This case study explores how a number of cooking school trained cooks have constructed a professional identity and practice as school cooks, and how their previous learning for, and practice in, restaurants dialectically interacted (and interacts) with the learning process they underwent once they started to work in nurseries and childhood schools.

The case study was carried out in 5 municipal nurseries (for children between 3 months and 3 years of age) and 3 childhood schools (for children between 3 and 6 years of age) in a Northern Italian town.

The cooks’ narratives, together with findings from participant observation, illustrate how working as school cooks entails, among other things, (1) restructuring the previous learning about ways with food to a considerable extent, (2) learning to comply with a host of bureaucratic expectation and stringent nutritional rules, (3) develop a teaching disposition and communication ability towards the children’s parents. These first interpretive findings can be considered as some of the building blocks of the school cooks’ professional identity. However, the latter dialectically interacts with the early restaurant-oriented training because if cooking for very young children invited and/or required of these cooks to introduce changes and experiment with more effective ways to make certain foods such as vegetables appreciated by children, this did not (and does not) prevent them from maintaining some of the learning and practices acquired in cooking school, and later performed in restaurants, that those cooks consider still valid or indispensable.

Gobbo F. (2012a), Nourishing Learning, Nourishing Culture, (paper presented at ECER Cadiz, Sept. 2012). Gobbo F. (2012b), The “RIGHT” food at the “RIGHT” time in the “RIGHT” way: the art of cooking for nursery and childhood school children (paper presented at AAA Annual Meeting, San Francisco CA, Nov. 2012) Gobbo F. (2013a), Food for thought (paper presented at the Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group Meeting, San Diego CA, April 2013) Gobbo F. (2013b), Food and the Transmission of Cultural Ways and Meanings in a Padua (Italy) Municipal Scuola dell’Infanzia (Childhood School) (paper presented at ECER Porto, Sept. 2013). Gobbo F. (2013c), Food For The Babies: The Ritual of School Lunch In A Padua (Italy) Municipal Nursery, (paper presented at ECER Porto, Sept. 2013). Gobbo F. (2015), “Nourishing Learning, Nurturing Culture, Cultivating Justice”, in G. W. Noblit, W. T. Pink eds., Education, Equity, Economy: Crafting a New Intersection, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 25-50.