"You can make salad with this, right?" : Race, Class and Health at an Urban Elementary School
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2014
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Haverford College. Department of Anthropology
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Thesis
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
As national anxieties over the 'obesity epidemic' increase in the U.S., nutrition education programs are being started in schools. I conducted ethnographic research on a nutrition education program called the 'Cooking Crew' run at Huey Elementary in West Philadelphia. This program is funded and supported by two centers at The University of Pennsylvania: The Netter Center for Community Partnerships and The Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative (UNI). In this ethnography, I demonstrate how particular food items--organic, local and exotic foods--are fetishized and constructed as 'healthy' in the Cooking Crew. However, this conception of health is exclusionary. Within this program, a white, upper-middle class idea of health is privileged and taught to African American students from low-income communities. The Cooking Crew further reproduces racial and class inequalities by failing to address access or affordability of 'healthy' food outside of the school environment. Lastly, this program perpetuates neoliberal discourses of individualization and self-reliance, which teach students to constantly monitor and regulate their own eating choices and the food habits of others.