Food, health and sustainability: How students navigate conflicting choices in social contexts

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Objectives: The paper explores how students’ values and food choices change or adapt depending on the social environment and how students navigate the resulting tensions in food choices and practices when balancing nutrition against social and cultural preferences and sensory experiences. Design: The study analysed students’ discussions about food and health to explore how values and knowledges are expressed together within them, and shift these across different social environments. Setting: Community-based study in Zimbabwe in a context many students live in food poverty with long-term implications for physical development and learning. Methods: Through a re-analysis of group interviews with 120 upper secondary/high school students attending six schools in Zimbabwe, we explored how students create meanings around food and health in different social environments. Results: Students’ creation of different meanings around food and health depends on the context and the wider social environment. As students discuss food choices and practices within the family, at school and in peer groups, different values and knowledges come to the fore, shifting from responsibility to identity and/or convenience. Importantly, bio-medical, social-cultural and sensory values and knowledges are present in all of students’ discussions across these different social environments. Conclusion: The concept of value-mobilities is developed to describe students’ ability to navigate tensions between how food and health are understood and valued in different social and cultural settings, and to make food choices and health decisions.