School lunch is often regarded as a necessary but inconvenient distraction from the real work
of education. Lunch in this view is about providing students the nourishment they need in
order to attend to academic content and the tests that assess whether content has been learned.
In contrast the central purpose of this collection is to examine school lunch as an
educational phenomenon in its own right. Contributing authors-drawing from a variety of
disciplinary traditions including philosophy sociology and anthropology-examine school lunch
policies and practices social and cultural aspects of food and eating and the relation among
school food the environment and human and non-human animal well-being. The volume also
addresses how school lunch might be more widely conceptualized and practiced as an educational
undertaking.
