Educating at the Risk of Excluding? The Case of the Tast’in Fives Sustainable Food Project
More and more cities are embarking on sustainable food projects. But the promotion of so-called healthy and sustainable food, whose principles and practices correspond to the culinary ethos of the middle and/or dominant classes, can sometimes serve as a Trojan horse for growing processes of urban gentrification guided by a hygienic substratum. To use Foucauldian’s terminology, we are then witnessing a new governmentality of bodies which consists, through the promotion of “eating well” and its corollary, the fight against junk food, of cleaning up human bodies in order to clean up urban bodies via a double implicit injunction: that of “eating well” and that of “becoming thin”. However, this governmentality of bodies, which uses a “gentle moralization” that tends to exclude populations that do not comply or refuse to comply, is not without creating certain reactions and/or resistance. It is to the roots of this governability of bodies and the labelling it produces, but also the resistance it generates, that we propose to focus in this article drawn from an action-research on the urban project Tast’in Fives (TIF), initiated by the Lille City Council and financed by the European Union. Our investigation is based on numerous participant observations carried out within the cooking workshops organised as part of this project, as well as 50 in-depth interviews with the organisers of these workshops and their audiences.