"Good" Food Literacy in Curriculum? Making Visible Constructs of Healthfulness, Access, and Race

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Language, Literacies, and Relational Curriculum

Abstract

Food invokes a curriculum of the senses, the body, nature, connection and culture. We apply a critical literacy lens to the Ontario Federation of Agriculture’s website, Six by Sixteen (http://sixbysixteen.me/index.htm), whose goal is “to help young people learn to plan and prepare six nutritious, locally sourced meals by the time they are sixteen years old” (Six by Sixteen, 2016). We argue teaching food literacy skills without a thorough and clear discussion about the social construction and complexities of food systems, discourses of class and race are reproduced and reinforced. When food literacy is equated with skills and ‘healthy’ habits, it damages the capacity to sustain our individual and collective human and more-than-human bodies.

Authors

• Velta Douglas, University of Toronto

• Erin Sperling, University of Toronto