La mensa scolastica come ‘spazio soglia’ tra la famiglia e la scuola. Punti di vista e prospettive famigliari dal progetto SUSFOODEDU

The school canteen is a place where the dimensions of health, education, and socialization appear closely intertwined. Within it, moreover, different subjects – teachers, children, parents, and canteen staff – with different goals, constraints, and cultures move. To build a shared educational project and make the school canteen an environment of learning and growth, it is useful to analyze it as a space of relationship, confrontation and sometimes contention between educational institutions and families, between food and health policies. In this paper we will refer to the ‘voice’ of parents and their personal experiences with respect to their children’s school canteen explored within the SUSFOODEDU project. The reflections are the outcome of ethnographic work within two comprehensive schools in the Bologna area. Understanding parents’ experiences allows us to confront the educational, social, and cultural dynamics surrounding food and its consumption between home and school. In this sense, the cafeteria becomes a possible ground for observation and construction of educational alliances/disalliances, in which the experiences, meanings, and values attributed to food and eating together in the public school space are intertwined.