Over the past decade we have witnessed a proliferation and intensification of food pedagogies across a range of sites. This article begins by considering two pedagogical scenes that attempt to address food. They were enacted within educational settings in Australia; one a Year 8 (13 years of age) health education classroom, the other a professional learning seminar. Each were heavily imbued with the obesity prevention imperatives that have come to characterise social, political and educational discourse around food in contemporary times. Using these scenes as a springboard, we move to consider the place where we initially envisioned food might intersect with environmental education. We imagined that it would be a space with significant potential for approaching teaching and learning about food in new ways. Deploying menu as metaphor, the authors explore the possibilities for this new terrain and argue that bringing a Foucauldian inspired ‘ethics of discomfort’ to the table might help us take stock of contemporary approaches and their effects. Given the dominance of crisis-driven responses that tend to characterise school food education, we conclude by suggesting that we need to interrupt the dominant discourses that circulate around food and try to engage with some new possibilities for teaching and learning about food.

As health threats appear with increasing regularity in our food systems and other food crises loom worldwide, we look to rural areas to provide local and nutritious foods. Educationally, we seek approaches to food studies that engage students and their communities and, ultimately, lead to positive action. Yet food studies receive only generic coverage and tangential attention within existing curricula. This article, reporting a pilot study located at Canada's geographic and cultural edge, focuses on local knowledge about past and present food practices. Objectives are to test pedagogies that bring all students greater opportunities for engagement and learning about their physical environment and food history, and that can be applied to rural and, with modifications, urban settings. Three critical, place-base pedagogical approaches — experiential, discovery and arts-based — to classroom teaching and learning are discussed, as well as implications for educational leadership, teacher training and curriculum development.

This article draws on La Via Campesina's definition of food sovereignty and its potential for reconceptualising food as a basic human right within the dominant Australian food discourse. We argue that the educative value that emerges from urban food production in Australia stems from the action of growing food and its capacity to transform individuals’ social and environmental concerns over food systems. Community participation in urban food production can promote a learning process that generates political understanding and concerns over food systems. We use the education theories of transformative learning and critical consciousness to discuss how Australian urban food production systems can create this social and environmental support for alternative food systems. By having control over food production practices and building collective understandings of how food choices impact global food systems, elements of food sovereignty can develop in an Australian urban context.

This article reports on an inquiry that used permaculture design thinking to create a science and sustainability education intervention for a secondary science class. The aims were to cultivate student attitudes towards science, towards learning science in school, and towards the environment, and to trellis learning of science and sustainability. Research into impacts of the intervention took the form of an interpretive, mixed methods case study, which included the use of questionnaires, interviews and observations. As a context for learning, local permaculture food production projects, as experienced through field trips in the intervention, appear to promote the relevance of science and sustainability learning and the ability to engage students. Science and sustainability learning outcomes appeared to vary among students, although nearly all of them reported they enjoyed learning science with a focus on the environment, including one group of students who reported they did not generally enjoy learning science in school. There was some evidence that the teacher transformed his own thinking through his participation in the intervention.

School gardens are becoming increasingly recognised as important sites for learning and for bringing children into relationship with food. Despite the well-known educational and health benefits of gardening, children's interactions with the non-human entities and forces within garden surroundings are less understood and examined in the wider garden literature. Using a relational materialist approach (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010) that considers the material artefacts that constitute a learning environment, this article examines children's interactions with the animate and inanimate life forces through three specific garden photographs. The photos belong to data derived from a study that examined food, ecology and design pedagogies in three Australian primary schools. This paper argues that children's interactions with the non-human materialities of a garden are a vital dimension of gardening practice. The agential powers of gardens have great capacity to mobilise and inform children's inhabitation of food gardens.

This article offers a perspective from early childhood care and education in Aotearoa New Zealand. It draws from the data of four recent studies to demonstrate pedagogical practices informed by Indigenous (Māori) perspectives. Māori values, such as manaakitanga (caring, hospitality, generosity) and whanaungatanga (relatedness), are shown featuring in routines focused on provision of food and serving as a key focus of early childhood education for sustainability. It is argued that providing opportunities for children to become engaged with growing, cooking and sharing food enables them to operationalise compassion towards themselves, others and the environment, reconnecting with the source of their food and demonstrating generosity and care to others (both human and more-than-human) in their communities. This can be viewed as a pedagogical response to the increasing encroachment of neoliberalism, with its incumbent individualism and lack of collectivist consciousness or concern for the environment, into education settings. Furthermore, drawing upon Indigenous perspectives honours traditional, localised wisdom regarding sustainability practices.

There is growing pressure from the public health sector, government, environmental, medical and scientific fields to teach young people about food. However, little is known about pre-service teachers’ preparation in this area. This article addresses this gap by providing a case study of one approach to food education, which was purposefully designed to bring together two fields — health education and education for sustainability (EfS) — in teacher education in Victoria, Australia. This article outlines the ways in which this approach has the potential to challenge the conventions of both fields and ‘spaces’ of health (first space) and sustainability (second space), and gave rise to a possible ‘third space’ (Soja, 1996). This article uses data collected from Promoting Health Education, a 10-week course designed for generalist primary school pre-service teachers. It also utilises reflections from pre-service teachers and teacher educators (also the authors) to explore how they navigated first, second and third spaces. In doing so, the authors examine some of the learning potentials and difficulties within third spaces, including: designing third spaces; wrestling with the dominance of first space; complexities of second space; and questioning what might be lost and gained through the design of third spaces.

In this article, I critically analyse how meanings of health and food, tied to obesity reduction, ‘subjugate’ environmental priorities and knowledges of food. To do this, I explore the meanings of health and food constructed in the NSW Health Munch & Move program. I examine the use of language to construct notions of food and health that are not only difficult to challenge, but difficult to think otherwise, including in relation to environmental perspectives of food. I argue that as calculative and individualised conceptualisations of food and health become more and more ‘common sense’ (Mudry, 2009), there is a ‘closing off’ of what is thinkable and doable in relation to food and health. The subjugation of environmental priorities of food takes place both through their marginalisation and through how we are invited to define the place of food in our lives.

Popularised feminist discourse has devalued daily cooking and implicitly defined it as work that reinforces women's second-class status. In an era of climate change linked to industrialised foods and disease epidemics caused by the modern Western diet, kitchen work has acquired political importance. Daily cooking must be understood as public, as well as private. Neither feminist theorists nor environmental educators have integrated cooking in the kitchen, specifically, into discourse. By examining two local foods activist groups, we measure one site where feminists value cooking, and we develop a feminist theory of gender-inclusivity. Based on our survey, feminists who cook with local foods are only beginning to ideologically integrate feminism and sustainable foods cooking; however, we argue that in practice, the connection is strong and that it is time to conceptualise a new discourse on the kitchen for a feminist-environmental theory of cooking.

In recent years, food scholarship has extended its preoccupation with consumption to interrogating the relationship between eating, culture and waste, and their effects on the environment. Simultaneously, food-related concerns have also become a recurrent part of popular culture, where examples from children's television provide fertile ground for discussion. This article analyses the multiple representations of food, consumption, and waste in Stephen Hillenburg's animated series SpongeBob SquarePants. Focusing on the specific food-related pedagogical philosophies that seem recurrent in the series, and following in Henry Giroux's footsteps by seeing a link between popular culture and educational structures, my discussion unravels the show's engagement with the over-consumption of fast food, the acculturation of the burger as the American meal par excellence, and environmental issues of ‘over-production’. I aim to show how, ultimately, SpongeBob SquarePants offers an evaluation of the connection between consumption, health, and disposability in contemporary Western societies.

In our paper, we draw on recent scholarship on food pedagogies and pedagogy studies to explore themes in the collection of articles in this special issue. In particular, we show how the articles variously conceptualise formal and informal pedagogies, their curricula, aims, and potential effects in relation to food and sustainability. Drawing on debates in pedagogy studies, we investigate how the papers reflect on what makes a pedagogy pedagogical. We then turn to food studies literature to identify how the articles in this special issue construct food as a theoretical and empirical object. Given food's multifaceted nature, which means that food works materially, biologically, economically, symbolically and socially, we explore which versions of food and its attributes are profiled across and within the articles. Inspired by critiques on race and class in relation to food and food social movements, in the final section of the paper we ask how the articles and future research on food and environmental education can take account of the racialised, gendered and classed dimensions of education for food sustainability. As part of our discussion, we evaluate the ethics of doing good, the moral economy educators reproduce in relation to class, race and gender, and the contribution feminism and critical race theory can make to future research agendas and writing in the field.