School Lunch Matters: Encountering the New Jim Crow and the Anthropocene

Abstract

This presidential lecture to the American Educational Studies Association argues that school lunch matters as education, not merely as management, especially within the ethically challenging contexts of the New Jim Crow (with its school-to-prison pipeline) and the Anthropocene—both wicked problems. The educational significance of children's foodways, school food, and school lunch has deep roots in early modern, as well as high modern thought, and within the past decade a new educational studies scholarship on school lunch has emerged concurrently with Michelle Obama's leadership for National School Lunch Program reforms. This study invites a wide range of educational studies scholarship by mapping school lunch matters that might frame new curriculum theorizing with the purpose of developing leaders' ethical responses to both the school-to-prison pipeline and the environmental crisis. This conceptual frame focuses a prospectus for educational creativity on school lunch's health matters, choice matters, table matters, earth matters, aesthetics matters, kitchen matters, community matters, service matters, and study matters.