Transforming School Food Politics Around The World
School food programs are about more than just feeding kids. They are a form of community care and a policy tool for advancing education, health, justice, food sovereignty, and sustainability. Transforming School Food Politics around the World illustrates how everyday people from a diverse range of global contexts have successfully challenged and changed programs that fall short of these ideals. Editors Jennifer Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert highlight the importance of global and local struggles to argue that the transformative potential of school food hinges on valuing the gendered labor that goes into caring for, feeding, and educating children.
Through accessible and inspiring essays, Transforming School Food Politics around the World shows politics in action. Chapter contributors include youths, mothers, teachers, farmers, school nutrition workers, academics, lobbyists, policymakers, state employees, nonprofit staff, and social movement activists. Drawing from historical and contemporary research, personal experiences, and collaborations with community partners, they provide readers with innovative strategies that can be used in their own efforts to change school food policy and systems. Ultimately, this volume sets the stage to reimagine school food as part of the infrastructure of daily life, arguing that it can and should be at the vanguard of building a new economy rooted in care for people and the environment.
With appearances and remarks from Representative Francesca Hong and Allison Pfaff Harris.
Additional resources to go along with your reading experience, including a book discussion and activity guide can be found here.
Jennifer Gaddis
Jennifer Gaddis is an associate professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools (University of California Press, 2019), which won book awards from the National Women’s Studies Association and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. She is the co-editor with Sarah A. Robert of Transforming School Food Politics Around the World.
Gaddis is an advisory board member of the National Farm to School Network and has written op-eds on school food politics for popular media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, The Guardian, and Teen Vogue. She and her students regularly partner with school districts, labor unions, and social movement organizations on community-based research and advocacy projects related to food justice in K-12 schools. Dr. Gaddis is an active member of the Healthy School Meals for All Wisconsin coalition and a regular partner of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Dr. Sarah A. Robert
Dr. Sarah A. Robert is an international education and gender policy expert and an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). She earned her PhD, Educational Policy Studies, from the School of Education, UW-Madison. She is the author of Neoliberal Education Reform: Gendered Notions in Global and Local Contexts (Routledge, 2017), awarded the Critics’ Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association. Robert co-edited with Jennifer E. Gaddis Transforming School Food Politics Around the World (MIT Press, 2024). She also edited “Intersectionality and education work during COVID-19 transitions” for Gender, Work, and Organizations (2023); Neoliber