Beyond Jamie’s School Dinners: Social entrepreneurs and other actants in the moral geographies of young people and food

Over the last decade school food has emerged as one of a number of ways in which concerns over children and young people’s health might be addressed. In 2005 Jamie Oliver, TV chef, emerged as a significant voice, championing the capacity of school food to avert a range of potentially detrimental health conditions. This chapter attempts to identify and analyze the ways in which the complex and ambiguous figure of Jamie Oliver has, and continues to claim some authority – in a variety of TV shows and social/moral enterprises such as Working in Jamie’s Kitchen and Jamie’s School Dinners –to intervene into what might be termed ‘the moral geographies of young people and food’. This chapter is concerned with those programs and interventions that aim to educate and encourage people (families, parents, young people, school teachers, dinners ladies) to make ‘better’ food choices in what has been called the battleground of school dining rooms. The intervention of social/moral entrepreneurs into these issues/spaces raise troubling questions not only about knowledge, expertise, authority in relation to young people, food and health but perhaps more significantly, who is/can/should be an actor in programs that overwhelmingly target the children of disadvantaged/poor families. Drawing on the work of Foucault and the late Stuart Hall the chapter explores how the figure of the moral entrepreneur might compel us to imagine the State as only one of a possible range of actors in the moral geographies of young people and food.

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