The mid-morning snack between public discourse health norms, school public and family habits: an ethnographic look at eating situations in kindergarten

In our contribution, we take an ethnographic look at the practical organisation of mid-morning snack situations in three Swiss kindergartens. We understand these situations as different forms of school publics and investigate how they are interconnected with the norms and demands of public health discourse as well as with family eating habits. To do so, we analyse newspaper articles as well as documents from school health institutions and ask which norms of this discourse become visible in everyday life in kindergarten, and how these norms relate to teachers’ actions. By ethnographically looking at how teachers organise mid-morning snack situations, how they react to children’s eating practices or the food they bring with them to kindergarten, we ask whether – or rather how – these discursive norms are reframed. Not only the way parents are addressed as responsible for implementing the requirements of the discourse around healthy food differs across the three kindergartens. Also, the scope of parents’ and children’s actions and the way of performing the mid-morning snack are highly variable. This last point depends not only on the specific kindergarten and the practices of teachers but likewise on a collectivising positioning process of the families related to the neighbourhood in which the kindergarten is situated.