Clearing Up the Table: Food Pedagogies and Environmental Education — Contributions, Challenges and Future Agendas

In our paper, we draw on recent scholarship on food pedagogies and pedagogy studies to explore themes in the collection of articles in this special issue. In particular, we show how the articles variously conceptualise formal and informal pedagogies, their curricula, aims, and potential effects in relation to food and sustainability. Drawing on debates in pedagogy studies, we investigate how the papers reflect on what makes a pedagogy pedagogical. We then turn to food studies literature to identify how the articles in this special issue construct food as a theoretical and empirical object. Given food's multifaceted nature, which means that food works materially, biologically, economically, symbolically and socially, we explore which versions of food and its attributes are profiled across and within the articles. Inspired by critiques on race and class in relation to food and food social movements, in the final section of the paper we ask how the articles and future research on food and environmental education can take account of the racialised, gendered and classed dimensions of education for food sustainability. As part of our discussion, we evaluate the ethics of doing good, the moral economy educators reproduce in relation to class, race and gender, and the contribution feminism and critical race theory can make to future research agendas and writing in the field.