“Humans bring food to their mouths, animals bring their mouths to food”—The morality politics of school-lunch sporks in 1970s Japan

Sifting through preschool teachers' funds of knowledge to reveal culturally sustaining child-feeding professional learning opportunities at one university in Singapore

“…In Japan, the 2005 shokuiku law enshrines Japanese school food and feeding practices as a core part of the national identity, which is constructed in opposition to Western identities (Hiroki, 2008;Kojima, 2011;Mah, 2010). When the Japanese government decided to offer children sufooku (sporks) instead of chopsticks to eat rice at school in the 1970s, this sparked a widespread moral panic as citizens feared it would lead to a new generation of ill-mannered children, untrained in Japanese ways of being (Hopson, 2023). At Israeli kindergartens, early childhood educators celebrate foods like matza (unleavened bread) and Jaffa oranges (a symbol of Zionist settlement in Palestine) to enculturate children into the national identity (Golden, 2005).…”