Institutional norms and school lunch patterns : a european comparison

The economic crisis is stretching the historical and social aim of school lunch policies, which has been to provide at least one meal a day to each child. Beyond the question of free meals, the issue of school lunches is now being impacted by new consumer movements and cultural distinction claims, such as a demand for organic or halal food. Building on the diversity of school catering models in Europe, the paper will propose a comparison of institutional offers and their impacts on food consumption conditions and children’s socialization in regard to food.The paper first focuses on the comparison of three typical school lunch patterns in Europe: the French national school lunch, the Danish homemade lunch boxes, and the mixed British pattern that may combine school meals, lunch boxes and alternative offers on site at school. These different catering patterns are based on different historical traditions and national contexts, are more or less homogeneous, structured and standardized at local level, and determine the modalities by which norms are transmitted: collective and egalitarian in the standardized French offer, family-based with the Danish lunch boxes, and individually based in the British offer of alternatives.The paper will also review some of the findings from a survey of teenagers from across the EU attending a European school offering a variety of catering alternatives at school (institutional canteen, lunch boxes, cafeteria, etc.), leading to a comparative typology of these teenagers’ relationship to the school lunches according to their national origin