School meals in Portugal: governing childrens food practices

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5944/rdh.25.2015.15841

Keywords:

School meals, Governmentality, Children, Food

Abstract

Drawing on a post-Foucauldian conceptual framework we look at the rationalities that inform the organization of the Portuguese school meals and the implementation of these rationalities to transform and normalize children eating habits. The empirical material is drawn from a thematic documental analysis of the school meals regulatory framework from the 1970s up until nowadays. The objectives are threefold: 1) to describe the continuities and discontinuities of official discourses on school meals institutional practices; 2) to look at the ways children, health and food are placed and interpreted in those documents; 3) to describe and explain trajectories of school meals governmentalities and its plural arrangements. It was possible to identify five types of school meals governmental regimes: the Authoritarian; the Democratic, the Modern, the Consumer and the Obesity and Risk. These regimes are intertwined and organize in multiple ways the contexts that govern childrens eating practices in schools.

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Author Biography

Monica Truninger, Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa

Monica Truninger is a sociologist and senior research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences – University of Lisbon (ICS-ULisboa). At the ICS-UL she is a member of the scientific board and of the scientific committee of Sociology. Her research expertise is on food and sustainable consumption, and has recently explored the topic of sustainable futures regarding energy consumption. She has conducted research on local and organic food systems, public food procurement, school meals and children’s eating habits, sustainable consumption and renewable energies. She has experience with various methodologies, namely focus groups and workshops with several stakeholders, online ethnographies, interviews and quantitative methods. She has published in journals such as Trends in Food Science and Technology, Journal of Consumer Culture, International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, Science and Technology Studies. She is a board member of the European Sociological Association - Sociology of Consumption Research Network and a member of the International Sociological Association – Research Committee on Food and Agriculture (RC40).

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Published

2015-05-01

How to Cite

Truninger, M., Horta, A., & Teixeira, J. (2015). School meals in Portugal: governing childrens food practices. Revista De Humanidades, (25), 31–55. https://doi.org/10.5944/rdh.25.2015.15841

Issue

No. 25 (2015): Food, quality of life and healthy lifestyles today

Section

Monograficos

License

The work was published in Revista de Humanidades licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. The authors know and agree that the distribution of the work is done by the use of such license. You can copy, use, distribute, transmit and publicly display, provided that the original authorship and source publication (magazine, editorial and URL of the work) is acknowledged, no use for commercial purposes and the existence and specifications of this license is mentioned. For any other use not specified in the license of authors consent should be required.

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