School Food Politics for Social Justice, Human Rights, and Sustainability

ABSTRACT: The aim of this presentation is to show the value of the concept of school foodscapes for critical, social justice-affirming, and cross-national analyses of school food policies and practices that inform political action. We share insights drawn from a critical inquiry into school food systems in Greenland and Denmark, where ‘food, because it is cultural and political, is a major social justice issue in schools’ (Weaver-Hightower, 2011, p. 19). We apply an
interdisciplinary approach to present the background and to analyze some of the fundamental differences in school foodscapes in Greenland and Denmark. Methods from foodscape studies (Appadurai, 1996; Dolphijn, 2004) are used to investigate the complex dynamics between physical, socio-cultural and organizational spaces for food in public schools. We analyze two texts by using
critical discourse analysis (CDA) as presented by Norman Fairclough (1992). We have selected these texts because each represents the dominant, discursive order of school food: a public policy text for free school meals in Greenland and a supermarket advert text for packed lunches in Denmark (author, 2023). Finally, we discuss the implications of these differences for inequity and social
justice among children and youth. The research question that guides our inquiry is ‘how can differences between school foodscapes in Greenland and Denmark be understood by underlying political discourses and what is the impact of this on social practice, especially with regard to equity and social justice for children and youth?’