Beyond Calories: Food as Relationship in the Learning Gardens

• In Event: Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: Food Communities, Garden Communities: Underlying Lessons, Limits, and Liminality

Abstract

Most packaged foods at the grocery store are processed for shelf life and have “Nutritional Facts” labels, with standardized design to make it easy for consumers to read and to assess the nutritional value of food based on standardized servings. Whether we call them calories or joules, or reconfigure serving sizes, when food is reduced to such “facts” in the relentless search for energy input and output following the model of industrial economy, we miss the value and meaning embodied in food. This study explores food as relationship in an urban school learning garden where 85% of the students are low-income and over 70% are non-white, mostly immigrants or refugees.

Author

• Dilafruz R. Williams, Portland State University