Transforming School Food With a Feminist Politics of Care

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: School Food Politics for Social Justice, Human Rights, and Sustainability (Table 35)

Abstract

School food programs are about more than just feeding kids. They are a form of community care and a policy tool for advancing education, health, justice, food sovereignty, and sustainability. Everyday people from a diverse range of global contexts have successfully challenged and changed programs that fall short of these ideals. This presentation highlights the importance of global and local struggles to argue that the transformative potential of school food hinges on valuing the gendered labor that goes into caring for, feeding, and educating children. Drawing from historical and contemporary research, personal experiences, and collaborations with community partners, the presentation provides innovative strategies that can be used in efforts to change school food policy and systems. Ultimately, the presentation sets the stage to reimagine school food as part of the infrastructure of daily life, arguing that it can and should be at the vanguard of building a new economy rooted in care for people and the environment.
Specifically, we highlight instances of transformative school food politics, which we believe is not possible without policy protagonism, a four-pronged approach for engaging in productive struggles for change: defining the problem that policy should address, seeking the resources to best address that problem, leveraging power vis-à-vis social categories (e.g., teachers as caregivers), and acting collectively. Engaging in policy protagonism is itself an act of care that can be used to produce more caring food and education systems, a feminist politics of care that prioritizes the daily infrastructure of life. When we care about school meals, we must not only care for and about the children who eat them, but also the cooks and cafeteria workers, teachers, agricultural workers, and others whose labor they depend on. And through our school food systems, we must care for the natural environment on which all life depends.
Care is a powerful form of acting in community – even at the national level – with implications for how we feed children in school. The feminist transformation we seek is one that comes from a diversity of stakeholders contributing their situated knowledge, questioning who holds power and who claims power, and forming collaborations to increase policy protagonism. We hope attendees will gain a deeper appreciation of school meals as central to the infrastructure of daily life that sustains and nourishes communities currently and into the future. We further hope that attendees will recognize care as a form of power with the potential to bring about transformative change when people act in community with one another to renegotiate who feeds whom, what, how, and for what purpose.

Authors

• Jennifer E. Gaddis, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Sarah A. Robert, University at Buffalo - SUNY