Increasingly, UK policy recommendations include food education. For example, the Levelling Up white paper recommends children leave school knowing ‘how to cook six recipes’ (LUHC, 2022); the Department for Education’s holiday activities and food programme guidance mandates daily nutritional education (DfE, 2022); while England’s National Food Strategy recommends improvements across the food and nutrition curriculum. Yet what is notable in each policy is the variety of terms employed to describe food education.
Similarly, a lack of consistent food education terminology was discovered in our recent research analysing how primary school curriculums around the world address food education and food literacy (Smith et al., 2022). For example, primary school food curriculums are called Cooking and Nutrition in England, Home Economics in Japan, Food Technology and Health and Wellbeing in Scotland, while Norway has a Curriculum in Food and Health. This highlights a distinct lack of terminology consensus in primary education, unlike in secondary education where the term ‘home economics’ is more consistently used (McCloat & Caraher, 2020). But what difference does this make?
