Food Education, Creative Practice and Youth’s Everyday Geographies of Food (RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2025)

This event is part of the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2025

Panel:

• Convenor, Panel Chair: Sara Brouwer, Utrecht University
• Convenor: Irene Marchiani, Utrecht University
• Convenor: Tine Beneker, Utrecht university
• Convenor: Ajay Bailey, Utrecht university
• Convenor: Harrison Awuh, Utrecht University

Description:

From various national educational programmes accompanying the EU’s Fruit and Vegetables Scheme to government-supported programmes such as the Healthy Schools Approach (De Gezonde School) in The Netherlands, the Italian School & Food Programme (Scuola&Cibo), and the ‘Food – a fact of life’ programme in the UK, the food education landscape is a patchwork.

While different in each country, these formal food pedagogies – educational ideologies and practices focused on growing, acquiring, shopping, cooking, eating and disposing of food (Flowers & Swan 2015) – share the common goal of educating young people about healthy and sustainable food choices and skills. Studies in European contexts have mainly measured knowledge retention and uptake of healthy eating habits (Battjes-Fries et al. 2017), while geographers in Anglo-Saxon settings have highlighted a scalar politics around how social anxieties about food and diet (cooking skills, childhood obesity) in educational programmes place responsibility on the individual scale of the young body, overlooking structural processes such as income and spatial inequalities that shape food access (Jackson 2016). Geographers have, furthermore, critiqued food education programmes for reducing food to its nutritional components, emphasising students’ deficits over capabilities, and for producing normative moral binaries distinguishing good/bad food, healthy/unhealthy or good/bad parents and children, often excluding diverse cultural and socio-economic foodways (Maher et al 2020; Rawlins 2009).

Creative methods and practice have the potential to bridge the gap between food education and young people’s diverse and everyday geographies of food. This session includes contributions that explore:

• How creativity in formal or informal education can reimagine food education;
• How participatory methods (e.g. photo elicitation, arts-based methods, games such as Serious Play but also gardening, cooking, recipes) can help integrate youth’s voices and their geographies of food in food education or to understand the role and responsibilities of teachers, administrators, parents;
• How creative practice (art, photography, theatre, poetry) can challenge the predominant material lens in food education, shift students from passive to active agents in learning about food or facilitate discussions around the relational and affective nature of food and structural political and economic factors influencing how families relate to food.