Beyond “An Apple A Day”: Advancing Education for Critical Food Literacy in Ontario’s School System

Food is in many ways a connective tissue of the human experience. Over the course of the last century, changes to both local and global food systems has “distanced” eaters from the sources and impacts of the food we eat and the political and ecological systems it is a part of. The agroindustrial food system has produced a wide range of crises, including impacts to the degradation of land, soil, species and water and climate, human health, culture, farmer livelihoods, food and agroecological knowledges, and citizenship. Many scholars have written about food and environmental crises as being reflections of a “crisis in education”. Numerous forms of food education, prolific in recent years, have emerged as a response to the idea that populations require more knowledge in order to “better” engage with the increasingly complex nature of food and food systems. Food education is understood as a conduit for increasing “food literacy”, which in turn is assumed to be part of the “solution” to problems caused by the industrial food system. However, expressions of food education ranging from corporate food marketing of ‘healthy’ and ‘ethical’ foods, public health campaigns which teach the individual to eat ‘better’, to notforprofit programming focused on food justice and active engagement carry disparate drivers and goals, shaped by the discourses most relevant to their locations. This has contributed to an international phenomenon where normative statements are made, largely in siloed environments (Martin, 2018), about what it means to be “food literate”. The discipline of social determinants of health has illuminated how people’s choices, behaviours, attitudes and pathways to positive health outcomes are constrained and shaped by structural and institutional factors which aren’t equitably distributed among human populations. It follows that food literacy frameworks should move beyond education which “treats” the individual, towards education which “treats” the very structural roots that make food literacy necessary. As food literacy becomes a more prominent feature of Ontario policy and subsequently shapes schoolbased learning, it’s important that we ask, What kind of food literacy do we want Ontario students to graduate with? The kind that reinforces existing crises?, Or, the kind that presents the possibility for change? The main goals of this paper are to build upon and contribute to the literature which engages with the intersection of food, environmental education, and critical literacy, to broaden popular conceptualizations of food literacy by bringing to the fore frameworks which address the root causes of food system dysfunction, to present possibilities for a food education practice that relocates the discursive space for determining “what counts as food literacy” (Kimura, 2010, p.466), and to consider how these things can respond to the increasing calls for food education to be advanced in Ontario schools. Drawing upon existing literature, education policy review, as well as qualitative data obtained through interviews with 12 people who work as teachers, formal and nonformal facilitators, and academic researchers from public schools, external organizations and universities, predominantly based in Ontario, this paper will explore the processes that would allow for critical food literacy to become an integral component of Ontario’s public education system. This goal of this paper is not to provide fixed solutions, but rather to help develop our collective understandings of what it means to nourish ourselves, our world, and each other.