Cross-cultural Perspectives on Eating: A Hidden Curriculum for Food

Alongside increased nutritional and social concerns about the quality of British schoolchildren’s diets there has developed a commensurate belief in the ability of education to affect changes in both attitudes and behaviour towards more ‘healthy’ eating linked to individuals’ lifestyles. Such a belief, it has been argued, has often been both ill-founded (Rodmell and Watts, 1986) and, where beneficial, likely to impact most upon the well-being of those least threatened by the association between health and lifestyles (Blaxter, 1990). For the last decade, health educators have devoted a good deal of energy in the search for ‘objective’ strategies to determine how best to impart health messages through food-focused education. For school pupils, most of that attention has focused upon the formal curriculum, namely the formal corpus of school knowledge that is imparted through legislation and texts and then filtered and acted upon by teachers. Where the knowledge content of the curriculum is itself a selection of the stock of knowledge retained within the culture of a society, such ‘objectivity’ is, of course, more apparent than real. Yet, in its most recent manifestation, food-focused education has been ranked the number one priority for all age groups-but, in particular, for those of school age-by the Nutrition Task Force (Department of Health, 1994) established in the wake of The Health of The Nation White Paper (Department of Health, 1992).