putting food on the table (Swan, Reference Swan2013). The labour of food production, in all its facets from agriculture and manufacture to retailing and feeding work, is dominated by racially minoritised women and men, and White working-class women. Except for the articles by Jenny Ritchie and Holly Stovall, and Lori Baker-Sperry and Judith Dallinger, gender, race and class are somewhat under-discussed, as we discuss more fully later. First, we situate the collection in relation to food pedagogies to offer a new set of concepts and concerns. Along with others such as Deana Leahy, Emma Rich and Jo Pike (Leahy & Pike, Reference Leahy, Pike, Flowers and Swan2015; Pike & Leahy, Reference Pike and Leahy2012; Rich, Reference Rich2011; Rich & Evans, Reference Rich, Evans, Flowers and Swan2015), Jennifer Sumner (Reference Sumner2008, Reference Sumner, Flowers and Swan2015), who for some time has convened a subject on pedagogies of food and writes about ‘eating as a pedagogical act’, we have developed a body of work researching food pedagogies (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2011, Reference Flowers and Swan2012a, Reference Flowers and Swan2012b, Reference Flowers and Swan2012c, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015a, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015b, Reference Flowers, Swan, Abbotts, Lavis and Attala2015c; Swan, Reference Swan2013). As we write elsewhere, efforts to ‘teach’ us about food have intensified (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012a, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015a). To understand this cultural trend, we deploy the concept of ‘food pedagogies’ to help us examine a number of processes: the proliferation of teaching and learning about food; the diversification of food educational curricula; the rise of new food pedagogues; the shift in expertise and knowledge about food; and the racialised, gendered and classed inequalities produced through these shifts (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012a, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015a). In sum, we characterise food pedagogies as a congeries of educational, teaching and learning ideologies and practices carried out by a range of agencies, actors, institutions and media that focus variously on growing, shopping, cooking, eating and disposing of food (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012a, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015a). In relation to learning, the term pedagogies points to various forms, sites and processes of formal, informal and incidental education, and learning inside and beyond the classroom.

We use the term food pedagogies because ‘pedagogy’ is capacious enough to denote a range of sites, processes, curricula, ‘learners’ and even types of human and non-human ‘teachers’ as papers in the collection attest. At the same time, the concept of pedagogy is constrained enough to denote some kind of intended or emergent change in behaviour, habit, emotion, cognition, and/or knowledge at an individual, family, group or collective level.

Food has become a battleground for politics, policy, reform and education in recent years, and food pedagogies seek to get us to change what and how we eat (Flowers & Swan Reference Flowers and Swan2012a, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015a). Intensified attention to our food habits is more than just about food. How we eat, and what we eat, are at the centre of what we want to be and how we will want the world to be: a point made very clear across the articles in this collection (Galutsky, Reference Galutsky2010). It also involves politics and inequalities: there are many different ‘pedagogues’ — policy makers, churches, activists, health educators, schools, tourist agencies, chefs — who think we don't know enough about food and what to do with it (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012b, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015a). Some are powerful actors with clear educational intent: the food industry, health authorities, nutritionists, research scientists, advertisers and consumers. As this collection makes clear, teachers from childcare to universities are critical to the design, promulgation and politics of food pedagogies and their moral economies (Leahy & Pike, Reference Leahy, Pike, Flowers and Swan2015; Rich & Evans, Reference Rich, Evans, Flowers and Swan2015).

Pedagogy and Education

Of course, ‘pedagogy’ is a foundational concept in education studies, used in its most narrow sense to characterise teaching, learning and assessment practices in schools, colleges and universities (Lingard, Reference Lingard, Apple, Ball and Gandin2009). Thus, educational theorist Bob Lingard (Reference Lingard, Apple, Ball and Gandin2009) states that in its most traditional usage, pedagogy refers to ‘teachers in classrooms’; that is, instruction, teaching and curricula. But, like other academics in education studies, he calls for pedagogy to be extended to the social and political context of classroom practices, including macro discourses of learning, teaching and assessment. Feminist educational and critical race theorists go further and insist that an analysis of pedagogy must grapple with how gender, class and race inflect teaching and learning and wider macro educational discourses (Luke & Gore, Reference Luke and Gore1992). These arguments speak directly to the discussions in the collection of articles in this special issue.

Pedagogy Studies

But there is another way to think about pedagogy, which is being developed outside of traditional education studies. Hence, scholars from cultural studies and adult education use the concept of pedagogy to analyse the educational effects of cultural and social processes beyond the classroom (Flowers & Chodkiewicz, Reference Flowers and Chodkiewicz2009a, Reference Flowers and Chodkiewicz2009b; Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012a, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015a; Hickey-Moody, Savage, & Windle, Reference Hickey-Moody, Savage and Windle2010; Luke, Reference Luke1996; Swan, Reference Swan, Simpson, Slutskaya, Lewis and Hopfi2012; Watkins, Noble, & Driscoll, Reference Watkins, Noble and Driscoll2015). Thus, Sandlin, O’Malley, and Burdick (Reference Sandlin, O’Malley and Burdick2011) make clear that pedagogy: ‘involves learning in institutions such as museums, zoos and libraries; informal educational sites such as popular culture, media, commercial spaces and the Internet; and through figures and sites of activism, including public intellectuals and grassroots social movements’ (pp. 338–339).

Broadly speaking, theorists study the cultural and social processes that attempt to modify or transform how we act, feel and think (Watkins et al., Reference Watkins, Noble and Driscoll2015). Hickey-Moody et al. (Reference Hickey-Moody, Savage and Windle2010) stress that the defining characteristics of classroom pedagogy — pedagogical intent, substance or content, including hidden curriculum and teaching and learning processes — can be applied to the study of public and everyday pedagogies. Analysis of the politics of pedagogies involves locating them within wider social, cultural and political relations of power. Thus, Luke (Reference Luke1996) emphasises that pedagogy cannot be conceived as an isolated intersubjective event where one analyses teaching and learning; rather, it ‘is fundamentally defined by and a product of a network of historical, political, sociocultural, and knowledge relations’ (p. 130). An important point to consider when reflecting on the articles in the collection and how they contextualise their foci.

Food, Sustainability and Environmental Pedagogies

Across the papers, scholars introduce us to deliberate designs for bringing food into dialogue with environmental education in formal institutional and non-formal learning contexts. They show us how field trips, interviews with elders, singing, cooking, gardening, research, watching cartoons and sharing food memories constitute creative pedagogical processes. We examine these more closely in this section, focusing on five articles in the collection, three of which write about formal education, one on informal adult learning, and one on public pedagogy.

Formal Education

In three of the articles, the authors detail how they design curricula. In so doing they bring together questions about food and sustainability, each of them drawing on different intellectual and curricula resources. Studying primary and secondary schools in Change Islands, a semi-isolated coastal community off Canada's most eastern province, Carole Harris and Barbara Barter conceptualise their approach as ‘critical place based pedagogy’ — the bringing together of critical theory with place-based pedagogy — using what they refer to as experiential-, discovery- and arts-based approaches. In contrast to the somewhat unbridled enthusiasm for distance learning in education and policy contexts, the authors ‘emplace’ education and food practices in an historical and geographical location. They introduce us to the local community: fisherfolk, shop owners, community workers and young people who live, study and work in a location devastated by the loss of their fishery and traditional food habits.

The authors’ design principle is ‘making room for the local’ in the curriculum. In building local curriculum, they seek to return the students to the rural, to give learning back to the community, and to teach students how to produce food locally in subsistent ways. They see their curriculum as a political intervention in the urban centre's imposition of education policy and the government's globalised neoliberal approach to industrialised food production. As with other articles in the collection, they emphasise the attenuated form that food studies takes in curricula, being based on health and consumer choice. Food-based sustainability pedagogy is an investment in the future: the food future the community desires, the future of students who are often taught in ‘community dis-embedding’ ways, and the future of training teachers and educational leaders in social justice. Their intent is to provide equitable, expressive modes of education outside of the imperatives of standardisation, the urban and the ‘cult for efficiency’.

Whereas Harris and Barter return place to the classroom, our next authors, Nelson Lebo and Chris Eames in New Zealand, encourage secondary school students to leave the classroom and emplace themselves in new educational spaces such as food forests and eco-accommodation. In contrast to Harris and Barter, who use traditional critical pedagogical approaches to inspire food production, Nelson and Eames bring permaculture design principles to curriculum development: a system of agricultural design that ‘seeks to recognise and maximise beneficial relationships while minimising or eliminating harmful relationships’. They show us that the seeds and soil for growing education for sustainability can be found outside of the fence of traditional curriculum theorising and practice.

Their project, like Harris and Barter, is to teach teachers as much as students about sustainability and new ways to teach. In using permaculture principles, they offer students science learning away from memorisation, facts and figures and towards science knowledge that can be used for sustainable food production. Their work extends notions of pedagogy to include a conceptualisation of learners using permaculture metaphors and learning as cultivating and trellising, thus stimulating us to think through learning through food and agriculture.

While Lebo and Eames encourage teacher learning as well as student learning, Jennifer Elsden Clifton and Debi Futter Puati teach teacher education. Their context is New Zealand, where they teach units on food education to teacher trainees in a Bachelor of Primary Education degree. In designing curriculum that brings together health education and education for sustainability, as with the first two articles, the authors want to design a new space for teaching food and sustainability by creating a discursive and educational space of new meaning in a 10-week course, rather than using field trips. Like the first two articles, this one also sees teachers as pivotal to achieving a more sustainable society, particularly given the expectations put on teachers to teach young people about food. Thus, there has been a push to encourage teachers to talk about sustainability — including food choices, organic foods, fair trade, animal welfare, food mileage, and teaching through school gardens. Through the concept of third space, the authors want to ensure that trainee teachers learn more broadly about food than just healthism through which food is positioned as medicine, fuel or risk. They are concerned about how teachers can inadvertently reinforce diet or weight loss, nutritional misinformation and stigmatisation, and position obesity as a medicalised illness.

This article can be placed in an emergent and important body of work on the effects of health reform in schools and the roles teachers play in perpetuating narrow ideas about health and food. For example, Leahy and Pike (Reference Leahy, Pike, Flowers and Swan2015) and Rich and Evans (Reference Rich, Evans, Flowers and Swan2015) have done significant research on what and how teachers teach about food and the problematic politics and representations of food and bodies that result. Elsden Clifton and Futter Puati aim to create a pedagogical space where the student teachers destabilise binaries such as healthy and unhealthy. A significant contribution of their work is to emphasise how alternative knowledges of food and eating can be a little po-faced and puritanical, having the effect of editing ‘the potential positive social and cultural relationships with food’. Thus, they leave us with a tantalising question, returned to by O’Flynn, which is how can educators learn to theorise and teach about the pleasure in food.

Informal Learning

The last two articles move out of the classroom to the urban garden and home TV screen to discuss informal learning and public pedagogy. In an Australian context, Federico Davilla argues that urban growers can transform their understanding of how food is produced locally and globally through growing food. He opens up the possibility of doing environmental education outside of the classroom and draws on theoretical traditions beyond teacher education; in particular, deploying two categories often used in studies of adult learning but rarely in school studies — transformative learning and critical consciousness. In contrast to the previous papers, he removes the teacher from the educational experience and emphasises the importance of community participation, and how growing food in cities and taking part in alternative food activist groups can enable adults to change how they think about food systems. He privileges what he calls personally engaging approaches to learning that he sees as produced through being closer to the realities of food production, but admits that people may have to educate themselves through food groups to see the global connections in food production.

Our final article turns to popular culture as pedagogy: the children's American cartoon Spongebob. In literature on food pedagogy, scholars have examined a range of forms of popular culture, particularly TV cooking programs and cookbooks, but less attention has been given to children's television. Thus, like Davilla, Piatti Farnell mobilises the notion of public pedagogy, influenced by Henry Giroux. In focusing on an internationally widely viewed cartoon, she shows how what seems trivial has important messages about food and the connections between health, disposability and culture. Thus, popular culture, pedagogy and entertainment collide. In a close reading of the cartoon, she reveals that its messages are more complex and ambivalent than one might imagine. It celebrates fast food and the hamburger, seeing them as emblematic of American consumerist values and lifestyles, but at the same time, the cartoon offers a satirical critique of fast-food for generating so much waste.

Farnell's article reminds us of the importance of interrogating popular culture in education and, in particular, the effects of public, cultural and everyday pedagogies in relation to food and sustainability. In food studies, there is a subfield of research on the proliferation of food media, especially on television programs about food and celebrity chefs (Hollows, Reference Hollows2003; Lewis, Reference Lewis2011; Pike & Leahy, Reference Pike and Leahy2012; Rousseau, Reference Rousseau2012), food writing and particular cookbooks (Mennell, Reference Mennell, Counihan and van Esterik1997; Gallegos, Reference Gallegos, Bell and Hollows2005), films such as Food Inc., Julie and Julia, and Chocolat (Lindenfeld, Reference Lindenfeld2010), and blogs and websites (Adami, Reference Adami2014; Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2015d). But very little of this has examined their pedagogical effects.

Indeed, Farnell's article is in a long tradition of education work on everyday media and objects in the home and public sphere that perhaps has been too easily ignored by educators. Thus, as far back as 1996, Australian educationalist and feminist Carmen Luke edited an interdisciplinary feminist book to examine how the domestic and private sphere work pedagogically to teach children and women about gender, class and race. Influenced by feminist theories of power and discourse, Luke (Reference Luke1996) describes her project as the interrogation of the ‘pedagogical project of everyday life’ (p. 1). In the book, authors explore popular culture in the home, from television programs and computer games, to parenting magazines and toys; and discuss how friendship and mothering constitute pedagogical relations. We think there are opportunities to take more inspiration from Luke (Reference Luke1996). For example, in future teaching and research on environmental education, authors might consider films such as Mad Max Fury, cartoons like The Simpsons, cookbooks, food blogs, food tourism, restaurant menus, gardening catalogues and food reviews as cultural pedagogies on food and sustainability.

Knowledge-scapes

In sum, these interesting articles offer us rich empirical studies of designing formal curricula. Overall, reading across the papers stimulates questions about the kinds of knowledge needed for educating for food and sustainability. Importantly, both the call and the articles point to the over-dominance of nutrition and obesity science, as well as to the need for local knowledge, experiential, community alternative science, Indigenous, embodied, emotional and feminist knowledges. Indeed, much of what is going on in food social movements are ‘struggles over knowledge systems’ (Goodman & DuPuis, Reference Goodman and DuPuis2002). But, while some articles clearly explain the different knowledges on which they draw, often these are not theorised. Moreover, the gendered, racialised and classed dimensions of food knowledges in these articles are under-developed. Most of the disciplinary sources for knowledge discussed across the articles tends to be either from environmental education or critical health; however, food curricula could also be inspired by disciplinary knowledge from geography, anthropology, history, feminist studies and cultural studies.

Furthermore, the ‘knowledge dynamics’ of the curricula could be examined. Food studies show that knowledges are much more intertextual and interactional than is sometimes imagined (Fonte, Reference Fonte2008). As Goodman, Boykoff, and Evered (Reference Goodman, Boykoff and Evered2008) write: ‘just beneath the thin yet oft-authoritative veneer of “crisp” science and eco-political discourses are variegated, messy and contentious interactions of knowledge, power and ideology’ (p. 5), in which facts, values and interpretations are all debated. For example, research shows how new combinations or ‘blends’ of lay and expert knowledge are being produced, which break down the simplistic binary of lay-good/expert-bad sometimes invoked in environmental adult education (Csurgo, Kovach, & Kucerova, Reference Csurgo, Kovach and Kucerova2008). For example, the papers in the special issue tend to focus on food production and food producers — gardening, permaculture, fishing people, organic farmers, and urban growers. But Goodman and DuPuis (Reference Goodman and DuPuis2002) argue we should not privilege producer over consumer knowledge. They write: ‘how the consumer goes about knowing food is just as important as farmers’ knowledge networks in the creation of an alternative food system’ (p. 15). In addition, they stress how new knowledges in food produce new figures and types of subjectivity; for example, ‘discerning food consumers’ (p. 8) that circulate in discourses on food and knowledge. We might ask what kinds of knowledges are marginalised in the articles? And what kinds of discerning subjectivities produced — ethical eaters, good teachers?

Problematisations

Another way to think about these articles pedagogically is to ask what the authors see as the problems in food practices and in environmental education that they wish to solve? The Foucauldian concept of problematisation can help us (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012c). A problematisation refers to ‘how problems are given a shape through the ways they are spoken about and through the ‘knowledges’ that are assumed in their shaping’ (Bacchi, Reference Bacchi2010, p. 2). Hence, examining problematisation entails interrogating knowledge production: ‘Where, how and by whom are aspects of the human being rendered problematic according to what systems of judgement and in relation to what concerns?’ (Rose, Reference Rose1996, p. 25). Thus, we can ask what judgments authors make about food, good food practices, and poor environmental education. What suppositions and presumptions are being reproduced, based on what kind of knowledges? For example, an assumption underpinning several articles is that there is a disconnect between people and food production. On what basis is this made? Another question is how food sustainability and environmentalism are conceptualised in the papers? In food social movements, there is a plethora of political practices and issues such as organic foods, local foods, anti-industrialised food production, vegetarianism, food for social justice, slow food movement, food security, to name but a few, but only some of these feature in the papers (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012a, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015a). What gets taken up in curricula and why?

A second aspect of problematisations is that they designate certain types of people and behaviour as in need of transformation. People who need changing have to be known to be governed (Bacchi, Reference Bacchi2012, p. 5). Hence, problematisations produce problematic people, habits and objects, and people who know, and people who don't (Flowers & Swan Reference Flowers and Swan2012c). Solutions are already set in train through the ways in which the problematisations are shaped. Thus, research on food pedagogies show that a range people are seen to be in need of changing: women, mothers, children, working classes, and racially minoritised groups. In this collection, the focus is more on children and young people, and teachers. For instance, teachers are not seen as being committed to sustainability or having the right of food knowledges, or being too reliant on healthism. Is this fair? How else might we understand the position in which teachers find themselves? What support do they need?

Pedagogical Capacitation

Finally, we turn to the most important question being debated in pedagogy studies in relation to public and cultural pedagogies: What makes something pedagogical? Thus, like Watkins, Noble, and Driscoll (Reference Watkins, Noble and Driscoll2015), we are frustrated that theorising on public pedagogy does not make clear what makes a space or process ‘pedagogical’. In similar vein, Sandlin et al. (Reference Sandlin, O’Malley and Burdick2011) argue ‘more work needs to be conducted on how the various sites, spaces, products and places identified as public pedagogy actually operate as pedagogy’ (p. 359). This means examining ‘the mechanisms and interactions that enable an individual's capacity to learn’ (Burdick & Sandlin, Reference Burdick and Sandlin2013, p. 143). Noble (Reference Noble2004) argues that the effect of under-researching pedagogy means that it operates in scholarship like a ‘black box’; signalling ‘something is done but without explaining how it is done’ (p. 2). Indeed, Watkins et al. (Reference Watkins, Noble and Driscoll2015) develop this criticism further, taking studies to task for deploying the term pedagogy ‘rhetorically’ rather than ‘analytically’. Usefully, they call for more research into the processes by which cumulative changes in ‘how we act feel and think’ are produced. They invoke concepts such as ‘capacitation, habituation and embodiment’ to encourage more focus on the durational effects of pedagogical relations and mechanisms (Watkins et al., Reference Watkins, Noble and Driscoll2015). And, as several of the articles in the collection suggest, pedagogic processes through which conduct is ‘capacitated, fashioned, regulated, re-directed and augmented’ are not simply cognitive, but embodied and deeply affective (Noble, Reference Noble2012, p. 2).

Food

Having discussed the stimulating questions raised by the articles on pedagogy, we turn next to the theme of food. When we read across the papers in this special issue, while authors discuss food in many ways, they do not theorise food as deeply or explicitly as food studies academics might do. We are not saying that food is not studied or referenced. It is. But the multifaceted nature of food and its complex cultural, social and political effects are less discussed. Food is freighted with meaning and constitutes bodily nutrition, but also pleasure, anxiety, labour and morality (Rozin, Reference Rozin1996). Food has multiple ‘regimes of value’ (Appadurai, Reference Appadurai1986) and is ‘simultaneously symbolic, economic, politic, material and nutritional’ (Abbots & Lavis, Reference Abbots and Lavis2013, p. 1). Even the act of eating is multidimensional, encompassing the spatial, cultural, biological, symbolic and material (Abbots & Lavis, Reference Abbots and Lavis2013). Thus, mealtimes are symbolic, social, religious and material events that define, reproduce and sustain families, gender, race, class and boundaries (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015b). So, how is food conceptualised and discussed in the articles? What kind of object does food become in this special issue? What kinds of relations and forms of sociality do the papers see food enabling? To answer these questions, we discuss the four remaining articles, focusing on how the authors construct food.

Messy Food

A critical health researcher, Gabriella O’Flynn combines personal reflections with critical health theorising to reflect on how the realities of her own feeding work challenge dominant healthism and ‘commonsense’ ideas about food. To do this, she analyses the pedagogical web resources for an Australian health promotion program aimed at teachers called Munch and Move which, in her words, produce a calculative notion of food and health based on obesity discourses. The healthy self constructed through these resources is not only at odds with her own experience, but also environmentally sustainable ways of knowing about food. Through positivist science claims based on so-called facts and truth, it individualises health — encouraging a notion of ‘my body, my health’, while depoliticising both. As a result, a moral economy of healthy bodies and practices, food choices and body shape are read as markers of choice, with slim fit bodies seen as ‘good’ and virtuous, and large bodies as ‘bad’ and gluttonous.

O’Flynn writes about how in her feeding work there are many competing emotions and power relations that play out as ‘decisions’ are made. As she writes, ‘my decisions are not linear or only influenced by me. Sometimes my decisions even contradict my own ethical and health priorities.’ The Munch and Move program makes food and health seem certain and resolute, easy to achieve and unequivocally good. This stands in contrast to what O’Flynn refers to as the messy and complex place of food in her life. Moreover, she shows how food pedagogies can bring shame. Thus, she felt she was positioned as a bad mother for putting a cake in her child's school lunchbox. Her priorities in choosing food for her children are seen as irrelevant and misplaced, and the symbolic place of the cake-making as part of her family practices ignored. The article challenges us to think about the place of food and eating in contemporary life. Referencing Berlant (Reference Berlant, Metzl and Kirkland2010), she shows how capitalism choreographs our physical, cognitive and emotional energy, to which we respond by eating. Hence, food is about mental health as much as physical health.

Food as Community Building

In her article, Jenny Ritchie too tackles issues of individualism and neoliberalism, writing about Maori worldviews and values of ‘manaakitanga’ (caring, hospitality, generosity) and ‘whanaungatanga’ (relatedness), performed through early childhood education for sustainability in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Teachers, parents and children grow, cook and share food as a way to demonstrate compassion towards themselves, others and the environment. Through food, children learn to care for human and more than human others. Ritchie claims that Indigenous knowledges provide alternative conceptualisations about stewardship for the earth. This approach to food is a political response to neoliberalism and its lack of care for the environment and ‘Papatuanuku’ (Earth Mother). The teachers see their food education as an intervention in neo-liberal policies causing poverty and serious issues of childhood obesity, poor nutrition and illnesses for Maori and Pacific Island children. In contrast to ‘pre-packaged obesogenic processed foods produced anonymously via energy-intensive, polluting and often obesity-promoting, industrial food manufacturing systems’ (Blair, Reference Blair2009, p. 18, as cited in Ritchie), the food in the centres is locally grown, contributing to children's understandings of ecosystems, seasonal cycles, processes of food production, recycling and regeneration. According to Ritchie, growing and sharing produce is a form of gift-giving outside the capitalist economy and reflects values of nurturing and caring. Children learn about traditional Maori foods such as boil-up — pork bones and ‘puha’ (sowthistle) from the garden, fish heads, fried bread and ‘kai moana’ (seafood). The garden provides a link to culture and physical and spiritual sustenance. Eating together is a celebration of the collective sustenance and affirms whanaungatanga. Food is not simply fuel but understood in a holistic, sensory, and spiritual way. Gardening is a source of wellbeing and the growing, preparation and sharing of food is a source of nurturing and community building, a counter to capitalist, industrialist food production. The paper emphasises that food is a form of making sociality, spirituality, and politics.

Kitchen Work as Feminist Politics

In an explicitly feminist paper set in rural United States, Holly Stovall, Lori Baker-Sperry and Judith Dallinger, like O’Flynn, write about their own and other activists’ feeding work. But in contrast to much second wave feminism, they seek to position kitchen work as both feminist and environmentalist. Given the rise of anxieties about food, cooking and localism, they claim that: ‘Kitchen work has acquired political importance. Daily cooking must be seen as public, as well as private.’ And, like Ritchie, they write about collectivism through feeding work.

They raise an important feminist issue in food activism that is often neglected, namely about the extra burden kitchen work can place on women. Cooking local foods from scratch is time consuming. The women food activists they research have paid work and after-work commitments, and little time or creative energy for cooking or even the simple processes of washing, chopping food and making a meal. Making good food requires patience, care and attention.

Much environmental education literature has omitted the kitchen. Indeed, feminism has devalued kitchen work and the housewife and full-time domesticity due to the unequal unpaid division of labour in the private sphere. While recognising how feminist food studies reveal the pleasure, power, status, drudgery and tensions of cooking in women's lives, they insist that feminists must prioritise food alongside activism and revalue the traditional work of the kitchen. To produce the kitchen as a site of environmental education means cooking on feminist terms. First, by choosing local foods as a way to support small-scale farmers of which women make up a large percentage; second, men must cook so there is fairer division of labour; and third, they call for more alternative spaces for cooking and eating — for example, gender-integrated community kitchens. In this way, cooking can support community building, teaching and learning, where men and women display skills and creativity.

Non-Humans

Whereas the previous articles focused on ways that food through human contact can make families and communities, Monica Green brings the non-humans in the production of food and knowledge into view. Focusing on garden pedagogies aimed at children, she argues that agentic capacity of non-human forces such as the soil, sun and insects produces different knowledge about children's experiences. Responding to what she calls ‘the escalating and prolonged unease about children's declining connectedness to food’, she argues that gardening can increase children's food consciousness and rejuvenate children's relationship with fresh food. Thus, in Green's view, gardening can deepen children's food knowledge, showing them where it comes from, how to cook it, and how it affects their bodies. In particular, she charts how children's interactions with life systems of the soil, air and sun, weather patterns, seasons, the cycles of day and night, animals and mini-beasts can develop their ecological literacy. Children's intense, joyful engagements with non-human life forms help them understand ideas of interdependence and food webs and the interrelatedness of all life. Thus, through maintaining, planting, harvesting and cooking food, digging, pruning, making and spreading compost, collecting and planting seeds, weeding, watering and mulching, children can enter into meaningful relationships with other species to increase awareness of the complexity and interrelatedness of the earth's support life support systems. Food for Green becomes less an object on the table and more a web of material and affective interactions.

Food Relations

These articles and others in the special issue underline the complex relationships we have to food and how food works symbolically, culturally and nutritionally to create connections and performatively make communities. Thus, we can start to see that food is not just something we put in our mouths but constitutes counter-politics, relationship-building, gender-making, and family-making.

While some of the articles hint at the political inequalities of food and eating — particularly in relation to healthism, obesity and neoliberalism — generally they focus on positive, equal sustaining relations in gardening, sharing and cooking foods. In contrast, feminists and critical race theorists in food studies emphasise that cooking, eating and other food practices can ‘isolate and divide as much as they can create sociality and cohesion’ (Abbots, Lavis, & Attala, Reference Abbots, Lavis and Attala2015, p. 2). For example, meal times do not just provide nourishment but also teach about gendered, classed and radicalised labour, control and violence (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015b).

Moreover, this work stresses the perfomative aspects of food, cooking and eating. For example, practices such as shopping, cooking and feeding work do not ‘take place within a pre-given entity such as the “family” . . . but instead the meanings of home and family are produced, reproduced and negotiated through domestic practices’ (Hollows, Reference Hollows2008, p. 60). As a result, food practices become performative resources through which people learn about how to ‘do’ family, gender, race, sexuality and enact specific roles such as being a good mother or grateful child (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015b). Food practices entail the cultural transmission of who does what in relation to food, what foods mean, how power operates, how gender, class and race are done through food, what being a child means, and how to be a certain kind of group such as a family, activist group or classroom. Such arguments raise important questions in relation to the papers and how food is constructed and theorised.

Struggle and inequality underpin ‘feeding work’: the gendered, classed and racialised tasks of shopping, cooking, serving, and washing up in the home and eating out (DeVault, Reference DeVault1991). As part of feeding work in the home, women organise their own and family schedules, choose and prepare food that are not their preferences, and do this in order to provide comfort for their children, partners and families. Feminist authors (Charles, Reference Charles, Jackson and Moore1995; DeVault, Reference DeVault1991, Reference DeVault1999; Hollows, Reference Hollows2008; Valentine, Reference Valentine1999) emphasise how families are suffused with, and constitutive of, social and power relations, including the gendered division of domestic labour. Thus, feminist writers caution us not to romanticise the food and family, or the food and community. Charles (Reference Charles, Jackson and Moore1995) writes: ‘sharing food is an important part of family life and a symbol of community’, but ‘this sharing, although symbolising a community, is not necessarily equal’ (p. 101). Furthermore, meal times can be a site of male aggression and domestic violence (Charles, Reference Charles, Jackson and Moore1995; Lupton, Reference Lupton1996).

The table is, then, a site of accommodation, compromise and conflict (Lupton, Reference Lupton1996). There can be ‘tension and friction rather than peace and harmony at mealtimes’ (Charles, Reference Charles, Jackson and Moore1995, p. 109). Food can be used to ‘punish, cajole, or reinforce hegemonic or patriarchal structures’ (Roth, Reference Roth2005, p. 182). Conflict can arise when parents view the table as a pedagogical site to insist on their children performing good table manners and eating habits. Men enact domestic violence at the table (Lupton, Reference Lupton1996). Family meal times are not always the site of a happy family, and we can add the community and classroom. How do these politics play out in the food curricula discussed in the articles?

Theorists such as Williams-Forson (Reference Williams-Forson2006, Reference Williams-Forson2010; Williams-Forson & Walker, Reference Williams-Forson, Walker and Albala2013), Guthman (Reference Guthman2008a, Reference Guthman2008b, Reference Guthman, Alkon and Agyeman2011), and Slocum (Reference Slocum2007, Reference Slocum2011) insist that racism and racialisation are central to the production, consumption and representation of food and the reproduction of racial inequalities. In her work, Williams-Forson (Reference Williams-Forson2006, Reference Williams-Forson2010) documents the under-researched specificities of African-American food practices, and is keen to highlight how for Black women, food has been an integral part of their community building, individual and collective uplift, and feminist consciousness-raising. As she writes, food is ‘inseparably tied to race’ although how the intersection between food and race is researched varies methodologically and theoretically (Williams-Forson & Walker, Reference Williams-Forson, Walker and Albala2013, p. 285). Albeit with different emphases and theoretical resources, Guthman (Reference Guthman2008a, Reference Guthman2008b, Reference Guthman, Alkon and Agyeman2011) and Slocum (Reference Slocum2007, Reference Slocum2011) examine the Whiteness of so-called alternative food practices and ideas about food justice, with both explicitly theorising Whiteness as a racialised formation in relation to food. In our own work, we discuss the politics and inequalities of multiculturalism food pedagogies and ‘eating the other’ (Duruz, Reference Duruz2010; Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012a, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015b; Hage, Reference Hage, Hage, Johnson, Langsworth and Symonds1997; Heldke, Reference Heldke2003). In her paper on Maori food politics, Ritchie brings out some of these issues, but overall, race is somewhat neglected in the papers.

Sensory Dis/connections

A key theme in the articles is that authors see the growing of food as a means through which children, urban consumers and young people can learn about food sustainability. In particular, the sensory aspects of gardening and the material properties of plants and soil are imagined to produce new knowledge and affective attachments. Future work in this area could draw on visceral scholarship that challenges us to reflect on the classed and racialised aspects of sensory learning, which are under-explored in the issue (Hayes-Conroy, Reference Hayes-Conroy2009; Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, Reference Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy2010). This work does not essentialise or individualise smell, taste, sight, hearing and touch, but sees them as historical socio-culturally located practices, performative of race, class and gender. In particular, Hayes-Conroy's (Reference Hayes-Conroy2009) work on teaching and learning in school gardening shows how ‘taste education’ is classed and racialised and produces differential access to viscerality. Senses and viscera should not be romanticised as presocial in sensory education and food activism, but understood as unequally distributed by class, gender and race.

Denaturalising Nature

A related question is how authors conceptualise food in relation to nature. As is often the case, in the papers, localism, de-industrialism, self-sufficiency and tradition are polarised as self-evident ‘goods’ in relation to science, and globalisation and industrialised foods as ‘evils’. A wholesome view of nature circulates across several of the articles. Vileisis (Reference Vileisis2004) argues that as food production became intensely industrialised in the 19th century, people imagined that their senses, which provided knowledge about food, were taken over by food science. This led to a nostalgia for rural knowledge and nature, primarily among the middle classes. The countryside was associated with the natural and the pure, in contrast to the city, with its connotations of the synthetic and polluted. As a result, city foods were seen as not natural. We can seem similar resonances in some of the papers.

Indeed, there are complex politics in the way that activists construct the natural (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012). As Myerson and Appignanesi (Reference Myerson and Appignanesi2000) write, ‘there was never a nature in which all the categories were pure’ (p. 37). Indeed, they argue ‘we can no longer talk with confidence about “nature” or “culture”’ (p. 62). To give a specific example: feminist Donna Haraway critiques the idea of impurity used by food activists in their arguments about genetically modified foods. Haraway (Reference Haraway1997) writes, ‘it is a mistake in this context to forget that anxieties over the pollution of lineages is at the origin of racist discourse in European cultures’ (p. 35). This work asks us to think hard about what we romanticise as authentic or real. Often, alternative food networks invoke a romantic localism that can reproduce inequalities for minority groups and new modes of ethical subjectivities for privileged groups (Parkins & Craig, Reference Parkins and Craig2009).

Food Memories

We would like to make a further point about the idea of the sensory and its potential to connect. Several papers hint at the centrality of bodies, but this research could be productively extended through a dialogue with studies on embodied learning and food. For example, anthropologist David Sutton (Reference Sutton2001) has researched the ‘doing/learning’ of cooking through an ethnographic study of women cooking in Greece. He argues that cooking involves an ‘embodied apprenticeship’ involving cognitive and embodied memory as forms of knowledges. This, for Sutton, is not about remembering a set of rules but involves ‘images, tastes, smells and experiences, techniques that can only be partially articulated, or memory-jogged, through the medium of recipes’ (p. 135). His argument brings out the sensuousness of knowledge in food production and consumption, but through a close analysis of embodied cooking practices.

Putting Some Other Things on the Table

To bring our commentary to a close, we finish by offering three final provocations on the politics of doing good: race, gender and class, and methodology. In focusing on what we call ‘doing good’, we interrogate how food educators legitimate their claims. Food pedagogies entail asymmetrical relations of power, authority and expertise. The studies and the curricula in the collection can be seen to reproduce ‘moral economies’ of knowledge and food practices reproducing categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ eaters, producers, cooks, teachers and students (Coveney, Reference Coveney2006). Food pedagogies elevate those ‘in the know’ and their ‘good intentions’; and shame classed, gendered and racialised forms of food knowledge, lifestyle and embodiment (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012a, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015a). As we write elsewhere, middle-class food pedagogies such as permaculture workshops and cooking classes, voluntarily paid for as leisure pursuits, consolidate classed and racialised hierarchies of taste, ‘healthism’ and ‘doing good’ (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015a). How then do the authors and teachers in the articles see themselves doing good, and on what terms?

The politics of knowing, what is known, who produces it and ‘who is in the know’ are critical to food reforms. For example, knowledge about what and how to cook is imagined to be on the decline among ‘modern’ mothers and children and subject to much policy and media commentary (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012a; Kimura, Reference Kimura2011). Scientific knowledge in the service of corporations — whether in relation to genetically modified foods or the industrialisation of foodstuffs — is constructed as ‘bad’ knowledge. In the ‘locavore’ food movement, knowing who made your food and where it hails from, and buying local foods is a political imperative, even though the environmental benefits of food miles is contested and the livelihoods of racialised groups growing food in distant countries rarely discussed. Of course, in all of this, there is a classed, racialised and gendered politics about who is seen as in need of knowledge and who is set up as ‘in the know’.

Race, Gender and Class

The most noticeable omissions across the papers were of race, class and gender, the articles by Ritchie and Stovall, Baker-Sperry and Dallinger notwithstanding. We mention earlier that race and racialisation are under-researched and under-theorised in food studies (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012a, Reference Flowers and Swan2012b, Reference Flowers and Swan2015d; Freedman, Reference Freedman, Casper and Currah2011; Guthman Reference Guthman2008a, Reference Guthman2008b; Pandoongpatt, Reference Pandoongpatt2011; Slocum, Reference Slocum2011; Williams-Forson, Reference Williams-Forson2006; Williams-Forson & Walker, Reference Williams-Forson, Walker and Albala2013). As Freedman (Reference Freedman, Casper and Currah2011) notes, the quotidian question ‘What should we have for dinner?’ is not such a simple, innocent question, because gender, race and class are made and consumed through the production and consumption of everyday meals. Hence, she argues that when we eat food, ‘we nourish and maintain our bodies but also produce and reproduce social worlds’ (p. 81). Thus, when thinking about bringing sustainable food to the environmental table, we need to theorise the bodies that laboured to plant, harvest, preserve, procure and prepare foods for others, as well as interrogating how these food practices reflect and reproduce social hierarchies (Freedman, Reference Freedman, Casper and Currah2011, p. 82).

We can extend this challenge to other aspects of environmental education mentioned in the articles. Thus, food scholars critique the racialised and classed politics of white, middle-class alternative food movements (Guthman, Reference Guthman2008a, Reference Guthman2008b; Paddock, Reference Paddock2011; Slocum, Reference Slocum2007, Reference Slocum2011). In this critique, sustainable and ethical food consumers and activists are shown to make normative judgments about what constitutes ‘good’ food, diets, production and consumption. For example, Paddock (Reference Paddock2011) argues that alternative food practices provide a platform for the reproduction of middle-class identities and culture, leading to the moral derision of working-class people and their food consumption. Ethical food consumption itself has become a symbolic marker of classed capital (Johnston & Baumann, Reference Johnston and Baumann2010; Paddock, Reference Paddock2011). The financial and time resources needed to sustain these forms of consumption and access to the health-giving properties of middle-class ‘good’ food have been roundly challenged for being out of the reach of White and racially minoritised working classes (Guthman, Reference Guthman2008a, Reference Guthman2008b; Paddock, Reference Paddock2011). Guthman (Reference Guthman2008a, Reference Guthman2008b) and Slocum (Reference Slocum2007, Reference Slocum2011) suggest such initiatives reproduce White embodied spaces and political aims that not only ignore racial food inequalities and exclusionary practices, but significantly reconsolidate them. How do these hierachies influence the curricula discussed? Ritchie and Stovall, and Baker-Sperry and Dallinger stress how cooking sustainable food can increase the burden on feminist activists. In her important work on food reform, Aya Kimura (Reference Kimura2010) has argued we need to ensure that women are not seen as the problem and solution in food reform, returning women to the domestic sphere.

Furthermore, issues of race, gender and class do not stop at food but are critical for understanding pedagogical relations and educational processes. In this regard, very few of the articles discuss the gendered, racialised and classed practices of teachers or students. For example, educational research on classrooms shows that teachers respond to boys and girls unequally in the classroom, and that boys often dominate space and practices. Accordingly, how did the children and young people acted in gendered, radicalised and classed ways on the field trips and in the classroom? How were the curricula gendered? Keen to address important issues of environmental education, few attended to the unequal and discriminatory performances of gender, class and race by teachers and students. Although positive affects of joy and sharing were profiled, what about shame, greed, competition, racism, and righteousness?

Meaning-Making Potential

To bring our discussion to a conclusion, we finish by raising a point about methodologies, food pedagogies and environmental education. The articles draw on a rich variety of methods. While these provide innovative data, there are still questions about the status of the data and forms of analysis undertaken. For example, we might think more explicitly about theories of multimodal representational processes, meaning-making potential and audience reception (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2011, Reference Flowers and Swan2015d). Thus, in cultural studies there are complex debates about how meaning is made and negotiated, indicating that people do not simply uncritically slurp up so-called ideological messages. How might these help us think about how learners negotiate meanings in food and environmental classrooms and media?

How do we know if someone has learned? How do we know what kinds of effects and affects teaching produces? What kinds of methods are needed to examine these processes? How can we bring learners’ voices and experiences to the centre of our research. In foregrounding embodiment, affect, habits and capacities, pedagogy studies academics encourage us to scrutinise how forms of conduct, technical and cultural capacities, and ideas and affect are acquired, shaped, fashioned and regulated discursively and materially (Watkins et al., Reference Watkins, Noble and Driscoll2015). Several of the papers implicitly write about the importance of affect: Green on children and life forces in gardens; O’Flynn on pleasure cooking with her children; Ritichie on sharing and care. How could we find ways to research and analyse how these work as part of education and learning? In their ground-breaking visceral fieldwork, the Hayes-Conroys show how bodies, sensations, moods and feelings are mobilised in alternative food activism (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, Reference Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy2010). Our bodies, senses, mouths, eyes, tongues, stomachs, noses and hands have all become the targets of teaching across diverse food curricula (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers and Swan2012a, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015a). So, how might we find embodied methods and analyses? In her work on dance and disability, Hickey-Moody (Reference Hickey-Moody, Coleman and Ringrose2013) emphasises the significance of affect — vibrations, sensations, rhythms and sounds — in cultural pedagogies. In our work we examine visuality in food tourism websites and food activist films, and bodily and emotional ‘materials’, and stress the role of cognition — the unconscious, habits, imagination, fantasies, desires and dreams (Flowers & Swan, Reference Flowers, Swan, Flowers and Swan2015b, Reference Flowers and Swan2015d). Noble and colleagues insist that it is through close-up, concrete qualitative study that we can identify how people ‘acquire’ knowledge, and skills and the cultural resources needed to participate in social and cultural practices such as gardening and localism.

In summary, this special issue develops significant, new knowledge in the field of food studies and environmental education. The collection draws on original empirical studies of diverse education sites and insists that food in its varied manifestations — collective, messy, material, symbolic, sensory, political, embodied — needs to be placed at the centre of debates on sustainability education. Future research should prioritise how food and environmental education conceptualises the concepts of embodiment as well as sustainability. In this vein, we would do well to question, as have the feminists and critical race theorists we cite, and to interrogate the ethics of doing good, and of the versions of bodily over mental and emotional health being promulgated, and think about the many ways in which food forms part of our lives, worlds and inequalities way beyond our eating tables (Berlant, Reference Berlant, Metzl and Kirkland2010; Mol, Reference Mol, Vandamme, van de Vathorst and de Beaufort2010).