Reimagining Education for Health: A Body and Sensory Reading of Child and Adolescent Obesity and Eating Disorders (c. 1920-2020)

This contribution is intended as an interactive discussion of a research project application framed within a bodily-sensorily and “temporally-inflected” lens to do with nutrition in connection with other key topics, such as physical exercise, body perception and emotional wellbeing. In particular, the project focuses on obesity and eating disorders in children and adolescents – and associated discourses, representations and practices –, which pose growing challenges to families and health and education professionals and, as contemporary research issues, also benefit from being looked at historically to understand the present condition(s) of childhood and adolescence. Imagined communities (Anderson, 1991) are embodied by individuals and groups of people. Young people in particular represent such social bodies. Healthy children and youth are thus emblematic of a healthy nation; conversely, unhealthy children and youth are symptoms of a sick nation (Nys et al., 2002). Food, in turn, as substance, is the fuel for body and mind and co-determines health and illness; as cultural form, it is inseparably bound to values, prejudices and anxieties. As such, it is an indicator of more and less conscious behaviours and thoughts, an element that binds and divides, that is: a factor which helps shape identities (e.g., Counihan & Kaplan, 1998; Scholliers, 2001). Indeed, “you are what you eat”, as a popular saying would have it, which can be traced back to La physiologie du gout (1826) by Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Implied in such rhetoric is an ambivalent conception of taste in relation to food (e.g., von Hoffmann, 2013). It fits in with discourses that have long posited man [sic] as a self-educating project (cf. Depaepe, 2012). From an historiographic point of view, in the domain of food, among other ones, the French Annales school in particular has been fruitful in linking up social and economic structures with everyday lives and habits of ordinary people, material culture, and the like. Significantly, in food history, the history of medicine, as well as the history of education since the 1990s a “cultural turn” has gained prominence and reconnected with such research. However, these cultural-historical disciplinary sub-strands have so far hardly been brought into dialogue or, for that matter, related to present challenges relating to obesity and eating disorders. What is clear in any case, across temporal-geographical and cultural contexts, is that in the binary code of sick and healthy regarding (social/individual) bodies, nutrition, exercise, and so on education has come into play and that, however formal or informal, this education has addressed the senses (***, forthcoming) and involved various producers of meaning, including audio-/visual materials (***, 2013/2016). In general, sense-scapes of childhood and adolescence (***, forthcoming) have changed to such extent that some refer to them today as “obesogenic”. Importantly, insight into how precisely these sense-scapes (including eatable landscapes; cf. Burke, 2005) have changed and how that has affected the young will help avoid framing the issues in question as concerning certain individuals and/or groups of people. Bibliography: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism . London/New York: Verso, 1991. Catherine Burke, “Contested Desires: The Edible Landscape of School”. Paedagogica Historica, 41 (4-5), 2005, pp. 571-587. Carice M. Counihan & Steven L. Kaplan (Eds.), Food and Gender: Identity and Power . Amsterdam: OPA, 1998. Marc Depaepe (Ed.), Between Educationalization and Appropriation: Selected Writings on the History of Modern Educational Systems . Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012. Viktoria von Hoffmann, Gouter le monde: Une histoire culturelle du gout a l’epoque moderne (Series: L’Europe alimentaire). Bruxelles, P.I.E.: Peter Lang, 2013. Liesbet Nys, Henk De Smaele, Jo Tollebeek & Kaat Wils (Eds.), De zieke natie: Over de medicalisering van de samenleving. 1860-1914 . Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 2002. Peter Scholliers (Ed.), Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages. Oxford/New York: Berg, 2001.