Food for Thought – Illustrating the (Educational) Mess we are in Using Global Food Production

• In Event: Childhood and Youth in Sustainability, Environment, and Climate Change Education

Proposal

Economic hardship and imbalance are not recent developments. What is new is that imbalances also impact the well-established order in countries of the Global North to a greater extent. Threatened by the effects of the war on Ukraine, energy-related (Wolbring 2011) and food-related security are under threat. Distopias of empty gas supplies and boats of grain negotiated out of being held hostage to keep the established order of imbalance between rich and poor in place have recently become headlines. Access to healthy nutritious food daily is increasingly becoming a privilege. Detailed backgrounds on the dynamics of factors leading to exclusion remain under-researched: “A wealth of information has been gathered regarding the impacts of race, class, and, to a lesser extent, immigration and migration status in the food system which has led to the common acknowledgment that ‘certain populations of bodies are structurally recognized as less worthy of sustenance’ (Slocum and Saldanha 2013, 1)” (Simpson 201, 406)

It is often stated that internationally comparative studies in education and policies based on those studies shape local and national, even global, educational thinking and educational realities and thus have a massive impact on educational understandings. And while those shifts in policies and settings are usually associated with high hopes for (better) employability, most of them also promote other values declared internationally shared, such as diversity, participation, accountability, and, most recently, sustainability (Ramirez et al. 2016). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are intended to help make sustainability an issue addressed in all areas of life against a backdrop of increasing resource scarcity (Biermann et al. 2022). They are, therefore, also being incorporated into the development of school offerings and curricula, making the benchmark for teaching and learning in higher education. Such globally proclaimed goals seem to have a solidarity effect if everyone commits to these goals and accordingly enables sustainable life designs. If these goals are also sustainable and promote social justice, then "an awareness of inter-being, togetherness, compassion, understanding, and a cooperative future in combating social, economic, and political injustice" (CIES call 2023) seems within reach.
Nonetheless, the significance of the SDGs has been disputed academically. The hoped-for improvement of educational work by linking it to sustainable social, economic, and ecological objectives does not seem to occur. Rather, the SDGs turn out to be a temporary steering moment that does not reach far enough (Heigl et al. 2022) and pursue a sustainable strategy. The further criticism is that here again, a particular idea of life and the handling of resources is one-sided, even paternalistically (Oloruntoba 2020), set as “shared value” and spread globally, while local necessities are subordinated. Those local specifics are often not considered even though they affect marginalized and vulnerable groups in specific ways.

This contribution aims to highlight some ideas of inequality in access to knowledge and the ability to engage in fighting (Simpson 2017) for the goal (e.g., SDG 2) of making quality nutrition available to all. This second SDG aims to “end hunger and ensure access by all people, in particular the poor and people in vulnerable situations, including infants, to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round” (United Nations 2015, https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal2). One of the social realms where this goal has been expected to be developed and fulfilled is through education and school systems.

Research on food projects (e.g., Gobbo 2016, 2021) shows how much there is to teach and learn about food and nutrition. This applies to students, teachers, administrative staff, and school administration on local levels. Teachers, teacher assistants, and those who prepare food must be familiar with individual, social, cultural, and religious peculiarities preparing food and meals. They must also be familiar with nutrition facts, their construction and meaning, and local and global food production. On the individual level, Lynn Fendler's (2012) work points to the close connection between education and diet, particularly regarding the formation of taste. However, taste here does not refer solely to like/dislike and taste judgments that reflect social distinctions. Taste education and taste distinctions between local and global foods become closely linked to cultural location and tradition, which entails sociality and inter-corporeality. Eating is insofar a pedagogical matter in which social togetherness in ritualized settings endows socialization into a society of taste. Schooling can be considered a way to become a social being and prepare for social, cultural, and political participation.

The questions we will take up in this presentation are:
1. How does food (in-) security affect education and vice-versa?
2. Who can afford to think about what to eat, and who will be lucky enough to be on the receiving end of humanitarian food programs?
3. Who is supposed to teach and learn beyond specific levels of complexity of the interlinkages between food production, distribution, provision, and availability?

Authors

• Sabine Krause, University of Innsbruck

• Michelle Proyer, University of Vienna