School meal sociality or lunch pack individualism? Using an intervention study to compare the social impacts of school meals and packed lunches from home

Abstract

French

The present article specifies and broadens our understanding of the concept of commensality by investigating what it means to ‘share a meal’. The study utilizes a school meal intervention carried out in Denmark in 2011/2012. It shows how different types of school meal arrangement influence the social life of a school class, and how these arrangements involve strategies of both inclusion and exclusion. Two types of school meals are compared in the intervention study: a hot meal based on Nordic ingredients and the normal Danish school meal arrangement in which children bring lunch packs to school. The study discusses commensality by examining and comparing lunchtime interactions within the same group of children in the two contrasting meal situations. The results fail to confirm the conventional view that shared meals have greater social impacts and benefits than eating individualized foods. The article argues that the social entrepreneurship involved in sharing individual lunch packs might even outweigh some of the benefits of shared meals where everyone is served the same food.

Keywords

commensality culture eating food individualization meals social sharing

Introduction

A commensal meal often evokes pictures of a family sitting around a table sharing a homemade meal (Mestdag & Glorieux, 2009). Yet in contemporary society far from all meals are eaten in the home, and often, even at a shared meal, diners do not eat the same food. In this research article we analyze commensality under conditions differing greatly from the traditional picture, which are nonetheless highly relevant, as children nowadays spend more and more of their daytime hours in institutional settings such as the school. Danish schools offer a meal setting where children eat together but eat different foods because the children bring in lunch packs. We investigate whether the commensality in this setting differs from the type that evolves when the same food is eaten by all. What role, if any, does food play in the shaping of commensality?

The existing literature on food and meals tends to depict some meals as more social than others. Sidney W. Mintz has stressed that social meals not only must be eaten by everyone at the same time but also consist of the same items for all eaters and be served in a fixed order (Mintz, 1985). Similarly, Claude Fischler emphasizes the way in which eating the same food makes individuals believe that they are the same, and thereby strengthens group identity and a sense of belonging (Fischler, 2011). The general suggestion here is that particular foods served in certain ways are better social conductors than others. Maurice Bloch describes how eating a bowl of soup implies greater togetherness than eating popcorn (Bloch, 1999). A hot meal generally reflects closeness and intimacy, and may be confined to immediate family or close friends (Wood, 1995), whereas eating a cold meal demonstrates something less intimate. Mary Douglas states in her famous article ‘Deciphering a meal’ that meals are for friends and drinks for strangers (Douglas, 1972). By contrast, eating different foods or following a specific diet is thought to isolate the eater from the collective. Tiina Arppe and her colleagues describe how following special diets, such as the living food diet and veganism, set the eater apart from others around the table, who eat ‘ordinary’ food (Arppe et al., 2011).

The literature, then, suggests that in order to socialize, the participants in a meal situation are supposed to share food from the same pot. Given this conventional wisdom, it is interesting to ask whether sitting around a table sharing the same food has more socially productive impacts than sitting around a table eating individual foods. This question is especially relevant because it is often claimed today that an individualization of our eating habits and meals is taking place (Arppe et al., 2011; Fischler, 2011; Mestdag & Glorieux, 2009; Mintz, 1985).

Researchers emphasize the ways in which the family dinner has become a buffet catering to each family member’s food preferences in both the preparation and presentation of the meal (Andersson, 1980; Beardsworth & Keil, 1997), as opposed to earlier, when economic hardship enforced another sort of commensality. Here, everyone had to eat the same food at the same time because ordinary families were not financially able to support differing tastes and divergent needs (Andersson, 1980; Beardsworth & Keil, 1997).

The individualization of social eating, also described as dietary individualism or food individualism, comes in many forms (Bove et al., 2003; Sobal & Nelson, 2003). Bove, Sobal, and Rauschenbach, for example, describe how newly married couples accomplish food individualism in complex ways, such as by only sharing specific components of the meal; by adding individual spices or sauces to the same food; by cooking the same ingredients in different ways; by making different side dishes; or simply by eating completely different meals (Sobal et al., 2002). If it is true that people still dine together but eat individualized foods, what does this imply about commensality? If the very heart of commensality lies in the social process of eating the same food, what is the impact of individualization?

There is an echo of this issue in the public debate in Denmark about school meal services versus lunch packs brought from home. Danish school children typically bring home-packed lunches to school. There is, however, an ongoing debate about whether this arrangement should be abandoned in favor of a school meal service providing dishes made outside the home, as happens in many other countries including Sweden, Italy, and Finland.¹

Bringing a packed lunch from home does nothing to obscure children’s social origins, as it reveals family tastes and preferences through the parents’ food choices. By contrast, the school meals offer the same dish to all, social origin notwithstanding. It is broadly accepted that school meal services offer a chance to positively influence the health of otherwise unhealthy children, and because of this ‘social meals’ are seen as both the social and nutritional platform to counter social inequality and promote public health (Benn, 2010; Carlsen, 2011; Gullberg, 2006; Raulio et al., 2010).

The present article looks into such assumptions, critically comparing the social impacts of school meals and packed lunches. To this end, we utilize a school meal intervention carried out in Denmark in 2011/2012. In comparing two meal situations, we discuss what sorts of commensalities are possible in contexts where children eat individual food items or share the same food. This may help us broaden our perspective on commensality; it may bring out a new version of the commensality concept, one reflecting the way eating takes place in contemporary society.

Commensality and sharing

For more than a hundred years, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social theorists have tried to describe and capture the idea of commensality. This interest is not surprising considering that commensal eating underlines important social relations, and the sharing of food is such an essential part of our life that it involves the very structure of social organization (Fischler, 2011; Sobal, 2000). For example, in modern family life, the meal is identified as an important social event that both establishes and reproduces the family as a social unity (Devault, 1991). Commensal eating patterns are not stable, but change over the life course, the mother’s feeding of the newborn representing the first and most fundamental food sharing relation (Pollock, 2012). When individuals face important life transitions, such as moving away from home, entering marriage, or having children or the like, their commensal patterns often change as well (Sobal et al., 2002), which is why studies of commensality also represent an opportunity to understand both the shifting in and reproduction of social relations.

Commensal eating strengthens social bonds within a group, but it does so fundamentally by excluding others (Grignon, 2001). Commensality therefore functions as a social marker and reveals social differentiations and hierarchies within societies, institutions, or homes; but the in- or exclusion from commensal events is not necessarily absolute. For example, Pollock describes how hospitality is a commensal practice where some people may be partially ex- or included, and she points out historical examples where commensal occasions involve and underline asymmetric relations between the participants, for instance when some people have only limited access to the food or drinks available (Pollock, 2012).

Studies of commensality generally fall into one of two categories. One category of studies analyzes commensality in relation to special occasions, such as feasts or celebrations (i.e. exceptional commensality). The other category analyzes everyday commensality (Grignon, 2001; Pollock, 2012). Whether dealing with exceptional or with everyday commensality, these studies often analyze commensality as it occurs in the private sphere; and research on commensal eating practices has paid special attention to the family as a study unit because the family is viewed as the most fundamental commensal unit (Sobal et al., 2002; Sobal & Nelson, 2003). Eating away from home is, however, also a central part of most people’s everyday life. But institutional commensal units, such as joint eating in school, in nursing homes, or at workplaces, are a neglected research area (Grignon, 2001; Sobal et al., 2002). A noteworthy exception to this neglect is Kniffin and colleagues, who studied workplace commensality among firefighters (Kniffin et al., 2015). They found that the daily act of eating together at the workplace enhances work group performance among firefighters, which is an important finding for understanding how organizational behavior can benefit from institutional commensality.

In its literal sense, commensality describes the sharing of the same table (Latin com = together with, and mensa = table) (Fischler, 2011; Miller et al., 1998). However, the term is often used to describe the social process of eating with others (Fischler, 2011; Sobal & Nelson, 2003), the shared consumption of food (Karrebæk, 2012; Mestdag & Glorieux, 2009), or, in a broader sense, not only eating together and sharing food but also ‘a sense of sharing food habitually’ (Fischler, 2011: 533). Although these definitions differ, they agree that some sort of sharing is closely linked to the idea of commensality. Sharing involves a sort of bonding mechanism that produces and signifies ‘togetherness’ (Beauchaine, 1988; Fischler, 2011; Morrison, 1996; Mäkaelä, 1991). Kniffin and Wansink show how meals elicit more jealousy among partners than other face-to-face interactions; this finding highlights how meals and food sharing signal intimacy (Kniffin & Wansink, 2012; Miller et al., 1998). So sharing food is a way of establishing closeness; by implication, a refusal to share is a clear marker of distance and may be impolite or even hostile (Bloch, 1999; Fischler, 2011).

In his seminal work The Sociology of the Meal Georg Simmel (1997 [1910]) introduces the commensality of the meal. Stated briefly, a shared meal is essential since it is a social action that mitigates or even wipes out social differences: sharing a meal means that the individual becomes indistinguishable from the social group in a meal setting in spite of the obvious fact that everyone is given their own portion and eats according to their own habits.

Communal eating and drinking … unleashes an immense socializing power that allows us to overlook that one is not eating and drinking ‘the same thing’ at all, but rather totally exclusive portions, and gives rise to the primitive notion that one is thereby creating common flesh and blood. (Simmel, 1997 [1910]: 131)

This ‘social blurring’, as we might call it, is an illusion – one promoted by the socializing powers of the meal which makes us believe that we are actually eating the same. Therefore it is the illusion of eating the same that is essential in the process of sharing food, just as it is the illusion of the flesh and blood of Christ that elevates the Eucharist to a level far beyond dry crackers and sweet wine. The shared meal turns the exclusive selfishness of eating into a social occasion.

Furthermore, Simmel emphasizes the aesthetic elements of the meal in a way that suggests that the sharing in itself elevates the individual need to eat to a more refined social level. When eating alone with your bare hands you have an all-too-close relationship to your food. This expresses almost animal tendencies, as it represents an unreserved desire, whereas the orderly usage of cutlery distances you from unrestrained craving. The acceptance of mealtime norms promotes social cohesion and a sense of community surrounding the eating process:

Eating with one’s fingers has something decidedly more individualistic about it than eating with a knife and a fork, since it associates the individual more directly with the matter and is the expression of a more unreserved desire. (Simmel, 1997 [1910]: 132)

Individual eating represents fulfillment in its most functional form, whereas the social meal represents a cultural tradition that, as a side-effect, satiates those involved.

From Simmel we might infer that people ought to follow certain table manners and eat from the same pots in order to be seduced by the illusion of the meal; that we eat the same and thereby belong to the same group. Whether this was his intention or not, Simmel’s work highlights a central question: Can we share a meal without sharing food and still have a commensal meal? If we do not eat from the same pot, can we still be seduced by the illusion of the meal? Fischler argues that especially in America people now tend to think that eating is a question of individual and personal freedom; the more choices there are, the more freedom there is. The contrast is with France, where eating is still considered a social affair (Fischler, 2011). To Simmel (1997), Fischler (2011) and others such as Mintz (1985), individualism, represented as individual food choice, is contrary to commensalism. However, is this actually the case? Obviously to eat alone is to deny oneself commensality. But eating together while still having individual food choices does not necessarily prevent people from socializing, from sharing food, from learning meal norms, and so on. To be clear, we do not question whether the sharing of food produces social bonding. The question guiding our discussion is about what individualization – represented as individual food choice – does to commensality. Since commensality is central to social life, this is an important issue.

Lunch packs versus school meal services

Turning to the debate about lunch packs and school meal services in Denmark, opinion can be divided roughly into two camps: those who defend the lunch packs and those who long for alternatives such as a general school meal service. On the one hand, their advocates claim that homemade lunch packs represent a unique opportunity for the parents to take into account their particular child’s needs and individual tastes. The lunch pack expresses individual preferences and tastes, and signals identity. In this manner, it remains almost the only opportunity for the child to gain a sense of uniqueness in an otherwise entirely institutional setting where the individual is located in a collective context (Allison, 2009; Beth, 2011; Metcalfe et al., 2008; Smidt, 2012). The packed lunch is also said to express parents’ care and love for their children, and it also reminds them of home. This is important, as children are spending more and more time in institutions (Smidt, 2012). The lunch pack issue is also discussed as a question of responsibility, in that relying on school meal services means that parents leave the responsibility of feeding their children to the school. The school is then responsible not just for teaching but also, in part, for children’s health. In this view, school meals represent a step down an unwelcome road on which parents gradually are stripped of the responsibility for their children and the state takes over.

Proponents of school meal services, on the other hand, claim that the lunch pack reflects out-of-date home and work arrangements in which mothers had the time and the energy to prepare healthy and varied lunch packs; today’s parents are simply too busy to do this. Lunchboxes are said frequently to contain unhealthy food items of poor nutritional quality (He et al., 2012). It is thought that school meal services, where all children are served the same healthy dish, can counteract social inequalities in health and hence be socially inclusive. In Sweden, the goal of social equality in health was part of the reasoning behind the establishment of the free and general school meal service which was gradually implemented between 1945 and 1965 and which ensured that Swedish children from all social classes, all over the country, were served the same food (Gullberg, 2006; Persson Osowski, 2012) . Some even suggest that school meals have the potential to act as a sort of social camouflage in that children with unhealthy or (in some sense) eccentric lunch packs are not exposed to the possible ridicule of their classmates (Carlsen, 2011; Gullberg, 2006). School meals are thus expected to reduce tension and perhaps bullying in school.²

In a recent pamphlet written by several powerful Danish trade and labor organizations, which joined forces to fight for a shared school meal service, the following statement appears: ‘Shared school meal services strengthen networks of good friends, because in contrast with individual lunch packs a shared meal creates cohesion’ (The Copenhagen House of Food at al., 2012 10, author’s translation). So a shared school meal service is said to contribute to more than simply healthy nutrition; unlike the lunch pack, it unifies (The Copenhagen House of Food, 2012; The Copenhagen House of Food et al., 2012). Whether or not this claim is substantiated, it is a very strong belief among important actors in the schooling sector.

If we apply Simmel’s conception to the debate, the lunch pack obviously represents the individualistic way of eating, and the school meal represents the ordered social setting of meals. In Denmark schools have no specific dining rooms or canteens, and the children are left to eat their packed lunches in the classroom, eating with their bare hands directly from the lunchbox. Not much attention is paid to how they eat. Rather the focus is on having enough to eat to stay focused during lessons.³ In this sense the lunch pack represents eating in its most functional sense, as a simple fueling of the body. Following Simmel, we might say the children become uncivilized, primitive eaters.

By contrast, school meals are organized around eating tables and cutlery is used. This lays out the framework for a commensal meal, in Simmel’s sense, where the uncivilized children become a sharing community unified by table manners and mealtime norms:

The strict standardization and regimentation [of the meal] has no external purpose at all. It signifies exclusively the transcendence or transformation which materialistically individual selfishness experiences through the transition in the social form of the meal. (Simmel, 1997 [1910]: 132)

The shared school meal corresponds closely to the traditional understanding of a commensal meal occasion, with the family sitting around a table having a hot and shared meal. Meals are indeed powerfully civilizing events (Beauchaine, 1988; Elias, 2000), but the question is whether this civilizing effect promotes commensality as Simmel seems to believe.

Research setting: The New Nordic Diet

This study draws upon a school meal intervention that was part of a large project on the New Nordic Diet (NND), called the OPUS (short for optimal well-being, development and health for Danish children through a healthy New Nordic Diet) project.⁴ The purpose of the OPUS School Meal Study was to test the NND’s impact on children’s health, academic performance, and behavior. The OPUS School Meal Study targeted 834 children aged 9–11 years from nine publicly funded schools. The study was based on a cross-over design; for three months the children were served the NND as school meals, and for a further three months the children ate their usual lunch packs. During the intervention period the children also helped to cook the NND food at school. The NND is a construct. It is the result of collaboration involving leading chefs from the New Nordic Cuisine and nutrition researchers. The idea of the NND originates from high-end cuisines such as that associated with the famous NOMA, which was elected the ‘World’s Best Restaurant’ in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2014, and is widely celebrated for its Nordic gourmet cuisine. However, besides involving high-end cuisines incorporating nutritious and healthy gourmet food, the NND also aims to democratize these values in order to make ordinary people aware of Nordic food, and make it part of everyday food practice. As such, the NND is part of a move to promote the New Nordic Cuisine through TV programs rediscovering hidden and forgotten Nordic food treasures, cookbooks with recipes relying on Nordic ingredients, educational activities, and research projects.

This overall focus on Nordic ingredients is connected with a worldwide trend to reinvent and promote locality (DeSoucey & Téchoueyres, 2009). In this process local food is seen as a symbol of authenticity and is often marketed as having unique agrarian, environmental, social, and gastronomic qualities as a result of special features of the local growing environment. Often the term ‘terroir’, the taste of land, is applied to justify and describe the unique attributes of a local product (Paxson, 2010). A central principle of the NND is exactly the idea of terroir. In the report in which the NND is defined for the first time, the Nordic terroir is said to have a distinct character deriving from the cool temperatures and special light of the region. The terroir, it is claimed, lends Nordic products a distinct and unique taste (Meyer et al., 2010).

Data collection

The first author on this article gathered data during fieldwork in two schools that participated in the OPUS School Meal Study. Importantly, each class was followed during both the lunch pack stage and the school meal intervention stage. This allowed us to contrast the two meal arrangements within each class, with the same children being involved at both stages. More specifically, in each school one class was followed before, during, and after the intervention. By being present at the school, and following the food and the pupils, we were able to highlight how different contexts shape perceptions and practices. Thus, the first author followed the children during the school day; cooked food with them whenever they were present in the project kitchen; ate lunch with them; joined them at breaks; and was present during lessons. Sometimes she joined the teachers or the chefs during the breaks, but mostly she joined the children in the schoolyard or in the classroom. Additionally, she participated in kick-off meetings prior to the intervention at which the school staff were introduced to the OPUS School Meal Study. Participation in these different situations and contexts helped us to gain a broader understanding of the pupils and of the OPUS study itself.

Often in comparative studies scholars face challenges revolving around the comparability of the people or situations being studied. For example, a comparative study of the social impacts of individual lunch packs and social school meals might compare the social cohesion and structures in two schools, one of which requires the children to bring lunch packs from home and the other of which serves school meals. Differences between the two schools may then be ascribed to the difference in meal arrangements. However, for conclusions based on such a comparison to be valid, one needs to remain confident that, apart from the meal arrangements, there are no other important differences between the schools – an assumption that rarely seems convincing. In the present research article the challenge of comparability is overcome by utilizing a unique intervention that allows us to investigate the social impacts of different meal arrangements for the very same children.

The school classes were chosen in collaboration with teachers, and the school principal, or head teacher, and parents approved the fieldwork. The first class, referred to as class A, was at a school located on the periphery of Copenhagen. It had 14 girls and 13 boys, nine of whom were bilingual, which in Denmark is a term typically used to describe children from ethnic minorities (Gilliam, 2009). The school is a publicly funded state school with nearly 600 pupils, and since it is situated near both a ghettoized area and an area with one of the highest housing prices in Denmark, it provides an urban, multi-social and multi-ethnic setting. It is surrounded by corner shops, pizzerias, and supermarkets. This offers the children the opportunity to supplement their meals with foods from outside the school, but only children in 7th grade and above (12–13 years old) are allowed to leave the school premises to buy food.

The second class, class B, had around 24 pupils and was in a suburban state school. The school has about 400 pupils. Class B had 9 girls and 15 boys, eight of whom were bilingual. The school is situated in a less prosperous neighborhood than that of class A, with high unemployment rates, high immigrant proportions, and high crime levels. As is usual for Danish schools, neither of the schools here had canteens or any other regular school meal provision. The only service prior to the OPUS School Meal Study, common to both schools, was a milk delivery service. The children at both schools ate their packed lunches in their classrooms.

The intervention was carried out in parallel at the two schools. The first author focused mainly on observations on class A and used class B in order to contrast and understand her observations in class A better.

As part of the study, nine focus group interviews with randomly chosen children from five different school classes were carried out. The children were interviewed at the beginning and toward the end of the OPUS School Meal Study. Discussions centered on the intervention food and comparisons with the food in packed lunches, and on the eating situation during the intervention compared with the regular lunch pack arrangement, with a focus on the rules guiding the two meal situations. In the second interview, the children were presented with some of the statements they had made in the first interview to investigate whether they had changed their minds, or whether they were willing to confirm their earlier statements. In order to prompt reactions to the food, pictures of the various dishes served in the intervention were used. This also served to make the topic at hand more concrete and more easily grasped by the pupils

A total of 26 interviews were conducted, including 17 in-depth interviews with teachers, chefs, and OPUS staff, and nine focus group interviews with pupils from classes A and B and other classes that also participated in the project (each focus group involved 5 children, all of whom were from the same school class). The fieldwork lasted four months, which all in all allowed for extensive observation of the social impacts of the differing meal arrangements on the children. All interviews and observations were transcribed verbatim and coded into themes relating to the research questions. Names and other personal identifiers were changed to protect participants’ identity.

In the following, we analyze situations in the fieldwork and interviews to answer the theoretical question this article deals with. No claims are made as to the generalizability of our empirical findings to the seven other schools participating in the Opus study. The outcomes of this methodological approach are set out in the ‘Results’ section that follows.

Results

Lunch packs and social interactions

The lunch pack is made at home by either the parents or some other carer. It is prepared either the day before or in the morning. Sometimes the children take part in the preparation. They might even make the lunch all by themselves, but in most instances it is solely a parent’s job. The lunch pack often consists of either the typical Danish rye bread with some sort of topping, or pitta bread or some other type of white bread with fillings, often supplemented by a piece of fruit and/or vegetables such as carrot or cucumber. These ‘green’ food items are often eaten in the short morning break between 9:30 and 9:55. Sometimes someone brings a leftover from yesterday’s dinner, and some children have food delivered from outside school by the local pizza delivery service. All pupils eat in their classrooms. They have about 15–20 minutes to do so, and they must remain seated while eating. They are allowed to talk to those who sit nearby. Occasionally, the teacher reads aloud from a book, and the pupils are then required to eat in silence.

The decision of what should be put in the lunch pack is often a question of balancing between what the child likes and what the parents think constitutes a proper lunch. The negotiation between child and parents is often reflected during lunchtime in school when, for instance, a child refuses to eat his packed lunch. The resistance is not always out of pure dislike of the food. It is rather a strategy: when the uneaten lunch is brought back home the parents might start to worry that their child has been hungry all day; they might therefore consider offering something ‘better’ in the future. The child might also choose to throw the lunch pack out and get some food from his or her classmates instead; or an exchange of food items might take place. Their use of these different strategies makes the children feel that they can influence what they eat in the lunch pack system, either directly by negotiating with parents or indirectly by exchanging with classmates.

Our analysis of the lunch pack arrangement finds a sort of symbolic gift exchange that is built on solidarity, sympathy, and friendship. For example, almost every day one child or another will either forget to bring lunch in or arrive with a packed lunch their parents have provided which they dislike. When this happens, the classmates share their lunches.

Adam doesn’t eat lunch today. He did bring a lunch pack, but he doesn’t like it. ‘When I get home I will throw it in the garbage can. Not the one inside the apartment, but the one on the staircase – otherwise my mother will notice that I did not finish it’, he says. ‘You can have some of my lunch instead’, says Selma, who sits next to him. ‘You can have an apple or a carrot or whatever you like’, she continues. Adam takes the apple and says, ‘Thanks’.

In the example above, we see one of the rare interactions between boys and girls in the classroom besides those that involve teasing or the like. Selma immediately acknowledges Adam’s dislike of his packed lunch and displays solidarity by offering some of her own lunch. Adam accepts her offer. In his famous work on gift-giving Marcel Mauss argues that there is no such thing as a free gift (Mauss, 1997). In theory gifts are voluntary; in reality they engage the recipient in permanent obligatory commitments. The gift is part of what Mauss calls a system of total services. It means that each gift is part of a system of reciprocity in which the giver and the taker are implicitly committed to one another. Thus, the act of giving creates a social bond between the giver and the taker. To accept the gift is also to accept the social bond and to refuse to accept it is to deny the social bond. When children accept food items from each other’s packed lunches (and the implicit debt or commitment this involves), the exchange of food can therefore be an important factor in creating and reproducing social relations in the classroom.

The understanding of the sharing of food as a sort of gift exchange is not new. Roy C. Wood describes the food gift’s symbolic meanings like this: ‘…the giving of food as a gift is intended to elicit some reciprocal gift, service, or obligation to behave in particular ways or to repay some social debt’ (Wood, 1995: 47); and Marianne Lien describes how the exchange of food gifts involves a sort of gratitude debt, and strengthens the social bonds between people in a small fishing community in Norway. Lien describes food gifts as a symbol of sympathy and a quest for friendship (Fürst, 1995).

In our study we saw how the food gift is returned in many different ways and given for many different purposes. Underlining a friendship is one such important purpose:

In class A the seating of the children has just been rearranged, and Karen and Emma are now sitting next to each other. The class has just had lunch and the pupils are on their way out to the schoolyard for their break. On her way to the playground, Karen takes out her lunch pack and asks Emma spontaneously if she wants some of it: ‘You can have a carrot’, she says. Emma has already eaten her lunch; she has put her big duvet jacket on and is on her way out, but she answers ‘Yes’, and reaches for the carrot. Karen takes one herself and they leave the classroom together.

Here, Karen and Emma use food as a way of saying the unsaid. Once in a while the teacher reseats the class and gives them new permanent seats. Their new seats are decided from a carefully structured plan in which the main consideration is to lower the level of noise in the classroom – a noisy, restless child is often matched with a more ‘well-regulated’ pupil. The two girls have just been seated next to each other, and by offering some of her lunch to Emma, Karen recognizes Emma as her new partner. Emma accepts the offer, although she has already eaten, and she is now obligated to walk out of the room with Karen.

Again, the exchange of food can also function as a way of catching attention:

Today, Albert’s lunch pack includes a cream cake, two sausages, and a pizza slice. He unpacks the cream cake very carefully and a cry of eagerness leaves his mouth as he finishes the unwrapping. Whether the cry is a strategy – i.e. a way to tell the others that he has a very nice lunch – or spontaneous is difficult to tell, but either way he immediately catches the attention of the others. The boy next to him, Michael, is the first to notice Albert’s lunch. ‘Oh, what’s that?’, he asks. ‘It’s my lunch’, Albert answers with a smile on his face. It is as if the pupils have a certain nose for smelling cake and junk food because, out of nowhere, some of the boys gather round Albert and his lunch pack. Albert shares some of it with them.

Albert is at the bottom of the social hierarchy in class A. He is noticeably smaller and thinner than the other boys and most of the girls too. He has difficulty concentrating during classes and he is often sent out of the classroom because of problems with keeping quiet and sitting still. His mother is seriously ill at the moment, and Albert is evidently going through a difficult time. Until recently he would buy toys and bring them to the others in the class. I found this somewhat strange and I asked him why. He told me that he did not know what else to do with the money he earned from delivering newspapers. In the same sentence he told me that his father now prohibits him from buying more toys for his classmates, but Albert has found another way to surprise his classmates: he brings some of his own toys to school, and these toys are apparently very popular. The other boys beg him for a chance to play with them.

The toy story reveals the same logic as Albert’s conduct at lunch. Albert brings something popular to school and for a short period he is the center of attention. He exchanges toys and food for attention. This demonstrates how food plays a central role in the social interactions in the classroom. Albert does obtain social benefits in exchange for his food and toys, at least in the short run. The example also underlines the way in which children’s understanding of food follows a logic unlike that of adults, in that what is generally perceived by adults as junk food is seen by children as very attractive food. And once again we see how the lunch pack functions as a way for parents to express feelings, when for instance going through a difficult time at home.

In sum, there is little doubt that the gift exchanges described involve some sort of sociality between pupils in the school class. It is too simple to describe the lunch pack merely as a particular way of eating; rather it represents a form of commensality that differs from what is most often assumed. The gift exchanges become a way to express emotions and feelings such as sympathy and solidarity, or a way to gain something, like attention. In addition, the lunch pack represents a social bond between parent and child, and equally creates a link between home and school. The children also express their feeling that they can influence the content of the meal, and in that sense the lunch pack represents a certain freedom. The gift exchange can also be a way to exclude others – children choose to share with some in the class and not others. Nevertheless it is an unwritten rule of the class that, if someone forgets his or her lunch pack, the others share with him or her no matter what his or her social position is in the class hierarchy.

In a school meal arrangement where all children are served the same meal in unlimited portions, such gift exchanges become redundant. The question is how this influences sympathy and solidarity in the classroom.

The school meal intervention and the New Nordic Diet

At 11:15am pupils in class A are permitted to go to lunch. This is ten minutes earlier than they would be allowed to eat in the lunch pack arrangement. Normally they eat in their classroom, but during the OPUS School Meal Study they eat in a room next to the school kitchen. The class A pupils walk up the stairs to the dining room; or rather they run up the stairs and crash into the dining room. As the room is not normally used for eating, it is not particularly well suited to this purpose. It is an all-too-large and quite dark room that is normally used for art classes. There are paint stains everywhere, and often other classes need to wrap up their art work and leave when the pupils from class A arrive to eat. This makes the atmosphere surrounding class A’s arrival at the dining room all the more chaotic. Class B eats in a very large and light room, but this room is also where pupils from the entire school pick up their daily portion of milk, which causes a lot of interruption and chattering, with children and staff walking in and out of the room. In both rooms tables are set with flowered table linens, cups, and plates in different colors – in general a colorful table setting that lights up the rather anonymous room settings. During the OPUS School Meal Study, the intervention classes get 5–10 minutes extra to eat, totaling around 20–25 minutes of eating each day. However, this extension of the time limit imposed when packed lunches are eaten includes a presentation of the menu – often by the pupils who have participated in either cooking or setting the table – and a certain amount of time lining up for the food. Two chefs prepare the meals. Twice a week four pupils are taken out of class to participate in the kitchen preparations. All pupils must take at least one portion of food onto their plates – even if they do not intend to eat it. The rationale for this rule is that, if everyone has something on their plate, it will be easier to convince the children that they should eat or at least taste the food. These lunchtime rules were devised jointly by chefs, teachers, and other OPUS staff.

Exclusions and ethnicity

In the new school meal system, children from ethnic minority backgrounds are labeled as different from the majority, a labeling that is constructed by adults and children alike.

Mary (a chef) presents today’s meal. At first she explains how there is a pot with halal meat to the ‘halal kids’, but then she corrects herself and says: ‘those of ethnic backgrounds other than Danish’. One of the minority children, clearly offended by the chef’s statement, responds loudly in an appalled tone: ‘We are not halal kids.’

This illustrates how the meal arrangement produces new types of differentiations within the school class. In this case, as in many others, a very strong line is drawn between those who eat only halal foods and the others. The same problem arises when pork is served. Importantly, the presence of children with backgrounds that prohibit them from eating certain foods need not be any problem since religious rules and beliefs are taken care of (for example, when pork is on the menu, similar portions made from veal are provided). It is then not only the food in itself that draws the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but also the way the food is served and presented, and talked about, that creates an awareness of the differences. By calling them ‘halal kids’, the chef also states that it is not the meat they eat that differentiates them, but something about the kids themselves. This distinction, at its worst, becomes a cause of bullying:

We are sitting at a table eating today’s New Nordic meal. It is roast veal with potatoes and vegetables. Other pupils ask Mereym why she does not eat the food. Mereym does not answer. ‘It is because she is afraid that it is not halal’, someone says. One of the girls at the table who did not hear this asks ‘What?’, and two others repeat loudly: ‘It is because she is afraid that it is not halal!’ Mereym still does not say anything. She smiles and looks down. Louise, the uncrowned queen of the class, continues the interrogation: ‘Hallo, is veal pig, Mereym?’ She is obviously confusing the method of slaughter with the ban on eating pork. Mereym still does not answer; she smiles an embarrassed smile. ‘Is it?’, Louise continues. Claire interferes and defends Mereym: ‘It is because she doesn’t like it. Just like me, I’m not going to eat it either’, and she points at the meat on her plate. Louise continues, ignoring Claire’s argument: ‘Yes, but I just asked if veal was pork.’ Camilla, who is a friend of Louise, takes Louise’s side and joins in: ‘Hallo Mereym, is veal pork?’

In this example a Muslim girl, Mereym, is clearly being addressed because she does not eat the food being served, and her choice not to eat is understood as a matter of religion, or even stupidity, since Mereym is accused of confusing veal for pork; the genuinely uninformed are of course those who bully Mereym, since they confuse the principles of halal with the prohibition on eating pork. Claire notices the bullying and tries to emphasize that Mereym is no different than she is, or than any of the others who do not eat the food; they simply dislike it, she states. But the bullying girls ignore Claire and continue their interrogation of Mereym.

However unacceptable their behavior is, the bullying girls actually do have a point: some of the Muslim girls refuse to eat any of the meat served in the school meal arrangement and often they even refuse to eat anything at all. The resistance appears to have several reasons. Alice is the third-grade teacher. She explains the ethnic minority children’s resistance to the NND as a question of cultural difference with respect to food choice and cooking:

There are some [children who do not eat] and there is no doubt that what they have in common is the fact that they have ethnic backgrounds other than Danish, and that they are used to a totally different food culture than the Danish one. Some of these things [in the NND] are quite foreign to them. Like, you know, what is krebinetter?⁵ It is not something their parents would ever make at home, and it is also something that is normally made out of pork, which is why they would definitely never make it. And this is the reason why one could say that there is a cultural similarity between some of the pupils that don’t eat much [of the NND] – simply because there is some foodstuff that they are not used to and some ways of cooking that they are not used to as well.

The cultural difference in traditions of food and cooking might be a good explanation, but it does not explain why some of the Muslim girls refuse to eat the meat, disregarding that it is halal and not pork. The girls are obviously uncertain as to whether the meat is truly halal. They constantly asked either the first author or the chefs whether the meat was halal, and even when we told them it was, they did not seem convinced. It is not possible from the mere look of a piece of meat to decide whether it is from an animal slaughtered according to the principles of halal. Therefore one has to trust the provider, so the name and reputation of the provider plays a crucial role. In this case the chefs prepared and provided the meat. They, and the first author, somehow failed to obtain the girls’ confidence. The kitchen staff’s inability to generate such confidence is not a new issue. Manpreet Janeja did fieldwork in a multi-ethnic state school in East London, and she noticed how a sizeable number of students, especially South Asian Muslim immigrant students, avoided halal meals at school altogether even though the kitchen staff, school, and council authorities stressed that all meat served in the canteen was halal (Janeja, 2012). However, the children ate halal meat in their homes – this obviously underlines the importance of trust in the provider.

To refuse to eat food, even though both authorities and peers expect you to do so, is to make quite a strong statement. Therefore the refusal may be seen as a cultural resource that the children draw upon in their interactions and positioning during lunch. By displaying disgust at the meat the girls can underline their position as good Muslim girls or simply their membership of the Muslim ‘group’; so this behavior is a strong identity marker (Gilliam, 2009). The Muslim boys also stressed their position as good Muslims when they checked up on the girls, asking whether they had remembered to take meat from the right pot – something they did in a few instances.

To summarize, the insistence on a diet based on Nordic food might engender, or accentuate, the differentiation of those who are used to eating this kind of food and those who are not, and perhaps those who can relate to the concept ‘Nordic’ and those who do not feel at home in this category. But it might also strengthen the bonds within the Muslim group.

The regulation of the school meal

In the school meal arrangement many regulations are applied in an effort to ensure that the children eat the NND. Each child has to put at least one portion of food on his or her plate, seats are changed so that opponents are spread out and seated next to children who like the food in the hope that these will encourage them to eat. Two large tables are split into small groups in both school classes, as large tables are believed to encourage noise and noise is associated with poor eating. Because of their resistance to consumption of the project lunch, some of the Muslim girls in A bring their own lunch from home, but they are not permitted by the chefs to eat their packed lunches during the lunch break. The rationale for this is that the children’s bringing of a lunch pack to school will send the wrong signal to those who actually eat the NND; the chefs fear that this might start a lunch pack revolution, after which children will bring their own food to school whenever they lose interest in the NND. This results, as described, in many situations where the Muslim girls sit at the table without eating a single thing. In relation to commensality, the obvious question here is whether one is participating in a meal if one does not eat. According to Simmel, the answer is negative, since it is the illusion of eating the same things that produces the understanding that the diners are the same. And in fact there is little doubt that the other children do not see the Muslim girls as part of the commensality of the meal. They constantly comment on the fact they do not eat any of the food. For their part, the Muslim girls often point out that they find it boring to sit and wait for the others to finish. In the lunch pack arrangement such systematic exclusions did not take place; in most cases the parents prepared food that the children liked and therefore everyone was eating something.

The case of the Muslim girls highlights several themes in relation to commensality. First, we see very clearly how a social division is made between those who like the food and those who dislike it and bring their own meals. The latter are not permitted to eat their packed lunches during the lunch break and have to eat afterwards. They are, then, excluded from the commensality of the meal and have their break shortened (because they have to eat during the break which is normally reserved for playing). Second, the control exercised by the chefs, including the prohibition on the consumption of packed lunches, is used to signal the right thing to do – which, here, is to eat the NND meal. Through the regulation of the meal, those who resist eating the NND are constructed as outsiders. In the school meal system the regulations observed were very strict, as the success of the intervention trial depended on the children actually eating the food served. Thus the school and intervention staff conveyed a specific understanding of ‘good’ taste and ‘healthy eating’ in which the NND is regarded as superior to the food the children bring to school themselves.

Morrison (1996) describes a finding that is rather similar to ours. She shows how what is eaten and the way in which it is consumed are exploited as mechanisms of social control and social division by people such as lunchtime supervisors (Morrison, 1996). Teachers may use their authority to insist that the students eat in a certain way, consume certain foods, eat more, and so on; and commensality is therefore, critically linked to its institutional structure (Allison, 2009; Golden, 2005; Karrebæk, 2012; Morrison, 1996). The sharing of food signifies togetherness – it defines the insiders as socially similar (Mennell et al., 1992; Morrison, 1996). But sharing excludes others and defines them as socially different, as happened here with the Muslim girls who declined to participate in the NND meal (Fischler, 2011; Morrison, 1996). This is exactly why Salazer argues that schools should avoid instituting rules and food regulations that prevent some pupils from having the same privileges as others (Salazar, 2007).

Third, it is striking that the pupils who (try to) bring in lunch packs are mostly those of Muslim background, which makes the social division appear religious. In that sense, it is not only food but religion and minority–majority relations that are negotiated during lunch – and these negotiations take place both among the children and between them and adults. Karrebæk (2012) presents a similar finding in her study of food socialization in a primary classroom in Denmark. She describes how the school’s understanding of appropriate food practices may differ from that in children’s homes, especially for minority children whose food culture differs from that of the majority. In both cases cultural preferences are problematized. In bringing in one’s own food one risks being excluded from the commensality of the meal. Eating the ‘right’ food is therefore a permission to participate in the commensality of the meal. The regulation of the meals engendered a segregated commensality, with one group refusing to eat and another group trying to do so. Unintentionally, therefore, the regulation and organization of the OPUS School Meal Study displayed an almost ethnocentric understanding of what a healthy and good school meal is.

The exclusion of the ethnic girls during the OPUS School Meal Study is remarkable since the shared meal should, in theory, lessen social differences and discourage social exclusion, not reinforce it. With the lunch pack, children might risk making their social background visible to everyone in school, but, although the visibility of social differences is lessened in the OPUS School Meal Study, differences seem to reappear in new and ever more subtle positioning.

When everyone is presented with the same kind of food in a school setting, reactions to the food become more crucial and the center of attention. Small dramas are played out during the project lunch. The children’s reactions to the food are enmeshed in their social relations. For instance, when Laura laughs when Emma runs through the room to reach the garbage can in order to spit out what she tried to eat, Laura recognizes Emma’s reaction to the food, which confirms and strengthens the social bond between them. The children interpret the food, the new tastes, settings, and rules in relation to each other. Thereby relations are produced and maintained during the meal. This might produce commensality among those participating in the meal. But this very fact also ensures that the exclusion of those not eating at all is much stronger. Therefore the pupils who do not eat at all are not just prevented from having lunch, they are also excluded from the commensality of the meal – and so from maintaining and confirming social relations through the food.

In sum, the exclusion of the ethnic minority pupils underlines important issues. The NND regime is an example of the way school food interventions and programs may exert very strong pressure on minority groups to adapt to majority food norms, and in this case adopt a food program privileging national foodstuffs. Ethnicity is a very central social distinction in all aspects of social life. The meal did not remove ethnic social distinctions – rather those social distinctions were displayed, or even reinforced, and in the worst case they formed the basis of religious harassment among the children.

The intimacy of sharing lunch packs

Simmel and others claim it is the idea of eating the same that is the basis of the social power of the meal. Our analyses suggest that the social process of sharing, giving, and receiving food is central to the sociality of the meal. The acknowledgement of the social bond that is implicit in receiving and giving food is a social promoter. And sharing is indeed possible in a meal where people eat different dishes. Sharing may be even more meaningful in a situation where you do not eat the same food. The consumption of different foods might well evoke interest: What are you eating? Why are you eating this? Where did you buy it? How did you make it? Different food choices are often an easy topic of conversation when people are, for instance, sitting in a restaurant having ordered a range of different dishes. And, as in the lunch pack arrangement, couples in a restaurant may try to taste each other’s food. Often people order different dishes in a restaurant precisely for the purpose of sharing. Miller, Rozin, and Fiske distinguish between food sharing that involves food that has been touched, bitten, or tasted by both the sharing parties (for example when couples taste each other’s food), and sharing food that has only been touched or tasted by one of the sharing parties (for example when eating from separate plates). They find that the sharing of touched or tasted food suggest intimacy and greater closeness in relationships compared to plain sharing (Miller et al., 1998). As the exchanging of lunch packs involves sharing food that has been touched or even tasted by the giver or at least made by the giver’s mother or father, the sharing of lunch packs represents an intimate act according to Miller and colleagues’ study.

There is indeed something very intimate in the exchanging of lunch pack foods, since the children share something that is in most instances homemade (or at least a product bought or chosen by the parents). Marlene Morrison calls the lunchbox ‘home in a box’, because the lunchbox displays some of the constraints and possibilities of the family food taste and food culture, and thereby home is made visible when the lunchbox is opened (1996). When children exchange lunch packs, they invite classmates inside their homes and share part of it with them. The children thereby put themselves in a vulnerable position, of course, because they put themselves, their homes, and their culture on the table. If the other children refuse the food offered, they also display a resistance to another’s cultures, tastes, and choices. But when the children accept food from each other’s lunch packs, they also – for a while – accept each other. A school meal program would hardly be able to develop such intimacy. In a school meal program, home is kept out. And even if children tried to exchange food in such an arrangement, their doing so would not imply the same intimacy, since the exchanged food does not represent their home, but the school meal service. What is offered in the school meal program is thus a product rather than a personal bond. And when the food in a school meal program is rejected, it is the system, the school, or the products, rather than the person doing the offering that is rejected. Thus, exchanging products within this meal system involves little risk of personal exposure, but also less chance to develop close social ties.

However, there is – as is also underlined in the Danish debate about school meals – another side to this issue. As Morrison points out, the lunch pack may also display constraints of the home (Morrison, 1996), and this may underline and enforce social divisions in the classroom (Karrebæk, 2012). Our observations showed that some children systematically did not bring any lunch to school. At the same time others brought extraordinary lunchboxes in with them – small boxes containing different kinds of food arranged in beautiful ways such as salad, fruit cut into small pieces, and even a small note from a parent wishing their child a good lunch. In other words: the lunch packs differed remarkably with respect to the resources, time, and energy that had been put into preparing them, and often – but not necessarily – this reflected the nutritional value of the lunch pack. In such instances there is no doubt that the lunch pack draws a strong social boundary between those from homes with the resources (knowledge, time, and money) to prepare food for their children and those without. This is evidently an important issue in the question of lunch packs versus school meals. As the lunch pack is a representation of the home, it necessarily introduces, reproduces, more general inequalities, and it therefore makes sense to try to replace this inequality with a meal, and way of eating, that is more of a social leveler. The irony, though, is that what happened during this school meal study was just the opposite: the lunch pack inequality was replaced by a new sort of inequality – one that underlined the social divisions among the children and in some cases even put some children on display. The lunch pack may display social differences, but at the same time it offers the opportunity to display identity, solidarity, and belonging. At the same time the children are often able to influence what they eat, and this is why, to many children, the lunch pack represents freedom.

A new kind of commensality?

In parallel with Fischler, Mintz describes individualization as a threat to commensal meals: ‘Choices to be made about eating – when, where, what, how much, how quickly – are now made with less reference to fellow eaters’ (1985: 202). And further on he argues: ‘These transformations have made ingestion more individualized and noninteractive; they have dissocialized eating’ (1985: 202). To Mintz a social meal is a search for consensus. The sharing of the same food items indicates that the participants have agreed on some common ground, and that the individual must adjust his or her desires to those of the group. These constraints and compromises are, according to Mintz, characteristic of a social meal, and the fear of individualization is therefore a fear of losing common ground or identity (Mintz, 1985).

We argue that this understanding of commensality is simplistic. It appears to be based on a traditional understanding of the commensality concept, where a family sits around a table and shares a common meal. Our analyses lead us to question the idea that eating different food is a non-interactive and dissocialized act, and we are in favor of new ways of understanding commensality. The lunch pack is not necessarily an individualizing meal. Rather, it involves sociality of the kind involved in the wide exchange patterns that occur when one person exchanges, shares, or ‘buys’ foods in exchange for something else, such as friendship or attention. The children in our study brought certain food items to school knowing that they were popular, and their consideration and decision of what to eat was made in close consultation with their classmates. It is exactly this exchange culture that gives the lunch pack arrangement the potential to generate a specific type of commensality. More analyses and discussion are needed if we are to characterize this commensality adequately. Elements of market mechanisms and power based on resources are potentially part of the picture, but freedom and independence, and potentially the acknowledgement of difference, are also present. We argue that individualization as it appears in divergent food preferences is not necessarily incompatible with commensality. Instead individualization promotes another type of commensality, one quite distinct from the traditional one: a commensality in the context of which the children interact actively with each other and their parents through the food.

Conclusions

The purpose of this article has been to critically analyze assumptions that are generally implicit in discussions of commensality and the significance of shared meals. Contemporary studies focus on the social benefits of eating the same food. The social exclusions that this process also involves are often neglected. Similarly, the social inclusion involved in the social process of eating different foods is rarely if ever highlighted. This leads to unequivocal fears about the emergence of individualization. The idea of commensality as something involving sharing the same food rests upon the assumption that equality in the meal promotes sociality. This idea is evident in the arguments put forward in the Danish school meal debate, and particularly in the claim that equality in the meal unifies, brings pupils together, and in the end strengthens the social cohesion of the school class. In this article we have shown that eating the same food actually produces new types of differentiation. This shows that equal access to food does not necessarily ensure that meals are more equal.

The OPUS School Meal Study analyzed here focused exclusively on food. It was part of a wider controlled scientific intervention trial which aimed to measure the physiological and cognitive effects of the specific dietary regime presented in the study, and the issue of how to create a meal setting that would promote social interaction among the children was not a priority. The program theory implicit in the project was that, when high-quality food was provided, commensality would simply come into being as a direct result. Within the project, little attention was given to the need to set up a social framing of the school meal that would promote sociality. As we have shown over the course of our article, this oversight was difficult to overcome in spite of the fact that the pupils were served food developed in cooperation with chefs who are part of the praised New Nordic Cuisine. This meant that, in the OPUS School Meal Study, attention was directed to content, rather than to form. It was tacitly supposed, in effect, that the content would shape the form. Yet, as we came to realize, fluid sociality will not coalesce if there is no container to hold it.

Footnotes

Funding

The study is part of the OPUS project ‘Optimal well-being, development and health for Danish children through a healthy New Nordic Diet’. Supported by a grant from the Nordea-fond, Denmark.

Notes

Author biographies

Sidse Schoubye Andersen is a sociologist and a PhD Fellow at the Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen. Her research interests cover social, cultural and pedagogical aspects of food and eating, including issues related to institutional meals, children and aging.

Lotte Holm is Professor of the Sociology of Food at the Institute of Resource Economics and Food Policy, University of Copenhagen. Her research interests center around social practices of eating, the multiple social and cultural meanings of food and meals in ordinary daily life, including issues related to food and identity, to lay perceptions of food and health, to everyday management of appetite and body weight, and to consumer perceptions of food quality and food safety. She has also researched food and nutrition policy, institutional feeding, and consumer acceptance and appropriation of new dietary regimens.

Charlotte Baarts is Associate Professor and Head of Studies at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. Analytically her research encompasses such elements as the body, culture, risk, trust, knowledge and expertise, and is situated within the sociology of health and illness as well as the sociology of work. Currently, she is investigating research-based teaching and educational sociology.

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