Charlie May Bell (KCL) - 2024-25 Students
charlotte.m.bell@kcl.ac.uk

The School Meal: A history of nutrition and education in Britain, 1970-2010.

The school meal is one of the most commonplace features of British school life, but the very ordinariness of the school meal belies a rich history of controversy and debate that offers valuable insight into modern British history. My project will unpack the debates and controversies surrounding the school meal between 1970-2010, moving in concentric circles as it examines how state responsibility for child welfare, the science of nutrition and the relationship between nutrition and education intertwine.

My project will explore the politics of the school meal from 1970, as attitudes towards the welfare state shifted, memorably encapsulated in Thatcher’s removal of free school milk. I will use the school meal as a lens through which to examine the debates and discourses that arose over the cutbacks to state welfare in the context of child nutrition at school. As political debates raged around the responsibility of the state for its most vulnerable citizens, the science of nutrition was becoming ever more popularised. Despite greater awareness of the nutritive qualities of food, the science of nutrition was, and remains, beset by nebulous and conflicting beliefs. I aim to examine how nutrition science appeared in the context of the school meal, spawning questions about whether the school meal was suitable nourishment for learning children. My project also seeks to examine the intersection of concerns about state welfare and the science of nutrition. Today, concerns over child food poverty cite the detrimental effects of hunger on learning, suggesting a relationship between child nutrition and education. This relationship is long-standing, and my project seeks to explore how it manifested in the context of changes in popular conceptions of nutrition, and the debates about state welfare. In particular, it seeks to look at pseudo-scientific theories about nutrition and mental development in children. The emergence of these theories coincided with the discourse surrounding the abolition of nutritional standards, the emergence of an education marketplace in 1989 and the publication of exam results which increased pressure on academic success. This coincidence raises questions about the interrelationship between the nutrition science, education and state welfare. My project addresses these questions, exploring the rise of popular scientific theories about nutrition and academic success and how they were connected with changes to school meals. An interrogation of how policy changes fed rhetoric linking nutrition and learning would inform understandings of the same rhetoric in contemporary debates.

This project will contribute to our understanding of late 20th century Britain, as neoliberalism took hold, and the postwar welfare state began to subside, but the project is also undeniably contemporary facing. Questions around how, when, where and whom to offer a free school meal, and what this meal should consist of, still rage. The history of this most ordinary, most ubiquitous of British experiences allows for new insight into how and why we cook up and allocate this integral meal for British schoolchildren. In this sense, the project has the potential to make an intervention at policy level right now, as the use of food banks and child poverty rises in Britain.

Primary supervisor: Dr Caitjan Gainty