Do we still need to teach ‘healthy eating’? I’m a ‘no’ on this. At least not in the way we’ve been doing it. It’s not because healthy eating is unimportant, but the way we’ve been teaching it is doing more harm than good. From moral messaging to unrealistic standards, it’s time for a new approach, one built on the foundations of curiosity, culture, and connection.
Despite good intentions, the focus on ‘eating’ and particularly on promoting a narrow idea of what’s considered ‘healthy’ hasn’t served our students as we might hope. Instead, it has oversimplified complex concepts, ignored lived experiences, and inadvertently caused a great deal of confusion, guilt, or shame.
In Australian schools, food and nutrition education has shifted significantly over the years. What once began as lessons about wholesome foods like milk, fruit, and vegetables and hygiene in the post-war years has become a more prescriptive and binary model: ‘healthy vs unhealthy,’ and perfectly portioned plates.
This evolution was not accidental. After World Wars One and Two, food education was largely about addressing undernutrition and building national strength. The Oslo lunch program trial, even though small, was introduced in the 1930s to improve nutrition, along with milk in the 1950s to offload surplus milk from the dairy industry. Malnutrition in post war periods saw the rise of population propaganda to improve eating habits, a push for the education of mothers, and the development of school curriculum that provided general education on diet and food hygiene. It is also interesting to note that the research that was conducted that made these recommendations, made assumptions that malnutrition was a result of ignorance while poverty was evidenced. These kinds of moralistic and virtuous assumptions still prevail today.
By the 1960s, school food education had shifted toward home economics, with an emphasis on practical life skills like meal preparation, budgeting, and managing a household. However, by the 1980s, the focus began to shift again. This time toward nutrition science. The curriculum started to prioritise nutrients, dietary guidelines, and food group classifications, reflecting a broader societal move toward individual responsibility for health through diet. This scientific lens, while valuable, often came at the cost of personal, cultural, and social understandings of food.
Enter the 1990s and the increased focus on ‘healthy’ body weight. Weight-focused paradigms have been the forefront of public health campaigns ever since. In 2011, Australia launched the ‘Swap It, Don’t Stop It’ public health initiative that promoted swapping larger portion sizes for smaller options, snacks for fruits and vegetables and discretionary foods eaten often for sometimes. These public health messages were repackaged into classroom resources, often without critical reflection on their developmental appropriateness or long-term impact. Curriculums also had underlying agendas about lifestyle disease prevention and energy in and out along with BMI calculations. Weight and health were implicitly linked and lurking in the background among harmful messages dressed as good intentions.
In recent years, there has been a growing pushback against discriminatory and stigmatising rhetoric in food and health education, particularly messages steeped in ableism, moral superiority, and narrow definitions of health. There is a growing recognition of the need to overhaul reductionist, oversimplified messages like ‘eat less’ or ‘eat more.’ While these messages were often framed as preventative, their promotion has coincided with rising confusion about what constitutes ‘healthy’ eating, increased body dissatisfaction among children and adolescents, and a heightened risk of disordered eating behaviours.
Schools are policy enactors, disseminating health messages en masse. In doing so, they have often become places where food is moralised and bodies are scrutinised. A lack of developmentally and culturally appropriate lessons has allowed psychologically harmful practices to take root. Wellness culture, from social media now shapes classroom conversations and how students think and feel about food and their bodies.
“When we stop moralising food and start exploring it, we give students the chance to build lifelong, respectful, and nourishing relationships with eating.”
Food education is important and there’s no question about that. What we need are programs that move beyond portion sizes and healthy plates. Programs that invite curiosity, celebrate culture, and foster connection. When we stop moralising food and start exploring it, we give students the chance to build lifelong, respectful, and nourishing relationships with eating.
