Ten years of the Food and Nutrition Education Reference Framework for Public Policies: principles, practices and challenges

Abstract

Celebrating 10 years of the Food and Nutrition Education Reference Framework for Public Policies is a privilege and a joy. We are pleased to present the works selected with all the care and rigor that the date requires. Two years have passed since we invited colleagues to contribute to this thematic issue, a symptomatic lapse of time that tells us that we need time... time to think and rethink practices, time to decant our reflections and theoretical-methodological constructions, elements that indicate the paths where advances in the field of Food and Nutritional Education (FNE) are being paved for the next 10 or 12 years.

The Framework, affectionate name as we refer to this 2012 publication, frames a context for strengthening spaces for social participation and intersectoral initiatives to promote the Human Right to Adequate Food (HRAF) and Food and Nutritional Security (FNS). It also frames the relevant and necessary production of a critical reflection on FNE actions, valuing it in the different contexts in which it was already developed and encouraging its insertion in new scenarios.¹

These new scenarios have emerged over the years, also framed by a series of adversities, such as (1) attacks on the references of critical education, especially Paulo Freire, produced by a conservative wave that spread across various aspects of social life; (2) the growth of professional performance perspectives strongly marked by neoliberal values that impose on the nutritionist the ideal of becoming “self-entrepreneurs”; (3) the health crisis related to Covid-19 and the need for changes in daily life (including social distancing), which required adaptations to the ways of taking care of food, nutrition, and health and carrying out FNE; and (4) the dismantling, emptying and reconfiguration of public FNS policies and other social policies that, combined with the context of crises (economic, social, climate and health), brought an overwhelming increase in hunger throughout the country.

In addition to the adversities, it is worth noting here the recognized advances regarding debates on food environments, sustainable and fair food systems, and the visibility given to gender and race issues among the health determinants, as well as the Framework’s contributions in encouraging registration and systematization of new practices, multiple knowledge and ethnic-racial issues in food and nutrition. In the context of these advances, we highlight two important initiatives: initially, in 2012, the creation of the Ideias na Mesa Virtual Network, to encourage the exchange of FNE experiences and support the training of professionals to work in this area;² and more recently, the Food and Nutrition Education Innovation Laboratory (Laboratório de Inovação em Educação Alimentar e Nutricional –LIS-EAN), launched to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Framework, which is dedicated to bringing together successful FNE experiences, besides systematizing knowledge to expand the access and sharing between health managers and professionals and in other sectors.³

We acknowledge in these initiatives the importance of describing, systematizing, and publicizing these experiences and, above all, sharing the successes of FNE professionals. However, despite the large number of experience reports sent to this thematic call, we understand that it was the right time to emphasize the gaps, renewing, once again, the challenges we are faced with in our daily lives and making the possible and necessary progress in the FNE field.

Thus, the articles gathered here present systematizations and analyses that, in the wake of the innovations brought by the Framework, were able to support spaces in which, traditionally, FNE practices are developed, such as schools, primary health care units, internships, and extension projects in universities, and also point out new elements that contribute to a conception of FNE freed from the constraints of banking education. This is a permanent challenge that still imposes itself on the FNE field. In other words, changing practices is not at all simple, especially when we are faced with professional training that uses traditional pedagogical approaches, sometimes focused on the demands of a neoliberal world that solely holds the individual responsible, and does not give up on archaic and normative conceptions about the health-illness, right-wrong, good-bad binomials.