Food and nutrition education as an emancipatory practice: Toward an engaged and popular praxis

Abstract

This theoretical essay aims to critically reflect on the approximations between the ideas of bell hooks and Paulo Freire in contributing to the construction of a popular and engaged Food and Nutrition Education (FNE). The methodology we adopted was analyzing the works of these authors to understand their intersections and specificities without pretending to exhaust them. The engaged pedagogy proposed by hooks, together with Freire’s liberating pedagogy, seek to transform not only Education, but society, with the subjects as the leading figures of their learning and emancipation process. When incorporated into FNE, these approaches can promote healthier eating, considering the issues of race, gender, culture, and power in food inequalities in the most diverse territories. Popular and engaged FNE is also related to promoting food and nutritional security, respecting cultural diversity, and fostering people’s political participation and autonomy in the decision-making process related to food and health. Moreover, training health professionals committed to this approach is fundamental to promoting significant changes in educational paradigms and understanding important gaps in this staff’s training of health professionals regarding social and human sciences content. In the current context, marked by the strengthening of agribusiness and the loss of food diversity, grassroots and engaged FNE is a way of defending food cultures, fighting for food sovereignty, and a more diverse and sustainable diet.