The aim of the paper/presentation is to critically analyze “the pedagogical meal” as an idea and a method used to civilize and make children aware of good choices and manners regarding food and health. “The pedagogical meal” is here seen as part of a discourse in which young children´s education and health have become general issues. Discussions regarding what and how children should eat have expanded and at the same time children have become a more important segment as active consumers. Contradictory concepts of children struggle and children are portrayed as immature “sugarlovers” as well as competent ambassadors for sustainable food choices. Children need to be educated to eat well and right, but they also have the right to experience and develop the knowledge of good eating on their own conditions.

In contemporary educational discourse, health is seen as something both overall and good, and the school's mission has increasingly come to focus on fostering students' good health (Irisdotter Aldenmyr, 2014). Health is seen as a natural right in the Western world (Berglund, 2008), but fabricated as a success factor that the individual must realize and conquer (Gunnarsson, 2014). People are expected to take care of their health, make good choices and live the right way. It is understood as a human right to eat well but it is also constructed as “normal” and sometimes as morally ideal behavior. Eating habits and food choices are seen as an essential part of health discourse and a normal healthy living. It is considered abnormal to make improper food choices, eating too much or too little, at the wrong time and in the wrong places (Nilsson, 2011).

A small pilot, done previously, shows that relations between children and food are made and explained from specific discourses of childhood, nutritional sciences, and moral ideas of how to become a healthy individual and a good eater (Balldin & Ljungberg, 2014). Using Foucault´s analytical tools, governmentality and genealogy (Dean, 1999; Foucault, 1991; 2010; Nicoll & Fejes, 2008; Rose 1999) the paper search for deeper understanding of what and how discourses and techniques operate in educational practices and policy, making us talk about and think of the relations between children and food in specific ways.

Parent’s responsibilities when it comes to children’s health are pinpointed in media and in reports from different medical and psychological experts. A central element in the discourse of children´s health is a focus on unhealthy food, uncivilized eating habits and obesity. Another element is that privileged families do the right choices and that privileged people, in contrast to unprivileged people and families, have an extended knowledge and awareness when it comes to food, nutrition and health. The overall element of risk imbues the different discourses and links them together (Beck, 2000). The medical experts are often positioned in a white middleclass and their position is intertwined with the discourses, whereas there could be negative consequences for families who are ethnically and culturally positioned outside of a white middleclass. We aim to highlight the above ruling mentalities through different empirical materials.

The empirical material consists of policy documents, media, magazines and books concerning children´s food consumption and upbringing, as well as ethnographical data produced within ongoing “foodprojects” with children. In a poststructuralist perspective our study deals with understanding and destabilizing, rather than explaining why and to what extent. The idea is to produce further understanding of how children´s health is made and presented, as well as how children´s relations to food is govern by mentalities of what makes a “normal healthy child”.

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