School Meals between health education and resistance of everyday life

Abstract

Taking into account the diagnosed malnutrition of the population, school seems to be a particularly suitable setting for the health promotion of young people. This includes both targeted educational programs for the development of nutrition-related knowledge and competence and school catering itself. School catering is considered as a favourable starting point since it allows to combine easily behavioural and structural prevention as well as reaching out to young people on a nationwide scale: By receiving healthy food, pupils learn rules for a healthy lifestyle and internalise them. By taking into account these programmatic constructs, I will be presenting the results of an ethnographic study on school meals. I will trace how, on the one hand, health is being drawn up as normative leading model for school meals and on the other, how it is effectively negotiated during the everyday practice of school meals. I will be showing then also how the implementation of health promotion is furthered by the institutions, but also, how the pupils are not simply the objects of institutional concerns but subjects who appropriate the space of school meals following their own interests and shape it accordingly.