Computer says no: an analysis of three digital food education resources

Abstract

ABSTRACT What kind of thing will food education become in digitised classrooms? Drawn from a broader research project concerned with the ‘e turn’ in school health and physical education, this paper analyses three examples of digital food education (DEF). This is done by considering the role of digital technology in changing – or not changing – earlier forms of food education. In each case, these processes are viewed as portals of connection through which knowledge claims are produced, copied, merged, manipulated, juxtaposed and re-represented. Food education is, therefore, conceptualised not as the distillation of scientific knowledge, but as the uses to which this knowledge can be put. Our overall finding – that in many ways DEF is not very different from that which preceded it – echoes other scholars; nutritionism dressed in digital garb is still nutritionism. However, rather than arguing that DEF needs to adhere more faithfully to nutritional science, we argue the reverse; that digital technology has the as yet unmet potential to move food education away from nutritional science towards something more intellectually rich and educationally engaging.