Junk Food Mums: Class, Gender and the ‘Battle of Rawmarsh’

Jo Pike

Food, Health and Education Research Group

University of Hull

j.pike@hull.ac.uk

Introduction

• School meals in England

• Current policy and evidence

• ‘Battle of Rawmarsh’

• Deleuze – affect, concept and opinion

School Meals in England

• School lunches in England

• 1980’s LEAs not obliged to provide school meals, removal of nutritional standards, CCT, reduced entitlement to FSM

• Feb 2005 Jamie’s School Dinners

• May 2005 Labour Election - renewed pledge to review nutritional standards, establishment of SFT, increased minimum spend

• Phased approach to adoption of nutritional standards - Primary schools: 2008, Secondary: 2009

Current Policy

• ‘Choosing Health’ Oct 2004 - identified obesity, diet and nutrition as priorities - revision of nutritional standards for school meals, NSFVS, Healthy schools

• 2004 PSA target - to halt year on year rise in obesity and overweight among children under 11 - increasing uptake of school meals

• Healthy weight healthy lives - by 2020 to reduce childhood obesity to 2000 levels

Evidence

• Jaime and Lock (2008) suggest some school policies have been effective in improving the food environment and dietary intake in schools, but there is little evaluation of their impact on BMI

• Wood and Harper (2008) “To date, school based interventions have proved unsuccessful at reducing levels of obesity...the modification of school meals can be successful at making changes at a school level, it has little impact on the dietary habits of individuals”. (SFT)

Overview part 2

• Deleuzian notions of affect

• ‘Battle of Rawmarsh’

• Media representation and affective response

Deleuze

“Opinion not only assumes a present and shared world; it also assumes a common sense whereby thinking takes the same ‘upright’ form distributed among rational perceivers. Opinion or doxa makes a direct link between affect and concept, between what we see and what we say, or between the sensible and the intelligible.” (p.24 Colebrook, 2002)

‘Battle of Rawmarsh’

• September 2006

• Rawmarsh Comprehensive School –

Rotherham, South Yorkshire

• Action taken by Mothers following changes to

school lunch options and operations.

‘Affective responses’

Affective responses

• Julie Critchlow, housewife turned antichrist, is standing outside Chubby’s sandwich bar drawing angrily on a cigarette and glaring at the secondary school opposite”

• To an outsider, Rawmarsh sounds like hell; a place where fat stupid mothers fight for the right to raise fat stupid children” (Hattersley, Times 24th Sept 2006)

OpinionsMorality “The food that these parents are handing out is not part of a healthy eating diet and on top of that I have to question the morality of delivering it from the grounds of a cemetery.” Weaver, Guardian, 18/09/06

Motherhood “Pictures of the scene-which looked like some grotesque Little Britain sketch-were splashed across the newspapers and Critchlow was called the worst mum in Britain” Hattersley, Times 24/09/06

“If these mums want to effectively shorten the lives of their kids and others’ kids then that is down to them.” The Sun 16/09/09

Intelligence “The row comes as a new survey revealed young people are suffering health problems due to a chronic lack of vitamins in their diet.”

Merton Parents

Ninja Mums

Conclusions

• Location of school meals policy in obesity discourse renders questioning of its aims ‘arguing outside of sense’

•Fatness and obesity used to mobilise affective response to those who question aims and implementation of school meals policy

•Use of disgust as affective response to mobilise opinions in relation to classed, white femininity