School feeding and the establishment of school identities: from meals for the poor to the right to food

This essay aims to analyze school feeding as a practice contributing to the establishment of school identities. The point of departure is a nonsystematic review of publications on school feeding and identities in Brazil's public schools. The discussion begins with the persistence of paternalistic discourses and practices that reduce school feeding to food for the poor, observed in the studies. The meanings in this paternalistic approach suggest that it appears to function as a power mechanism to brand the schoolchildren with an identify of poverty and inferiority. This understanding is situated in the prevailing power relations in schools, in the exercise of disciplinary power and its potential to produce identities, as well as the practices of resistance resulting from such power in the school feeding context. The schoolchildren are also agents of their own identity processes, considering that their relations with school feeding involve processes not only of subordination but also of resistance and active identity-building, combining the traditional with the modern, the local with the global, among other aspects. Even the ambiguities in this scenario are signs of a paradigm shift in the planning and practice of school feeding, raising elements to analyze it: on the one hand, as a device for the maintenance of social inequalities, and on the other, efforts and actions to support school feeding as an essential right and factor for emancipatory identities.