How and why should children eat fruit and vegetables? Ethnographic insights into diverse body pedagogies

Much recent scholarship in the field of sociology of childhood has analyzed the disciplinary and regulatory strategies for governing children's bodies in the name of “health” and “life” in North/Western Europe, North America, and Australia. These analyses problematize how formal and informal pedagogies are shaped by biomedical knowledge, popular media images, and neoliberal agendas in ways not always for the benefit of the children in question. Little research, however, has explored the body pedagogies developed within grass-roots movements concerned with children's health and well-being; furthermore, little research has explored these topics outside the North American or European space. Following a comparative ethnographic approach, I explore the differences in how and why children eat fruit and vegetables in a) public kindergartens and b) allotment gardens in Berlin, Germany, as well as in c) Landless Workers' settlements in Espírito Santo, Brazil. The qualitative analysis reveals that biopedagogical concerns often intermingle with ecological as well as broader societal issues, depending on the concrete context in question. This, in turn, poses new questions concerning our understandings of “biopower” and “biopolitics.”