School Lunch is Not a Meal: Posthuman Eating as Folk Phenomenology

Abstract

School lunch is one of the least critiqued aspects of compulsory schooling. As a result, there may be a tendency to think of school lunch as part of the hidden curriculum, but what and how students eat are evident and ubiquitous parts of the schooling experience. In demarcating the school lunch as an overt educational event, this article attempts to tell a story behind the centerpiece of that event: meat. We hope to add to the small yet growing body of literature in social foundations of education addressing the multiple meanings and theoretical complexities of school food, as we consider the cafeteria's potential in cultivating posthuman eating through the lens of folk phenomenology. We ask: What are the implications of a site—the school cafeteria—where eating animals is routine and normal, yet still ignored and forgotten? This question extends well beyond the cafeteria itself. Thus, our analysis seeks to make overt a phenomenological reversal that returns to the things themselves—animals (human and nonhuman) and their lives and deaths—as a way to recognize food's posthuman and folk significance. We conclude by linking our analysis to the challenges faced by educators and scholars critiquing the neoliberal school that routinely acts as a training ground for docile bodies and technocratically controlled human and nonhuman subjects. Posthuman eating as folk phenomenology is an opportunity to recover what has been lost in the neoliberal effort to (re)produce students as acquiescent consumers.