Eating in the Nursery School: Pedagogy, Performativity & Biopolitics

The study presented here explores eating as a pedagogical practice. It pays attention to arrangements of things such as Christmas cookies, whole-wheat and white bread, frozen chicken, plates, chairs, tables, and freezers. Entering in dialogue with performativity theory and post-structuralist approaches, a series of ethnographic analyses from German and Brazilian nursery schools reveal how eating can be enacted as a sensual pleasure, a health risk, an ethnic custom, or a civil right within a variety of local pedagogical contexts. Through specific arrangements of foods and other things, young children are educated to eat with moderation, to change their ethnic dietary habits, or to become modern citizens. Pedagogy can thus entail doing public health, doing ethnic identity, or doing citizenship while eating is an important way of doing these in early childhood education and care settings.