Performing Vegetable Nutrition: Rethinking School Food and Health

Abstract

School food programs across the United States are plagued by widespread criticism and face urgent calls for reform and public discourse has also become fixated upon “healthy” eating as a means to address a variety of child health problems. Scholars widely challenge the admonishment to eat “healthy” as laden with privilege and recognize the inherent, hegemonic whiteness of contemporary alternative food movements, but few studies have directly examined the relationship between race and school food programs. This paper draws on ethnographic research to unpack “healthy eating” through the perspective of elementary school students and shows how they challenge dominant narratives that assume kids do not like vegetables and expose the fallacy of nutrition education as the key to healthy eating. Through the performance of vegetable nutrition, kids critically engage with normative nutrition messages and begin to reveal a racialized consciousness of school food.