Jo Pike

Rethinking children's spaces and places

David Blundell’s excellent book is the latest addition to the well-established New Childhoods Series, published by Bloomsbury and edited by Phil Jones of the Institute of Education. The book reflects an increasing cross-disciplinary academic interest in the sub-field of children’s geographies which has steadily grown over the last three decades. Emerging in tandem with the new sociology of childhood in the early 1990s, children’s geographers called for academics to engage with children’s everyday spatialities – that is to say the mutually constitutive relationships between space and the social relations of childhood. As Blundell suggests

Is Neo-Liberal Capitalism Eating Itself or Its Young?

As we finalise the introduction to what we think is an important, and timely, examination of the relationships between a globalising neo-Liberal capitalism, a post-2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) environment of recession and austerity, and the moral economies of young people’s health and well-being, it appears that neo-Liberal, globalised capitalism might be about to eat itself … again. And if not itself, then it will continue, it seems, to devour its young.

'Someone has to keep shouting': celebrities as food pedagogues

ABSTRACT In a recent interview with the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver stated that ‘Food is the most basic issue […] it’s about health […] someone has to take responsibility for this. Someone has to keep shouting’. Oliver’s statement reflects his position as a chef, a public pedagogue and, importantly for the purposes of this article, a celebrity. Oliver’s is one of many voices that have entered the public realm to educate the public about the dangers of unhealthy eating. In this article we discuss the work of three celebrities: Jamie Oliver. Sesame Street Workshop’s character Cookie Monster and Australian food celebrity Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Foundation for schools. Whilst acknowledging that these three food pedagogues represent only a few of the voices that seek to intervene in the food consumption habits of citizens in contemporary times, they can be understood as a public pedagogical response fuelled by the obesity epidemic. We argue that whilst on the surface it appears that our three food pedagogues offer benevolently inspired propositions, we understand such posturing as deeply political. Specifically we are interested in examining the educative effects of these messages and their troubling implications for how individuals understand and experience food-related imperatives. We ask readers to consider who is metaphorically ‘shouting’ whilst drawing on various pedagogical forms and devices and we ask who is being ‘shouted’ at, and to what effects. We suggest that these celebrities function as powerful pedagogues who seemingly attempt to offer particular visions of health, consumption and citizenship, and, above all, attempt to cultivate a moral duty to eat well.

15 From Health to Hard Times: Fairness and Entitlement in Free School Meals After Neo-Liberalism

Following the election of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition Government in the UK elections of 2010, the then Education Secretary Michael Gove announced that plans to extend a pilot scheme to provide free school meals for children in primary school would be abandoned. The previous Labour Government’s pilot scheme was implemented between 2009 and 2011 and extended free school meals entitlement in Wolverhampton (UK) and provided universal free school meals for all primary school children in Newham and Durham (UK). These pilot schemes replaced previous eligibility criteria, where pupils were entitled to free school meals if their parents claimed ‘means-tested out-of-work benefits (such as Income Support) or Child Tax Credit (and not Working Tax Credit) with an annual income of no more than £16,190’ (Kitchen et al. 2013, p.1).

Interventions to increase free school meal take-up

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to design and implement interventions to increase free school meal (FSM) uptake in pilot schools. This paper describes the interventions, reports on acceptability (as perceived by school working parties) and explores the process of implementing change. Design/methodology/approach – The research consisted of two phases, an exploratory phase followed by an intervention phase. Findings from the latter are presented. Ten pilot schools (five primary and five secondary) in Leeds, England were recruited. Each established a working party, examined current claiming processes and implemented individualised action plans. This paper draws on the final action plans and interviews/focus groups with working parties. Findings – Interventions to improve FSM claiming process, minimise discrimination and maximise awareness were designed. The majority were implemented successfully, the exception being amending anti-bullying policies. Creative ways of delivering interventions were demons...

Introduction: Beyond Jamie’s School Dinners

The horsemeat substitution scandal is neither the impetus for, nor the object of, the discussions and analyses that we want to develop in this book. However, this scandal makes clear, if we examine it in a particular way, key dimensions of what we want to identify as the moral geographies of young people and food. And it is these moral geographies that are our prime interest here.

Dinner Ladies and Junk Food Mums: Gender, Class and the Battleground of School Meals

The (melo)drama that made Jamie’s School Dinners such compelling viewing for millions of viewers in the UK and around the world was established early on in the first episode of the series – as it must be if people are to be engaged and continue to tune in and to connect to the characters, the figures, that we encounter, that we care about, that make us angry, that frustrate us. Much of this drama, initially, was centred on the relationship between Jamie Oliver and Nora Sands, the so-called dinner lady that Oliver worked with at Kidbrooke Comprehensive School. In this chapter the figure of the dinner lady is important for our discussion. But Nora, and her encounters and disagreements, even battles, with Jamie Oliver, was a much more central figure in the story of poor food options and poor food choices in English school dining rooms, and the struggles to replace these poor options and choices with good food options and good food choices. Nora’s central role in the drama associated with the struggles to effect these changes became clear early in episode one. A significant element in establishing Nora’s part in the drama that was to unfold related to the chaos that developed as Jamie Oliver tried to get Nora and her fellow dinner ladies to prepare more nutritious options for the school’s dinner menu, rather than to just open boxes of processed food and reheat this in the hours before service of the midday meal.

The School Meal: A Civilising Technology?

Like much of Foucault’s (1995) work, Discipline and Punish has frequently been debated, and subjected to multiple interpretations in many of the social sciences where it has been inserted into a variety of disciplined spaces. Indeed, a less than generous reading of this debate might suggest that many of the key elements of Discipline and Punish have to a large extent been misunderstood, even misinterpreted. But that sort of reading would suggest that we, and a number of others, have been able to discern more accurately what it was that Foucault really meant by terms such as bio-power, discipline, panopticism, docile bodies (though it is possible to get these, as with anything, wrong). That is not what we want to claim, or to achieve here. Instead, our aim is to open up a space for thinking about the myriad ‘little practices’ that can be encountered in school dining rooms, and the purposes (implied or explicit) and consequences (intended or otherwise) that these practices serve and produce. The part of Discipline and Punish that interests us in relation to these concerns is the section on Docile Bodies, and Foucault’s discussion of new problematisations of the productive capacities and possibilities of embodied labour emerging at the rise of rationalised capitalism. Foucault (1995, p. 135) opens his discussion of the docile body, as he often does, with a compelling account of a particular historical figure: in this case the ‘ideal figure of the soldier as it was still seen in the early seventeenth century’.

Jamie’s School Dinners: Celebrity Culture, Food and the Problem of Healthy Eating

Jamie Oliver is undoubtedly one of the most influential and well-known figures in relation to concerns about eating habits, food production, processing and preparation, health and well-being and the food that we (who live in the UK, the US, Australia/New Zealand) feed our children in school and elsewhere. In 2005 his reality TV show Jamie’s School Dinners attracted some of the highest viewing figures for Channel 4, with an estimated 5.3 million UK viewers tuning in to watch his crusade to improve school meals in the London Borough of Greenwich, UK. Further television series followed with the UK-based Jamie’s Return to School Dinners in 2006, Jamie’s Ministry of Food in 2008 and Jamie’s American Food Revolution in 2010, which aired in the US and Australia as Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. The response from the public, media commentators, nutritionists and school food professionals was mixed and Oliver’s campaigns and interventions were both applauded and criticised. While some commended his efforts to bring school food to the fore of the political agenda, other reactions ranged from the outspokenly critical to the savagely judgemental. And yet, Jamie Oliver is by no means the only celebrity chef to venture into such campaigning territory (see, for example, Gordon Ramsay’s Behind Bars, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fish Fight and Chicken Run).

The School Dining Room: A Governable Space?

It is almost axiomatic to suggest that a concern with space, its organisation, effects and usage has traditionally been the dominant concern of geographic inquiry. But this interest in space, as we have indicated in our engagement with the concept of moral geographies, has also been the focus of both empirical and theoretical work in other social scientific disciplines. Gerry Stimson (1986, p. 652) argues that: The history of human beings is a history of the arrangement of spaces and places. It is found in the most minute and mundane aspects of daily living: for example, places of education with their lecture halls indicate the relationship of teacher and taught; the three-bedroomed family house which embodies the idea of the nuclear family; the front and back gardens around many houses indicate the English idea of privacy, property and attachment to the land.