Food, Culture & Society

An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research

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Exploring Foodscapes at a Danish Public School:

How Emotional Spaces Influence Students’ Eating
Practices

Mette Kirstine Tørslev, Marie Nørredam & Kathrine Vitus

To cite this article: Mette Kirstine Tørslev, Marie Nørredam & Kathrine Vitus (2017) Exploring
Foodscapes at a Danish Public School: How Emotional Spaces Influence Students’ Eating
Practices, Food, Culture & Society, 20:4, 587-607, DOI: 10.1080/15528014.2017.1357946

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2017.1357946

Published online: 05 Sep 2017.

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DOI:
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Food,
Culture
Society
&
VOLUME 20 │ ISSUE 4 │ DECEMBER 2017
Exploring Foodscapes at a
­Danish Public School: How
Emotional Spaces Influence
Students’ Eating Practices
Mette Kirstine Tørsleva  , Marie Nørredama
and Kathrine Vitusa,b
a
University of Copenhagen; bAalborg University
Abstract
Promoting healthy eating among children has high priority in Nordic countries but
remains complex. With the purpose of contributing knowledge to inform efforts to
promote healthy eating environments in schools, this article explores how children
feel and reflect about eating at school and seeks to nuance understandings of how
food and eating are situated in school life. The article draws on ethnographic stud-
ies carried out at a Danish public sports school following two classes from fifth to
seventh grades (age 11–14). By adopting a practice perspective and the analytical
concepts of foodscapes and emotional spaces, the article analyses how emotions
(affects and feelings), discourses, materialities, and social relations within the
school interact. The findings show that many students find eating at school unpleas-
ant. Students want to eat in an un-stressful place away from the gaze of others. They
want to eat in “a safe space”, which is difficult to find at school. Students’ accounts
reveal how eating at school, intersected by the transitional life-phase of youth, is
affected by normativity, control and (self-)discipline, which shape and constrain
their eating habits. The article points to the importance of addressing the emotional
dimensions of eating in efforts to promote school health.
Keywords: Institutional foodscape, emotional spaces, eating practices, ethnogra-
phy, school lunch, school eating environment, children, youth, health
587
M. K. TØRSLEV ET AL. ◊ Exploring Foodscapes at a Danish Public School

1. Introduction
Children’s eating habits and food choices are central issues when discussing
child health and well-being in the Nordic countries. In Denmark, numerous
“healthy eating” campaigns and official national nutritional advice campaigns
have been launched within recent years, many in the public schools (Folkesko-
len) that play a crucial role in policy and practical engagement in promoting
children’s healthy living (Ministry of Education 2009). Consequently, school
food has become highly politicized (Pike 2010). At school, “healthy” eating is
part of both the curriculum and everyday school practices—in talking about
food, eating food, relating through food (Kemmis et al. 2014)—and is required
for the sake of the individual student as well as for the maintenance of a pro-
ductive learning environment.
Research has stressed that environmental factors contribute significantly to
health outcomes (Frohlich, Corin, and Potvin 2001; Pike and Colquhoun 2010).
In Danish public schools, interventions include the provision of healthy meals
and increasing physical activity during the school day. However, only a few
changes have been made to school structures and spaces (Bruselius-Jensen
2014). As is common in population-based nutrition interventions (Conten-
to 2007; Delormier, Frohlich, and Potvin 2009), the aim has mainly been to
change individual health behavior.
Changing eating habits to promote “healthy” eating among students is
a complex matter and goes beyond providing information and healthy food.
Sociological research exploring eating and food as an integral part of children’s
everyday lives and identity formations (James, Kjørholt, and Tingstad 2009)
shows, in various ways, school eating as contextual and as socially embedded in
everyday life (Delormier, Frohlich, and Potvin 2009). It shows how it is the social
rather than nutritional aspects of the school lunch that students are interested
in (Daniel and Gustafsson 2010); how gender, class, and intergenerational
relations intersect with eating styles and social interaction among peers (Bugge
2010); how everyday school meals are contested and highly discursive spaces
with strong socializing forces (Gibson and Dempsey 2015; Karrebæk 2012); and
how aesthetic, sensuous considerations shape school meals (Bruselius-Jensen
2014). This research has exposed clear evidence of the multiplicities and
ambiguities that shape children’s eating practices at school, ambiguities that call
for further exploration of the emotional dimensions to food and eating (Dolphijn
2004) at school. This includes how food and eating relate to daily school life
and how the school as a social agent plays a role in the emotional dimensions of
eating. The emotional connectedness of food and eating in relation to children’s
eating habits has been noted as significant in other settings, primarily within
the home and family (Lupton 1994; Skafida 2013). It is therefore important to
approach this connectedness within the school setting.
Given that emotions (including feelings and affects) influence eating, this
article explores how children feel and reflect about eating lunch at school. The
article seeks to increase and nuance the understanding of how food and eating
are situated in everyday school life with the purpose of contributing knowledge

588
 to inform efforts to promote healthy eating environments at school. The article
draws on an ethnographic study carried out at a Danish public sports school,
following two classes from fifth to seventh grades (aged 11–14). During the
study it became evident that the students did not like eating at school. The pres-
ent analysis springs from curiosity regarding this empirical fact and thereby
undertakes an exploration of food and eating at school by asking how children
practice this activity. We probe how eating is experienced as pleasant and/or
unpleasant by children, and, how the school environment interacts with these
eating practices and experiences.

2.  Theoretical Approach and Conceptual Background

The article approaches eating as “practice” to understand how emotions, dis-
courses, materialities, and social relations within the school setting interact.
Taking a practice approach implies foregrounding doings, sayings, and relatings
(Kemmis et al. 2014), that is, how students do and experience lunch, how they
talk, perceive, and feel about food and eating, and how they relate to one anoth-
er through food and eating. In this way we consider eating practices as mean-
ing-making, identity-forming, and order-producing activities (Nicolini 2012, 7).
This also entails exploring the school setting as a “social site” for these prac-
tices (Kemmis et al. 2014; Schatzki 2002). School is not only a local physical
setting, but also a wider social scene situating eating practices in a cultural
history of education, eating, and health promotion.
Analytically, we explore eating practices by addressing the interconnected-
ness of eating as foodscapes with specific attention to the emotional spaces of
eating experiences (Dolphjin 2004), that is, focusing on the affects and feelings
that are triggered, produced, challenged, or changed in practices surrounding
food and eating at school.

2.1.  Emotional spaces

The term “emotional space” refers to an understanding of emotions as rela-
tional flows between people and places, produced in social practice in the in-
terplay between and among people and environments (Bondi, Davidson, and
Smith 2007). Hence, emotions are considered neither purely psychological, in-
dividual matters—something we “have” inside ourselves—nor just something
we “take in” socially (Ahmed 2014). Moreover, emotional spaces contain more
than defined “emotions” and “feeling states” (e.g. happy, sad, or angry) by also
including affects that are not directly accessible to experience, although they
are not exactly outside of experience either (Pile 2010). Affect is like “a push”
towards emotions and hereby part of felt relations and practices (Thrift 2004).

2.2. Foodscapes
VOLUME 20 As an analytical concept, the term “foodscape” has gained increasing popularity
ISSUE 4
in studies of food, environment, and health (Nygaard et al. 2013; Truninger,
DECEMBER 2017
Horta, and Teixeira 2014). While foodscapes have various theoretical bases

589
M. K. TØRSLEV ET AL. ◊ Exploring Foodscapes at a Danish Public School

and analytical applications, a common interest remains in understanding how

people, food, and environments interact in complex social systems of food and
consumption (Mikkelsen 2011, 210; Nygaard et al. 2013). Some approaches
focus on the physical aspects of foodscapes, for example, food availability in
certain environments (Burgoine et al. 2009), whereas other approaches explore
food and eating in a broader notion, including all encounters with meanings
and associations with food (Brembeck and Johansson 2010; Johansson et al.
2009). Tapping into the latter approach, the present article explores foodscapes
as food-related structures that are always in a process of change by looking at
events of eating as processes of particular sensing, tasting, and feeling that are
connected, contextualized, and given meaning as they occur in time and space
(cf. Rick Dolphijn 2004). Through this perspective, foodscapes and eating
events are approached analytically on both the individual level (i.e. a student’s
food-related encounters) and on the institutional level (i.e. the school as a
specific physical, organizational, and sociocultural space in which students
encounter food-related issues, such as meals, food, and health messages)
(Mikkelsen 2011, 215). Following Dolphijn, attention is centered on “how we
live our lives with food, according to food and through food” (Dolphijn 2004, 8).
Given that all food-related encounters are connected and contextual,
students’ eating experiences at school are distinctive by being situated within
an institutional foodscape (Mikkelsen 2011). The school is not just a place
where children spend time; school is an educational, civilizing institution
(Elias 2000; Valentine 2010). It is a spatial setting shaped by (and shaping)
institutional logics, that is, the material practices and symbolic constructions
that are legitimized through social interests, conditions, and needs. Hence, it is
a place where the institutional health logic defines the appropriate relationship
between subjects, practices, and objects as a particular mode of rationalization
(Scott 2014, 90). Thus, eating events are situated within a network of food-
related issues on different levels: national (Education Act, curriculum),
municipal (health-promotional initiatives, school meal services), school (local
school policies and views), class (teacher’s engagement in health and food/
eating issues, peer cultures, social interaction), and individual (subjective
encounters and embodied experiences). By approaching eating experiences
through the analytical lens of foodscapes, we make it possible to explore the
interconnectedness of these different levels.

2.3.  School setting: an institutional foodscape

The study is set in Hillside Sports School, a public primary school in Copenha-
gen. The school has extra physical education (PE), a specific sports track from
seventh to ninth grades, and a school ethos that places the joy of physical ac-
tivity, health, and play at the heart of everyday school life. We chose Hillside for
the study because the school is “particular” in its specific objective of creating
positive, healthy, and physically active school lives for children, while at the
same time being an “ordinary” public school.

590
 The active inclusion of physical activity in all pedagogical and didactic think-
ing during everyday school life is central to Hillside’s sports profile. Food and
eating is a subject of education in public school in general and at Hillside sports
school in particular. The teaching of food, body, nutrition, and consumption is
part of the school curriculum; for example, home economics and occasionally
in biology or science or during “special theme” weeks. It is also subject to
more informal education on healthy food and proper eating; for example, with
posters being displayed throughout the school carrying messages encouraging
healthy eating and making collages of “healthy food items” in art class. The
school does not at present have a formal health policy, but there is a consensus
on defining health practices in terms of engaging in physical activity and eating
healthily. While these policy and discursive levels of the school foodscape are
significant, structural and material aspects also interact with and shape eat-
ing events. At Hillside students eat lunch in the classroom during their daily
fifteen-minute eating break (afterwards they have a thirty-minute break; the
0–6th grades must go outdoors into the school playgrounds, while the 7th–9th
grades can stay indoors). Hillside has no canteen, as is common in Danish pub-
lic schools because of the tradition of students taking packed lunches to school
(Høyrup and Nielsen 2012). However, the school participates in the municipal
school meal service “EAT,” which delivers freshly cooked meals to the school
every day, so that the students here can get a pre-ordered and prepaid sandwich
or hot meal. Until sixth grade, the meals are brought to the classroom by older
students, but from seventh grade they must go to the “EAT lounge” downstairs
to pick up their food and bring it back to class. During the school day students
can eat as they please during break, but no food is allowed during lessons, ex-
cept for special occasions, such as birthdays, when students usually bring cake
or ice-cream for sharing.

3.  Methods and Design

Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted at Hillside by the first author (female)
in 2012–2013. Two school classes from the fifth to seventh grades were fol-
lowed, covering 56 students aged 11–14 of even gender distribution, of whom
65 percent had an ethnic minority background. The first author spent three con-
secutive months with the classes in fifth grade and went back to the same two
classes for two and a half months at the beginning of seventh grade. The study
was ethnographic and exploratory, based on participant observation (Madden
2010), the overall research interest being children’s experiences of emotional
well-being and how emotional well-being is affected by practices of ethnicity
and youth transitions in the school context. Methodologically, the study empha-
sized participatory research activities to provide students with the options of
both verbal and non-verbal articulation (Gauntlett and Holzwarth 2006; Guille-
min and Drew 2010, 178). Methods included a participatory photo project (with
VOLUME 20 photo-elicited interviews), gender-based group interviews, mappings of food-
ISSUE 4 scapes, and interviews with school staff. As a study over time, the fieldwork
DECEMBER 2017 provided insight into students’ reflections and experiences of the transitional

591
M. K. TØRSLEV ET AL. ◊ Exploring Foodscapes at a Danish Public School

processes of approaching adolescence in regard not only to eating practices,

but also emotional well-being (First author 2016).
Drawing on ethical guidelines within childhood research (Alderson and Mor-
row 2004), locally meaningful informed consent (Madden 2010) was obtained
from the school leadership and teachers, from parents, and from the students
themselves. Participation in the study was voluntary and not part of school-
work, and each student was invited to participate in one or more activities. All
names are pseudonyms.

3.1.  Mapping foodscapes

The analytical focus on eating experiences developed during fieldwork in fifth
grade based on work with photo albums and participant observation during the
school day. Using these methods revealed how food and eating were charged
with meaning and how eating played an essential role in students’ relations,
identifications, and emotional well-being in complex intersections. The
methodological approach to mapping foodscapes was inspired by participatory
research on children’s foodscapes in Nordic countries (Brembeck and Johansson
2010; Johansson et al. 2009) and developed as an integrated part of ethnographic
fieldwork. As an analytical and methodological concept, “foodscapes” were
thus empirically developed as a way of moving beyond dominant discourses on
“healthy food talk” at school by seeking to shift the attention away from food
itself to all the things that go on around eating, affect eating, and are affected
by eating (Dolphijn 2004). In other words, the concept was used to stimulate
students’ reflections on their eating environment (social, emotional, physical)
and to draw attention away from otherwise very fixed notions of healthy versus
unhealthy food.
Seventh-grade students were invited to participate in mapping their “food-
scapes” in class. Every student was given a large poster with the assignment
to write (and illustrate with drawings, if preferred) at least ten separate places
where they had eaten, each unit being labeled an “eating event.” The poster was
conceptualized as the student’s foodscape, and the eating event was defined as
an event where they had eaten something, even just a piece of gum. For each
event, they were asked to write where, when, with whom, and what they had
eaten. They were also asked to write something they particularly recalled from
this event (students wrote both short sentences such as “We were laughing”
and longer explanations of a quarrel, particular tastiness, or reasons for being
happy or sad) and state whether they found the eating event pleasant (rart)
or unpleasant (ikke rart). No predefined explanation of “pleasant”/“unpleas-
ant” was provided, leaving the characterization of a pleasant/unpleasant eating
event open for students to define based on their own reflections and feelings
related to eating. Based on their foodscape mappings, each student wrote a
short essay, ranging from a few lines to two pages, about two events from their
poster: a pleasant and an unpleasant eating event (at least one from school).
Finally, interviews were conducted. The posters were used to guide interviews.

592
 The foodscape posters and essays were organized and coded thematically
to identify patterns, particularities, and variations in eating experiences, both
in general and at school particularly. The complete set of empirical data was
then joined and unfolded through multiple analytical readings, both as narra-
tives of each student and as cross-sectional thematic readings (Mason 2006).
While analytically this article emphasizes the empirical foodscape material,
the findings are based on an analytical process emerging from the fifth to sev-
enth grades, including all the empirical data from the ethnographic fieldwork.

4.  Findings and Analysis

4.1.  Pleasant eating in emotional “safe spaces”

“A pleasant meal is cooked by someone who knows you well—your mom. Or
your grandmother,” Adham says in seventh grade, having been asked to define
a pleasant meal, thereby expressing the emotional connectedness of eating
practices. The emotional basis of eating is common in students’ descriptions
of their eating experiences, although they define pleasant eating differently. It
may take place at home with the entire family together, having fun with friends
in the park, or at home alone quietly in front of the TV. Often the actual food is
less important, but the social context is essential. When describing unpleasant
eating experiences, students often refer to uneasiness and stress: for example,
a family conflict at home, a parent or teacher trying to get one to finish eating,
noise, or a lot of people around. The food of an unpleasant meal is again less
important, although it figures in the eating events; for example, food defined as
repulsive, food one is “forced” to eat, or food one is not “proud to eat.” In an in-
terview, Ahmed reflected on the (un-)pleasantness of a meal, and he described
how “eating a steaming piece of pizza while walking across the schoolyard”
would make eating unpleasant. Ahmed explained that he would be disturbed
by noise, people staring, and a fear of stumbling, so he would not be able to
savor the delicious pizza. In the interview, he juxtaposed the hypothetically
unpleasant meal with a pleasant meal his mother prepares: a Palestinian dish
with tomatoes, meat, and sauce, a meal he can eat at home when his younger
siblings have been put to bed. Here Ahmed draws attention to recurring themes
and issues that students see as central to pleasant eating: taste is important
but not fundamental, because disturbances such as noise (in the school yard
or from siblings), people looking at one, and self-consciousness (fear of stum-
bling) are pivotal. Hence, the eating experience is physically, socially, and emo-
tionally shaped in time and space (Dolphijn 2004).

4.1.1.  Seeking safe spaces for eating at school.  Looking at the students’
foodscape posters, school eating events are mostly represented as unpleasant
eating events. Students’ descriptions of how they experience lunch at school
VOLUME 20
are nonetheless ambiguous: it is nice and fun to be with friends, but references
ISSUE 4
to loud music, children running around, lack of time, headaches, and intrusive
DECEMBER 2017
gazes as unpleasant dominate students’ accounts:

593
M. K. TØRSLEV ET AL. ◊ Exploring Foodscapes at a Danish Public School

You always get caught up in something. I mean, if someone is making noise,

and maybe someone else says something funny, and then you want to com-
ment on that. And then suddenly you think, “Arhh, I can’t eat, time is up.”
(Rashid, seventh grade, interview)

While eating with friends is nice, Rashid says he feels frustrated when he can-
not help engaging in jokes, and suddenly “time is up.” He further explains that
if he does not have time to eat, he gets upset and angry and has a “bad break”
afterwards. In many essays, students similarly voice a sense of stress and dis-
turbance, as illustrated in the following essay by a girl, Maha:

When the bell rang, I took my apple to the hallway to eat it. The apple was
sour, I thought. Aida, Susanna, Klaudia, and Zeinab came into the hallway.
It was a Wednesday at 11.15. We talked about the orienteering race. I was
very stressed about the history presentation later. We all brought an apple,
except Susanna. There were a lot of students in the hall. I hate it when
people look at me while I eat. Susanna was lashed at by her older sister’s
friend—it was unpleasant to eat. I threw out the other half of my apple away
and went to help Susanna. Later I noticed I had strawberry gum—I love that.
(Maha, essay)

Maha explains in the interview following the essay that she never likes to eat in
class because she feels weird (as if something is wrong with her) when people
are looking at her, and sometimes she goes into the hallway. But it is not much
better out there. Her apple is sour, she is stressed about a presentation, peo-
ple are looking, she’s disturbed, and she throws away her apple. Maha cannot
find a place to settle with her eating—there is neither physical nor emotional
calmness to eat, and she paces up and down with her friends. The need for a
calm place to settle while eating, together with its absence, become clear when
taking a closer look at the few pleasant eating events that do take place at
school, as these events are ruptures from everyday eating practices—for exam-
ple, a group of girls eating alone in class when everyone else has left the room,
or a boy eating lunch with his close friend in the school yard while they skate.
Nasrin pinpoints the issue in her short essay/ that she calls “The Secret Room”:

Second week after school start, Banoura, Cecilie, and I find a room where
we sit and eat. I cannot say where it is, but it was really fun and nice just to
sit in there eating and talking. But then on Wednesday a teacher came and
threw us out. (Nasrin, essay)

Nasrin explains afterwards, in agreement with Banoura and Cecilie, how the
secluded space of the “secret room” makes the meal pleasant. It is not just
because it is fun and exciting to hide, Nasrin explains, it is because no one is
“looking at” or disturbing them. Thus, the story of the secret room reflects two
common aspects in students’ descriptions of pleasant eating. First, they want

594
 to eat in a place that is quiet, calm and unstressful. Second, they want to eat
away from the gaze of others. Banoura also addresses “people gazing” in her
essay, in which she describes in detail how she feels “gross” (klam) and “like
a pig” when people are “gazing” (glor) at her while she eats. These students
want to eat, as some put it, “in a safe space.” However, this is difficult to find
at Hillside.
In the following sections, we examine further students’ experiences of eat-
ing at Hillside school, and we move to an analysis of how different levels of the
institutional foodscape (e.g. school materiality, policy and discourse, and class-
room interactions) enact eating practices at school. While students were en-
couraged to reflect on all food and eating events at school, we focus specifically
on experiences of the school lunch. This is because these eating experiences
were more fully elaborated in students’ accounts and because, in both inter-
views and observations, the lunch appeared pregnant with symbolic, cultural,
and moral meaning-making and negotiation. While it may have been possible to
find a safe space for eating a cracker during the day, it proved much harder to
have a full undisturbed meal for lunch.

4.2.  Experiencing lunch at Hillside: “a break for talking,

not for eating”

Laughing, talking, running. Apples fly. “You’re gross,” Malene screams, while
a group of boys laugh out loudly. Music is playing. Umar paces the room
trying to figure out where to sit today. He ends up alone. His sad look is
painful to witness. Rana is poking her pasta salad—I wonder if she has eat-
en anything today. As the bell rings and the lunch break finishes, the trash
can is instantly filled by leftovers. The room empties as they all rush out to
spend their thirty-minute break in the school yard. (Field notes, fifth grade)

Every day at 11:15 a.m. the school bell rings at Hillside, signaling a fifteen-min-
ute break for eating. Students put away their books and take out their packed
lunches from their backpacks. Two or three students usually get their food from
the municipal school meal service, “EAT.” During the eating break, teachers
stay in the classroom to supervise and socialize with students. Although stu-
dents have fixed seats during lessons, they are free to sit as they please when
they eat, as long as they are seated. However, teachers rarely stop students
walking around, unless it becomes very chaotic. If the need to be seated comes
up, arguments and reasons for moving around are many and are used creatively;
for example, going to the bathroom, getting water, picking up stuff in the locker,
or putting something in the trash can. Consequently, the eating break involves
a lot of moving around. Moreover, as indicated in the above quote, the eating
break involves “pacing around” (like Uman) and “poking” but not really eating
VOLUME 20
one’s food (like Rana). Yahia, a boy in seventh grade, reflected on this, saying,
ISSUE 4
“I don’t think people eat at this school. I mean, when we eat it is actually not so
DECEMBER 2017

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M. K. TØRSLEV ET AL. ◊ Exploring Foodscapes at a Danish Public School

much a break for eating as it is a break for talking.” His statement confirms the
social significance of the eating break (Bruselius-Jensen 2014). However, the
sociality or community of eating is not just a matter of fun in getting together,
for the school lunch appears to be as much about exclusion and identity-mak-
ing as it is about socializing with friends. A lot of time is spent “pacing around”
in negotiations of social and symbolic positioning. In interviews, many students
say that they do not like eating at school, and many prefer not to. For some,
this means a school day without eating. “I can manage to wait until I get home,”
Boris remarked. To others, it means stocking up on crackers, chewing gum, and
other small snacks during breaks.

4.2.1.  Discourses of appropriate eating.  A recurring topic in student de-

scriptions of eating lunch at school, which was also observed during fieldwork,
was how teachers in different ways noticed and commented on the content of
students’ packed lunches. Some teachers interfered if they noticed students
eating unhealthily, others only if students did not eat. Few teachers went so
far as inspecting students’ packed lunches collectively by asking for a show
of hands: “Who brought vegetables?” one teacher often asked, demanding that
students always bring “healthy food,” which is defined as rye bread and vege-
tables. Moreover, in interviews all teachers emphasized the importance of the
nutritional value of students’ lunches to ensure that they have the energy to
perform during the school day, as well as sustain a healthy everyday life. This
was not just for the sake of the individual student, but also to ensure a calm,
focused learning environment.
Hence, the regulation of eating practices based on healthy versus unhealthy
food plays a significant role in how food and eating are experienced at school.
Students also say that they have to eat healthily because they are attending
a sports school and therefore are supposed to be “healthier” than students
at other schools, and everyone is very clear about nutritional definitions of
healthy eating. While this may reflect the success of informational health cam-
paigns, it also indicates a restrictive approach to food based on normative bi-
nary oppositions (Mol 2012), as students verbalize food and eating in terms
of rules and discipline, reflecting notions of right and wrong eating, as well as
legitimate and illegitimate food (Douglas 1975). These restrictions and nor-
mative categorizations engage the students’ eating experiences, affecting how
they feel about eating:

Freja:  Well, sometimes it is okay [eating in the classroom], but

sometimes it’s not so pleasant.

Interviewer:  How is that?

Freja:  Well, if it’s unpleasant, it has something to do with, for exam-

ple, something unhealthy, like, something you’re not proud

596
 to bring, then it’s not so nice to sit there and eat it…. If you
bring white bread with chocolate, then it’s kind of unhealthy,
and then you think, “Well, I’m just going to fold it back in
so the others don’t notice that I brought something really
unhealthy.”

Interviewer:  What about the days you find it pleasant to eat in class?
What is that like?

Freja:  If you, for example, get complimented on your food, if you
think it tastes really good and you kind of also want to show
it to the others. (Freja, seventh grade, interview)

To Freja, legitimate food is “something healthy,” and she does not like others to
notice if she brings something unhealthy, like white bread with chocolate. She
further describes pleasant eating not just by taste, but also based on others’
evaluations; eating is pleasant when she feels comfortable “showing” her food
to the others. Her concern about the food she brings thus disturbs her safe
eating space in the sense that symbolic and moral meanings interact with the
eating experience. Another girl similarly expressed how (self-)regulatory dy-
namics shape her eating in the sense that her food can make her feel “weird”
while eating:

She [the teacher] always yelled at people for not bringing food, or because,
well, you know it must be healthy; and maybe it is not very embarrassing,
but I just feel kind of weird, so every time I eat, I open the lunch box to take
out some food and quickly put the lid back on. Most people keep the lid of
the lunch box open, I just think it’s weird. Zeinab keeps telling me to take the
lid off, but I don’t do it. I don’t know why. (Signe, seventh grade, interview)

Signe does not like to eat with the lid of her packed lunch open; to have the
packed lunch open, she says, makes her feel “weird” (i.e. strange in an uncom-
fortable way), thus revealing an uneasiness or discomfort about her packed
lunch. Signe’s description indicates that a preoccupation with accommodating
the teachers’ (and her own) expectations of appropriate eating disturbs her
eating. This does not happen in a single incident; rather, it has become an
embodied habit to “eat with the lid on” (also noticed by her friend Zeinab and
discussed with her), and the rule has become an integrated part of her eating
practice—(re)produced by teachers administering rules and by internalized
rules of behavior and thought—as self-care or practices of the self (Foucault
1988).
The experience of having to eat appropriately and take good care of oneself
appears in several students’ accounts. In some cases, it is also a reflection of
VOLUME 20
the increasing responsibility that comes with growing older. For Selma in sev-
ISSUE 4
enth grade, it can be stressful to make one’s own decisions on what to bring in
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a packed lunch. She worries that she will end up bringing unhealthy food that
is not good for her. Nevertheless, during the interview she (proudly) makes a
perfect list of (officially) healthy food items to put into a packed lunch. Anoth-
er girl, Malene, explains this stressfulness about choosing for oneself by “the
fact” that her body “craves and demands” sugar, and she cannot always control
this. And, if you give in to this craving, “people will think you are disgusting for
eating junk-food,” she continues, and “then you’ll become fat and be bullied.” In
this way, the girls reveal distrust in their own bodies, a distrust that is (re)pro-
duced by the health rules and regulations that permeate school life (Mol 2012).
Moreover, the girls reveal a common concern among students that “being fat”
leads directly to being “bullied” or being “left out.”
Here the school’s sports profile plays a role in emphasizing physical activ-
ities, sports games, and performances, as the “fat body” cannot keep up with
the socially active everyday life at school. This point was also noted by the
school nurse during an interview, where she expressed a concern with the lack
of opportunities for children who are either overweight, do not take a great
interest in sports, lack the social and/or financial resources to attend soccer
or gymnastics sessions in the afternoon, or cannot match the physical skills of
their classmates. They risk being left behind, she argued. The ambition to be
able to “keep up” thus plays a significant role in the school foodscape, not only
as a fear of becoming fat, but also as a worry that one is not eating appropri-
ately. Magnus expressed in an essay how such worries can affect his eating in
class:

I was eating my packed lunch. My dad had made it, and it included rye bread,
ham, sausage, banana and cheese. I was in class in the front row close to
the teacher. I was eating with my best friends, Alex and Yusuf, and it was
cozy and nice. The food tasted really good until I remembered that we had
PE [physical education] later and I knew that I had to eat all my food to have
the strength to run during PE. I ate as fast as I could, I concentrated only
on the food, but it was not very pleasant, because I know you have to eat
slowly, but I had to hurry. But I was nervous. I gathered all my things and
went out into the school yard. I always play with my friends, but I didn’t feel
like it because I felt bad. I think I ate too fast. It all passed during PE—I ran
really well. (Magnus, essay)

Magnus initially enjoys his lunch; food tastes good, and he is with his friends.
Then he suddenly thinks about PE later in the day, he becomes preoccupied
with the necessity of eating to perform, and he cannot enjoy lunch. He also de-
scribes how eating is affected by feelings—how anxieties and worries capture
the event of eating—shaped by dominant notions and expectations of food and
eating at Hillside: you must eat (healthily and slowly) to perform (run). Magnus
thus experiences the eating event as influenced by a logic and requirement of
appropriate eating to such a degree that it not only inhibits him from having a
pleasant meal, but also makes him feel bad during and after eating. Magnus

598
 stops sensing and feeling the food with his complete body (what the food tastes
like, and what the body needs to feel satisfied), as he is preoccupied with how
he is supposed to eat to be able to perform as expected—the “rational self”
takes over to discipline and control the body (Mol 2012). In this way, regula-
tions about “healthy eating” may contribute to a detachment of the body/self,
producing alienated bodies as “disembodied selves” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock
1987, 21). The students’ accounts of eating practices during lunch thus sug-
gest that the eating space for eating is normative, regulated, and highly (self-)
disciplined. Here, feelings of stress and of the fear of failure tend to dominate
eating practices.

4.2.2.  Constructions of “bad” food.  When considering definitions of healthy

food, the consensus at Hillside is curiously strong (given the variety of world-
wide dietary knowledge, expertise, and convictions): a healthy lunch consists
of rye bread and vegetables. This is “the proper” lunch (Murcott 1982), as
opposed to the unhealthy, “bad” lunch, which students typically define as white
bread (perhaps with chocolate), durum or shawarma. Dietary discussions are,
as Dolphijn suggests, “not based on ideas on natural law or physical premises,
but on norms” (2004, 92), and the norms of healthy food at school legitimize,
and are legitimized by, an institutional logic of health at the school. Healthy
food is what, in the Danish cultural context, has been constructed as known
and normal; hence, it has become unquestioned, other than by its difference
from “other” products (Dolphijn 2004, 77). This is particularly evident when
looking at rye bread: part and parcel of a healthy packed lunch at Hillside, as
in most Danish schools, rye bread is historically considered part of Danish
tradition, culture, and national identity (Jakobsen 2012). At school it becomes
the marker of the “healthiest,” “proper,” and “normal” packed lunch (Karrebæk
2012), compared with, for example, a foreign shawarma based on white bread
(even though it may also be filled with salad and vegetables).
This normative categorization and alignment of healthy, normal Danish food
plays a central role in students’ eating experiences. This experience is shaped
by the importance of not standing out as different. In the following quote, the
interviewer probes Zarifa’s statement that eating in class is not pleasant:

Interviewer:  What makes eating in class not so pleasant?

Zarifa:  It is when there are a lot of people, and they ask. You know, if
it [the food] looks strange, and they ask, “What’s that?” and
then you say, “I really don’t want to tell you.” I sometimes
get embarrassed when they ask me, “What is that?” (Zarifa,
seventh grade, interview)
VOLUME 20

ISSUE 4 Zarifa’s eating experience is affected by her food being “strange” (it’s “Paki-
DECEMBER 2017 stani”, she explains), making her feel uncomfortable and embarrassed when

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eating. The food is constructed as “strange” by the comments of her class-

mates, and she incorporates the “strangeness” of her food as an embarrass-
ment, making her feel bad while eating (Rozin 1999). In this way, eating “prop-
erly” and “healthily” at Hillside is not only a nutritional matter but is also loaded
with symbolic, cultural, and moral values and meanings (Douglas 1975). Food
“structures what counts as a person in culture” (Curtin 1992, 4), and “to count”
in the Danish school food culture, you must preferably eat rye bread. Food and
eating may thus engage with social relations as categories of exclusion, but
they can also become a space for social and ethnic mobility:

Zeinab:  There was a time when I was unhealthy when I didn’t eat rye
bread. I was young, and I wasn’t at all the healthy one—and then
I felt bad about myself, and I began to eat rye bread.

Maha:  I didn’t like rye bread at first.

Zeinab:  Neither did I actually … but now I like rye bread. (Girl focus
group, fifth grade)

Here Zeinab expresses how Danish food culture (rye bread), identity (“the
healthy one”) and the internalization of rules of healthy living intersect. Zeinab
felt bad, but after a while she began to practice health appropriately, and now
she likes rye bread. When students bring food that does not comply with strict
norms of healthiness, whether for economic, social, cultural or other reasons,
they become targets of stigmatization. Students’ socioeconomic, cultural, and
religious backgrounds engage with eating practices, but, rather than being an
expression of them, these backgrounds become differences, categorized by the
moral binary structure of good versus bad food (Douglas 1975). Moreover, the
symbolic nature of the packed lunch as an extension of students’ homes posi-
tions not only the individual student but also the family within a social land-
scape and health hierarchies. However, this is not only the case symbolically
and emotionally, but also explicitly, as students must sometimes take home a
note if their packed lunch is not considered appropriate. Zarifa remembers one
such note, after which her mom began to put rye bread in her packed lunch, and
then “It was okay.” Food and the packed lunch thus form part of a process of
categorization based on what “belongs” to Danish “health culture” in the form
of both the teacher expecting a proper “healthy Danish lunch” and the mother
seeking to provide one. Thus, symbolic and moral meaning-making in school
eating spaces becomes dichotomous, potentially fostering positions of good/
bad and right/wrong while enacting a sense of belonging and non-belonging.

4.2.3.  Proper bodies: internalizing right and wrong.  While regulations on

healthy eating may cause a sense of bodily alienation, bodies are certainly
present during eating, which is an ultimate bodily practice of taking, chewing,

600
 and swallowing food into the body. It is exactly this concrete confrontation by
(and of) the bodily fleshiness of the self that causes uneasiness during eating
at school. Maha wrote in the previously quoted essay how she hates it when
“someone is looking” while she eats, Ahmed would not enjoy eating pizza in the
school yard because of “people looking,” and Banoura wrote how she “feels like
a pig” and “feels gross” when students at school look at her while she eats. The
discomfort caused by “looks” is expressed in various forms, revealing a sig-
nificant self-consciousness during eating. This sensitivity of eating may relate
to the affective nature of eating, where, as an intimate exchange between the
environment and the self, eating involves a material breach that creates a sense
of vulnerability (Rozin 1999, 14). The body is potentially exposed during eating,
and students often refer to eating as embarrassing:

Zeinab:  The reason I didn’t eat so much was that it’s embarrassing to eat
in class. Well, now it’s not so embarrassing because I’ve seen
others eat spaghetti or hamburger or hotdogs and stuff. So, well,
okay, it’s just a bread roll!

Mette:  How is it embarrassing to eat in class?

Zeinab:  If you accidently spit or if you bring some gross food.

Mette:  Does anyone say anything?

Zeinab:  Yeah—definitely. They say something to Yahia. You know, that du-
rum he brings. But I’m not sure he cares.

Mette:  Do you care?

Zeinab:  Well, not so much—you know, they eat stuff too, so if they say any-
thing, I can use that against them. (Zeinab, fifth grade, interview)

Zeinab describes how eating in class is uncomfortable because of the embar-

rassment of accidently spitting out food or eating something considered gross,
thereby expressing a sense of exposure or sensitivity during eating. Zeinab is
afraid she will get caught in a precarious situation, bodily by spitting or sym-
bolically by eating something gross. The embarrassment Zeinab refers to is
thus actuated by the intersection of the bodily practice of consuming food with
the symbolic practice of becoming and defining the self through this consump-
tion (Dolphijn 2004, 55). Eating is thus a risky activity (Fischler 1988; Rozin
1999), not in the sense of conventional health risks, but as a risk of exclusion
by becoming bodily different, gross, and overweight. Zeinab points to lunch as
VOLUME 20 a sort of social battlefield where you have to keep up your defenses; if someone
ISSUE 4 comments on Zeinab’s eating, she can strike back at them, because “they eat
DECEMBER 2017

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stuff too” and that can be “used against them.” Thus, what you eat, and how
you eat it, can be turned against you because food positions students in social
landscapes (Caplan 1997).

5.  Discussion: Early Youth and Ensuring Emotional

Safe Spaces for Eating
Students in this study express the need for emotional safe spaces for eating,
spaces that foster feeling calm, relaxed, able, and joyful; spaces where the
tastiness of the food is not disturbed by regulatory pressures or the gazes of
one’s peers; spaces where emotionally affectionate connections enacted via
the food—for example, being cooked by “mom”—are allowed to flow without
disturbance. In these spaces, eating is pleasant. However, they are difficult to
find at school when having lunch, where the emotional flows in spaces of eating
stimulate feelings of stress, guilt, embarrassment, repulsion, and the fear of
exclusion. The analysis has shown how regulating gazes of health promotion
engage with students’ eating practices to the extent that they may prefer to
“keep the lid on” and foster a sense of detachment of the body/self in the quest
to control the eating, craving body. At the same time, eating practices at school
confront the students with the corporality of their own and other bodies in a
very material way, thus causing uneasiness and embarrassment. Students in
this study connect healthy eating with healthy bodies, apparently in compliance
with nutritional health knowledge. However, the significance of this connec-
tion is not necessarily to obtain a nutritionally healthy body that is resilient to
present and future sickness, but to build on the desire to have a body that is in
compliance with moral, aesthetic, and social normativity. Hence, the primary
motivational factor among the students at Hillside to eat and act “healthily” is
to protect themselves from being categorized as deviant, that is, as unhealthy,
fat, or strange.
When this study began, the students were 11–13  years old (fifth grade)
moving towards 12–14  years (seventh grade). Hence, they approach youth
with a multitude of body-emotional, social, and physical changes which shape
and affect their everyday lives, including their perceptions of self and others
(Aitken 2001; Valentine 2003). Their everyday practices are filled with both
anticipation (looking forward to joining the “teen club,” as some put it) and
anxieties about navigating all these changes. In interviews and conversations
or via photos and drawings, they expressed how “becoming teenagers” is en-
ergy consuming, and many of them reported having a hard time “recognizing”
themselves, their bodies, and their feelings (authors 2016). Moreover, such
changes are hard to keep private, leaving the early adolescent body vulnerable
(Aitken 2001; Thorne 1993) due to constant internal and external evaluations
and identifications based on perceptions of the “normal” body (James 1993;
Valentine 2010, 27). These transitional dynamics shape and affect the students’
eating practices: how they do and experience lunch, how they talk, perceive,
and feel about food and eating, and how they relate to one another through food
and eating (Kemmis et al. 2014). Hence, the transitions towards early youth

602
 involve increasing negotiations of “normality” concerning feelings, physical ap-
pearance, and behavior, all being enacted in the event of eating as a social and
symbolic site for identity-making (James, Kjørholt, and Tingstad 2009). This
may be considered a natural path and condition of life. However, at Hillside
the school foodscape—the eating environment as a flow of affects, feelings,
discourses, and materialities—becomes a space of control, regulation, and in-
creased self-responsibility based on dichotomies of right/wrong or good/bad.
Hereby the negotiations of normality are emphasized and eating practices are
seriously disturbed. Therefore, it is vital to be aware of the elements of eating
practices and to address them in efforts to enhance emotionally healthy eating
environments at school, not only to ensure that students eat a nutritious lunch
to sustain their healthy everyday lives, but also to avoid the development of
more deeply felt bodily alienation and negative body images (Grogan 2008).
While much disturbance of eating practices occurs in the classroom, these
are connected to and shaped by the network of food-related encounters in the
school’s institutional foodscape (Dolphijn 2004). Accordingly, to make chang-
es to eating practices—to promote emotionally healthier environments—it is
necessary to be attentive to various institutional levels within the school as a
social site, as a specific physical, organizational, political, and sociocultural
space (Kemmis et al. 2014). Rather than considering eating practices as indi-
vidual forms of behavior determined by contextual factors (Blue et al. 2016), it
is necessary to direct awareness to the physical setting of lunch (e.g. allowing
more physical room and time) intersected by both cultural-discursive and so-
cioemotional spaces. This means developing and strengthening a perception
of food not only as nutrition, but also as contextualized affective experiences
and allowing alternative health norms. It also involves a recognition of how
food and eating engages the sense of relating based on social hierarchies, peer
culture, and power relations, including how these shift during the transitions
of early youth. Evaluations of recent Danish school meal initiatives have em-
phasized that, to create healthy eating environments, food and eating must be
integrated into the school’s educational program and organization (Høyrup and
Nielsen 2012). Moreover, food and eating must also be explicitly included as an
educational priority within broader school policies. Food and eating are already
considered a major factor in children’s health, but they should also be recog-
nized as a constitutive factor in the social, symbolic, and emotional dimensions
of children’s everyday lives.

6. Conclusion
Most students in this study said that the daily lunch at school is hectic and
noisy, physically, socially, and emotionally. Students not only lack the time and
spaces for eating, but also spend vast amounts of time and energy staying
clear of “noise” and “interfering gazes” while negotiating social and symbolic
VOLUME 20 relations and identifications. Students’ accounts of eating reveal how the nor-
ISSUE 4 mativity of healthy, appropriate eating has led to panoptic regulatory gazes that
DECEMBER 2017 disturb their eating at school. This promotes neither nutritional nor social and

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M. K. TØRSLEV ET AL. ◊ Exploring Foodscapes at a Danish Public School

psychological well-being and health, and many students are developing dis-
embodied health compliance (or defiance) rather than embodied health com-
petency. Also, the normative character of eating potentially marginalizes eth-
nic minority students and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. The
emotional spaces of eating at school build on regulation, control, and (self-)
discipline, where feelings such as guilt, stress, and fear of exclusion or failure
are rampant. The result is that students do not like eating lunch, causing them
to not eat at school, except for crackers and candy in the corners to keep
the belly from rumbling. Feelings effect eating practices (Lupton 1996), and
children (especially when approaching the youth stage) will inevitably at times
have different kinds of bad feeling that may prevent them from eating. When
the emotional eating environment at school becomes the factor that prevents
students from eating, it becomes a serious, institutional problem that must be
addressed to ensure children’s health and well-being.

Acknowledgements
The article is based on a PhD study that is part of the SULIM Research Pro-
ject—Towards Sustainable Healthy Lifestyle Interventions for Migrants—man-
aged by the Danish Research Centre for Migration, Ethnicity and Health and
financed by the Innovation Fund Denmark.

Mette Kirstine Tørslev is a PhD Fellow at the Danish Research Centre for Mi-
gration, Ethnicity and Health (MESU), Department of Public Health, University of
Copenhagen. Her main areas of research are childhood and youth, school health
promotion, ethnicity, migration, and integration, and ethnography. Correspondence
may be sent to: mekt@sund.ku.dk

Marie Nørredam is Associate Professor at the Danish Research Centre for

Migration, Ethnicity and Health (MESU), Department of Public Health, University
of Copenhagen. Her main areas of research are equity and health, migration, and
health services research.

Kathrine Vitus is a sociologist and Associate Professor at the Department of Soci-

ology and Social Work, Faculty of Social Sciences, Aalborg University, Denmark.
During the research for the SULIM research project she was Associate Professor
at the Danish Research Centre for Migration, Ethnicity and Health (MESU). Her
main areas of research are childhood and youth, identity and ethnicity, migration,
integration and marginalization, and qualitative methods.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

604
 Funding

This work was funded by the Innovation Fund Denmark (formerly the Danish Strategic
Research Council).

ORCID
Mette Kirstine Tørslev   http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6186-6241

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