The Politicization of School Catering in France
Vegetarian meals, halal meat, local and organic food origin, modulated prices... The issues associated with school canteens have become issues of political conflict, accompanying the more general politicisation of food issues since the late 1990s. This article examines how school canteens have been politicised, based on two main hypotheses. First, school catering issues have become more visible and conflictual at the national level, in connection with the development of new cleavages in Western European political systems, between identity and cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and between ecologism and productivism, on the other. Second hypothesis, the wide autonomy and diversity of local actors in the implementation limits the influence of this politicization on school catering policies at the local level. To test these hypotheses, we analyse quantitatively (classification) and qualitatively two corpora of more than 10,000 articles devoted to this subject and distinguish between national and regional arena; we also rely on five case studies in four rural towns, based on interviews and observation material. These data confirm the hypothesis of a national politicisation through increased visibility and conflict, as well as the association with new cleavages, but show the limited and differentiated effects of this national politicisation at the local level.