Introduction

Farm to school (FTS) is a popular approach to food systems education in K-12 schools across the United States. FTS efforts can include a wide range of activities including serving locally grown fruits and vegetables in school nutrition programs, planting and maintaining school gardens, and engaging students in garden and food-based educational activities across the school curriculum (USDA 2019a; Joshi et al. 2014). Through these approaches, FTS has been promoted as a “win–win–win” for kids, farmers, and communities, due to its potential to improve student health and academic success while forging economic partnerships between schools and local farms (NFSN 2020a; Vallianatos et al. 2004). At the same time, a small group of critical scholars have charged that FTS programs may inadvertently reinforce neoliberal trends (i.e., individualism, private funding, and a reliance on volunteerism) in food and educational systems and thus exacerbate social inequalities (Allen and Guthman 2006; Meek and Tarlau 2015, 2016). This polarization of perspectives, where FTS programs receive either praise or critique, serves as a motivation for the current article. Research on the merits and potential for FTS to positively affect the food system and health disparities is relatively scarce, and the critiques are largely theoretical and generally do not account for the complex outcomes of real-world FTS programs. Through a year-long ethnographic study of FTS within one public school in the Southeast US, this paper contributes to these debates. We draw upon theoretical frameworks of materiality and affective labor to investigate how engagement with FTS activities can transform the social practice of everyday life in school for students, staff, and teachers (Figueroa and Alkon 2017; Hayes-Conroy 2010). Triangulating data collected through participant observation, interviews, focus groups, and surveys, we find that the hands-on work of FTS can reframe success in collaborative terms, engage the school around collective responsibility, and build relationships across socioeconomic and racial difference. In contrast to much prior work on FTS, we do not simply emphasize the benefits of producing responsiblized subjects, but rather highlight potential benefits of developing subjects who understand and participate in collective responsibility. We also identify areas resistant to change and argue that more work must be done to formalize and institutionalize commitment to the funding, labor, and resources needed to maximize the transformative potential of this work.

Farm to school context

The FTS movement began with a few pilot programs in the 1990s, and as of 2015 42% of US schools reported participating in FTS activities of some kind (Ralston et al. 2017; USDA 2019a). In the US, FTS initiatives are supported and encouraged by a wide range of local, statewide, national, non-profit, and private sources. Established by the 2010 Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act, the USDA’s FTS Program provides information and competitive grant funding to support the development and implementation of FTS activities including school gardens, agricultural education, and bringing local foods into school nutrition programs (USDA 2019b). However, there is no durable federal policy requiring FTS implementation, or funding to support FTS efforts and the personnel required to maintain them.Footnote 1 The National Farm to School Network is an advocacy organization that serves as a clearinghouse for information and resources for FTS, but does not provide direct funding (NFSN 2020b). At the state-level, policy and funding for FTS is highly variable: most states have passed bills “celebrating” FTS efforts, and an increasing number have passed legislation funding grant programs, coordinator positions, or local purchasing pilot programs (NFSN 2019). At the local-level, as of 2014 approximately 12% of school wellness policies included language about FTS in the cafeteria, and 18% had provisions for school gardens (Piekarz et al. 2016). Districts often support FTS activities through partnerships and funding from a mix of public, private, and non-profit sources (c.f. NFSN 2016). Given this piecemeal approach to policy and funding, FTS programs are highly heterogeneous—with each district or school taking its own path to implementation.

Despite the overall heterogeneity of FTS programs, common goals include supporting local agriculture and child nutrition through the buying power of the National School Lunch Program (Izumi et al. 2010) and enhancing cross-curricular, experiential learning for students through school gardens and food-based learning (Joshi et al. 2008; Ratcliffe et al. 2011). FTS programs have also been promoted as “symbolic” of broader efforts to mitigate food, health, and economic disparities by “fostering equity” through “community-driven solutions” (in Joshi et al. 2014, p. V). Although the evidence for positive outcomes on these fronts is limited, a growing body of quantitative nutrition studies demonstrate that FTS programs can modestly increase student fruit and vegetable consumption during the school day, and improve students’ attitudes towards fresh produce (Berezowitz et al. 2015; Ratcliffe et al. 2011; Ozer 2007; Bontrager Yoder et al. 2014; Robinson-O’Brien et al. 2009). However, these studies find only moderate increases, and furthermore, food consumption studies and attitude change are “notoriously difficult to measure” (Ohly et al. 2016, p. 318). School gardens have also been found to increase student motivation and autonomy in science learning (Williams et al. 2018). In addition, a review of qualitative school garden research (Ohly et al. 2016) identifies several beneficial outcomes—including fostering sense of connection to growing food that leads to an increased preference for trying vegetables (Passy et al. 2010), creating a sense of empowerment for children who otherwise struggle in traditional school settings (Chawla et al. 2014), and promoting teamwork toward shared goals that can breakdown social barriers and elitism (Cutter-Makenzie 2009).

In contrast, a small group of critical scholars (c.f., Allen and Guthman 2006; Meek and Tarlau 2015, 2016) cautions that FTS may inadvertently aggravate the very social ills it hopes to remedy. Focusing their critique primarily on farm to cafeteria efforts, Allen and Guthman (2006) argue that the lack of federal funding drives local schools to rely on private funding and volunteer labor—key tenets of neoliberal economic regimes—to enact FTS program goals. This creates a situation where schools with greater access to financial and human capital can more effectively support FTS programs than schools and districts with fewer resources—a finding corroborated by a study coming out of USDA (Ralston et al. 2017). Allen and Guthman (2006) also warn that “[d]iscourses of personal responsibility and individual success, consumerism, and choice” (p. 410), strategically employed by FTS advocates to obtain political and financial support, may help produce students as neoliberal subjects who believe that “social change is simply a matter of will rather than something that must be organized and struggled over in collectivities” (p. 412).

In a similar vein, Meek and Tarlau (2016) argue that by focusing on outcomes such as academic performance, normative body sizes, and “healthy choices,” many FTS programs rely on rhetorics of personal responsibility rather than catalyzing critical engagement with food justice and opportunities for social change. This “de-politicized” approach elides the persistent damage that capitalism and racism have wrought on the food system, and is fundamentally “insufficient for helping youth understand the racialized injustices inherent in the current food system, and their capacity to transform them through collective action” (Meek and Tarlau 2015, p. 133). Instead, Meek and Tarlau (2015, 2016) call for a “critical food systems education” explicitly grounded critical pedagogy (Freire 2000), food justice (Mares and Alkon 2011), agroecology (Gliessman 2013), and food sovereignty (Wittman 2011) to catalyze real potential to disrupt trenchant inequities in the food system and beyond.

In short, where advocates emphasize the promise of FTS as a “win–win–win” scenario that harnesses the organizational and economic power of school nutrition and public education to improve the lives of students, farmers, and communities, critical scholars argue that FTS’s current focus on local purchasing and garden-based learning obscures broader and more persistent social and economic inequities, and thus may do more harm than good.

Theoretical framework

Our analysis of FTS is situated within a larger debate about the potential for alternative food movements to ameliorate the social, economic, and environmental ills created by a corporate food regime underpinned by neoliberalism (c.f. Figueroa and Alkon 2017). Alkon and Mares (2012) write that “neoliberalism is a political economic philosophy that asserts the primacy of the market in attending to human needs and wellbeing, and re-orients the state towards the facilitation of market mechanisms” (p. 348). Since the 1970s, neoliberal economic philosophy has had a complex and ubiquitous hold on western societies like the US and UK—exacerbating social inequalities grounded in colonialism, capitalism, and racism, and expanding gaps between the rich and the poor (Stone 2016). By emphasizing market deregulation, increasing efficiency and trade liberalization, neoliberalism, in essence, values “profit over people” (Chomsky 1999).

By liberalizing trade, as well as privatizing, localizing, and individualizing responsibility, neoliberal economic policy affects food systems, and thus human health, by supporting a powerful corporate food regime where a select few, very large private corporations control increasingly large shares of food production and distribution (Alkon and Mares 2012). This drives a host of associated social issues: commodity-based foods are more cheaply priced and readily available than their healthier alternatives (Minkoff-Zern 2012); farm workers are underpaid, overworked, and often food insecure (Quandt et al. 2004); and changing economic markets make it hard for family farms to survive (Suess-Reyes and Fuetsch 2016). In the US and around the world, low-income and communities of color are disproportionately affected by these issues—creating problems such as diet-related diseases, food insecurity, and loss of farming livelihood (Otero et al. 2013).

Although alternative food movements (like community garden projects and farmers markets) intend to support “sustainable” agriculture and feed communities across economic and racial lines, critics argue that these movements overwhelmingly reflect whitened imaginaries about agriculture and “healthy eating” and, thus, largely fail to restructure food systems, especially in marginalized communities (Guthman 2008; Figueroa and Alkon 2017). Perhaps most relevant to our argument, critics also argue that alternative food movements re-inscribe neoliberal subjectivities that produce individually responsible consumer-citizens—in other words, these movements valorize “good choices” made by socially-conscious individual consumers (ideally at farmers markets), over collective and community-focused solutions (see Guthman 2008, 2011).

Neoliberalism also has shifted the focus of education. Under Keynesian economics of the 1960s and 1970s, education and other social institutions were valued as improving “human capital” (Davies and Bansel 2007). In the decades that followed, the same market-oriented values that drove neoliberal shifts in food systems allowed neoliberal reformists to reframe education as a commodity that can be measured, “bought and sold like anything else,” contributing to the rise in standardized testing as a universal measure of educational success (Davies and Bansel 2007, p. 254). Since poverty creates stress in families in the form of food insecurity, violence, emotional and physical trauma—all of which also make it more difficult for students from low socioeconomic status households to learn—schools with higher income populations are more likely to reach standardized testing benchmarks (McGee 2004; Orfield 2001). Schools where students “underachieve” on standardized tests are judged with a “no excuses” approach enforcing another pillar of neoliberal ideology: meritocracy, in which individuals (and their schools) are framed as responsible for their own success or failure with little regard for social context that facilitates or impedes this success (Picower 2011; Lakes and Carter 2011). Neoliberal meritocracy is further reinforced by educational tracking, which separates students into levels by perceived academic ability with little regard for the effect of social context on academic performance, and ends up segregating students largely along class and racial lines—ultimately ensuring that privileged students maintain increased access to opportunity (Jones and Vagle 2013). This creates a feedback loop in which the very conditions that have created economic stratification, also create educational stratification.

By shifting capital away from public institutions and placing the onus for success and well-being on individuals, neoliberalism effectively obscures the “structural and historical root causes of our increasingly stratified society” and largely neutralizes efforts to remedy social inequalities through collective (rather than individualized success) solutions (Sondel 2015, p. 291; Davies and Bansel 2007). This is where the critique of FTS we describe above comes to bear: Are alternative food programs like FTS ameliorating the social, economic, and environmental ills caused neoliberalism in a collective way, or are they further individualizing responsibility, thus recreating neoliberal citizens? The decades-old debate often pins this as an “either-or” question. In contrast, our research follows the lead of scholars such as Figueroa and Alkon (2017) and Hayes-Conroy (2010) who use qualitative research methods to characterize the social practice of everyday life. Examining the social structure and practice of alternative food programs, these authors find that alternative food programs often transcend binary categories of “neoliberal or not neoliberal”—simultaneously contesting certain aspects of neoliberalism and reproducing others (Figueroa and Alkon 2017, p. 208).

In this vein, we characterize the social practice of FTS by drawing upon the conceptual frameworks of materiality (Miller 2005; Hayes-Conroy 2010) and affective/playful labor (Hardt 1999; Moore et al. 2015). The concept of materiality focuses analytical attention on the ways that the physical characteristics of the material world shape human engagement with that world—in terms of sensory experience and bodily practice, as well as social and environmental relations (Jackson 2000; Miller 2005). Following Bourdieu (1977), Miller argues that much of our engagement with the material world is so familiar that it becomes second nature, part of our “habitus,” supporting the social reproduction of “the normative orders and expectations” of society (2005, p. 6). Yet Miller also draws on Latour (1999) to argue for attention to the instances in which the material world has an impact (“agency”) on the social world (2005, p. 11). Here, we employ the concept of materiality to orient our analytical attention to the ways that the physical nature of FTS (e.g., hands-on engagement with the gardens, livestock, and produce) shapes the day-to-day experiences of students, teachers, and staff, as well as their interactions with one another and with their environment.

We also draw upon the concept of affective labor, to examine the work of FTS performed by students, teachers, and staff. Affective labor is best understood in the context of the twentieth century shift in labor, initially, from the primary production of agriculture and extraction of natural resources, to an industrial economy associated with “modernization” (Hardt 1999). In the late twentieth century, labor shifted again toward an information and service economy characterized by “immaterial” and “affective” labor, which Hardt describes as labor grounded in human connection and “embedded in the moments of human interaction and communication … [producing] a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion—even a sense of connectedness or community” (1999, p. 96). In the case of agriculture, this can be characterized by the growing consumer interest in food systems that cultivate connections between food, its production, and the socio-environmental values of consumers (e.g., increasing demand for local and organic food, the rise of farmers’ markets and community gardens, and of course, farm to school). This economic shift can be viewed through a critical lens, in terms of the way alternative food movements produce, reproduce, and satisfy affective desires grounded in eliteness and whiteness, as we describe above, and the ways that affective labor is often grounded in gendered, racist, capitalist, and neoliberal tropes. Yet, Hardt argues that affective labor also holds the potential to subvert dominant, capitalist rationalities, writing that “[i]n the production and reproduction of affect … collective subjectivities are produced and sociality is produced” (1999, p. 96). For our purposes, the concept of affective labor provides a lens for examining the potential collective subjectivities and sociality produced through the work of FTS. Moore et al. (2015) fine tune this concept further to discuss the value of “playful labor” (p. 408). They posit that when children make play out of work, they are collectively and actively imagining future societal realities. Timmerman and Felix’s (2015) concept of agroecological labor helps to further describe the work of FTS. They argue that agroecological labor is varied, knowledge-intensive, stimulating, and social in nature; thus, it has the potential to create a meaningful work environment with opportunities to develop new knowledge and skills, peer recognition, and autonomy in work. We draw upon these frameworks to attend to the affective value and sociality embedded in students’ engagement with FTS.

Below, we use the frameworks of materiality and affective labor as analytical lenses to characterize the day-to-day practice of FTS and to interpret the counterexamples to critiques of neoliberalism that we identified in our data.

Methodology

Site description

We selected Hickory Middle School (HMS)Footnote 2 as the site for investigating the potential for FTS to disrupt neoliberal subjectivities in public school education for a number of reasons: First, because of its relationship to entrenched racial and economic inequalities that have been exacerbated under neoliberalism. HMS is an economically and racially diverse public middle school located in River County, a small, metropolitan county of approximately 110,000 located in the Southeast US (NCHS 2014). Compared to neighboring counties, River County ranks lower on quality of life measures, and has higher rates of unemployment and childhood poverty (County Health Rankings 2020). Notably, it also has a higher rank of income inequality (determined by the ratio of household income at the 80th percentile to income at the 20th percentile) than its neighbors (County Health Rankings 2020). HMS is a majority-minority public middle school that serves several low-income neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly African American, and a growing Latinx population. HMS also serves wealthier neighborhoods, which are overwhelmingly white. Nevertheless, the district continues to wage efforts to mitigate the harms of these inequalities. For example, using USDA’s Community Eligibility Provision for high poverty districts, the district has provided free breakfast and lunch to all students who attend River County schools, including HMS, since 2016.

Second, despite persistent social inequalities, River County has been a part of the growing FTS movement for most of the last decade. The majority of its public schools have on-site vegetable gardens and the district is committed to purchasing local and regionally-grown food for their cafeterias.Footnote 3 The district has received statewide recognition for these efforts, including the inaugural “Outstanding District” award. At the time of our research, HMS had the most established and well-integrated FTS program in the district. The FTS program at HMS includes three main components: community partnership/outreach, experiential education, and waste reduction (see Fig. 1), which are connected by a complex series of relationships: The school’s FTS program centers on the school’s 7000 ft2 vegetable and fruit garden—planted, weeded, and harvested by students in the Agricultural Science class. Produce from the HMS garden (supplemented by the nearby university’s student farm) is used in a variety of ways. Students enrolled in Family and Consumer Science (FCS) and Low Incidence Disability (LID) classes use produce for their cooking labs. Ag Science students harvest produce and deliver it to the cafeteria for a monthly ‘garden bar.’ Students help run a weekly afterschool vegetable stand, and produce is also prepared by students for a series of community meals served throughout the school year and during the summer program. In the cafeteria, students collect food waste to compost and uneaten fruit to repurpose for cooking labs in FCS and LID classes.

Fig. 1
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Relationship between farm to school components at Hickory Middle School

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Finally, our well-established partnerships with HMS and its FTS program provided us with critical opportunities for access, trust, and collaboration in the context of research. A core group of HMS teachers and staff, who call themselves the “Sustainability Squad,” have shaped the FTS landscape and programming over the past six years. The Sustainability Squad includes the school principal; a handful of teachers and staff, including the FCS, Ag Science, and LID teachers; an AmeriCorps VISTAFootnote 4 who manages many of the day-to-days aspects of FTS at HMS; and a district-level Middle School Garden Coordinator, hired in 2016 through a three-way financial partnership between the school district, local university’s public outreach division, and Cooperative Extension.Footnote 5 In addition, the FTS program has thrived with strong community and institutional support from the county government, local businesses, and local university—including researchers on this project who participated at various times and capacities by installing and maintaining gardens, assigning student service-learning on site, offering teacher training and support, and collaborating in research to understand the impact of FTS programming on the school body.

Data collection and analysis

Drawing on the principles of participatory research (Cornwall and Jewkes 1995), we designed our research goals and questions in collaboration with the Sustainability Squad, during the 2014–2015 school year. We received approval from the school district and the University of Georgia’s IRB to conduct this research. During the following school year and summer, we conducted our research using multiple ethnographic methods: participant observation of FTS activities, a 6th grade student baseline survey, focus groups with students, as well as interviews with administrators, teachers, and staff (see Fig. 2).Footnote 6

Fig. 2
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Research timeline

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AB administered a survey to incoming 6th grade students, during their Ag Science and FCS classes, at the beginning of the school year to provide baseline data about HMS students’ previous gardening experience, science content knowledge, sustainable behaviors, attitudes toward citizenship, and knowledge of the food system. Eighty-three percent (158) of the 6th grade class completed the survey. Following the survey, 25 students were purposefully invited to participate in semi-structured focus groups. Students were selected based on their survey results to reflect demographic diversity of the school population. We also received nominations from the Ag Science and FCS teachers as to students who would enjoy participating in a focus group and provide a diversity of perspectives. Twelve students returned the necessary parental permission and assented to participate in the focus groups (48%), and were divided into two separate focus groups (one with four and the other with eight students). These focus groups met twice during the school year, to investigate students’ knowledge and behaviors around “sustainability” through a directed brainstorming activity led by AB.

AB also conducted weekly participant observation of FTS activities during Ag Science and FCS classes, in the garden, in the cafeteria, and during afterschool and summer programming, for a total of 73 h of observation recorded in written fieldnotes. Questions that guided her observations include: What types of FTS activities are students participating in? How do students, staff, and teachers interact with one another during these activities? What messages are teachers conveying through their FTS lessons about food systems, school community, and students?

At end of the school year, AB and JJT conducted individual interviews with key members of the Sustainability Squad (n = 5). These interviews sought to identify and characterize the FTS program goals as defined by these key educators, how their goals influence the messages that students take away from the FTS programming, and how the FTS programming relates to the issues students face more generally.

All interviews and focus groups were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Transcripts and field notes were imported into Atlas.ti to facilitate systematic qualitative data analysis, then analyzed using an iterative inductive and deductive approach to identify and index key analytical categories related to our research questions and theoretical framework (Saldaña 2016). AB and JJT triangulated interview, focus group, and participant observation data through extensive interrogation and discussion to arrive at the final themes presented here.

Results and discussion

During our year of data collection at HMS, we observed that although some social phenomena corroborated the critiques of FTS as the re-inscriptions of neoliberalism (Allen and Guthman 2006; Meek and Tarlau 2016), the majority of day-to-day engagements around FTS were not adequately explained by it. Drawing upon lens of materiality and affective labor, we identify three key themes that demonstrate the potential for FTS to disrupt neoliberal subjectivities in the context of public education: broadening opportunities for students to experience collaborative success, engaging the school body in collaborative responsibility, and catalyzing relationships across socioeconomic and racial divides.

Broadening opportunities for students to experience collaborative success

To a greater degree than elsewhere in the school, FTS focuses on material and affective labor. Much of this occurs in the context of “hands-on” collaborative projects, such as gardening and cooking, which require the efforts of many students—and often many classes—contributing over the course of several hours, days, and even weeks. This type of classwork shifts the focus away from individual merit and toward collective accomplishment—allowing teachers and students to redefine classroom “success” in collaborative terms. Michelle, the Ag Science teacher, describes how this translates into her teaching, saying, “I want [students] to see that it’s a huge process and that everyone has a hand in it, because there are 12 different Ag Science classes, and we all just have this one little hand in… the culminating event or end product like the garden bar.”

In the case of FTS, the material product of students’ affective labor changes their social environment; it is something that they can taste, see, smell, or touch, and take pride in the collaborative accomplishment. In his interview, Principal Tom reflects on the value of the materiality of this work, stating, “You can go to FCS and learn how to make kale smoothies, make [a] kale smoothie, and drink it and it’s a task you’ve done and you’re successful at.” While all students benefit from more collaborative and concrete accomplishments (Ohly et al. 2016), this type of work may be especially valuable for students who are not experiencing meritocratic, individualized (i.e. neoliberal) ‘success’ in school. Several Sustainability Squad members reflected on this in their interviews, including Eliza, the FCS teacher, who described this phenomenon during one participant observation session, excerpted below:

Later, when Eliza comes back in [the classroom after releasing the students], she immediately starts telling me about [Student A]. She says that in the traditional classroom setting he struggles, it’s not his strong suit. But in the kitchen, he works very well and is always wanting to help out. She says that she really enjoys that in her class, some students shine who do not shine with the typical schoolwork. [Field Notes, October 16, 2015].

Neoliberal school reform has narrowed the pedagogical techniques that core class teachers employ to primarily individualized and “standards-based” learning in which students are solely responsible for their own performance (Scogin et al. 2017). This in turn limits the definition of ‘success’ in school to the ideals of meritocracy: that students’ successes and failures are their own responsibility regardless of context (Davies and Bansel 2007). This is exemplified by increasing regimentation of learning standards and high stakes testing. Yet in the context of FTS, we repeatedly witnessed examples of affective labor and its potential to produce collaborative sociality (Hardt 1999). As students worked together in the garden, we observed them becoming deeply immersed in the material and collaborative work of weeding, shoveling mulch, feeding the animals, picking lettuce, or hammering nails in the chicken coop. As students cooked together in FCS class, we watched them chat while they whisked dressing and chopped vegetables—working side-by-side toward the shared goal of preparing food for themselves or others.

This focus on collaborative accomplishment disrupts the neoliberal meritocracy that otherwise structures students’ school day and opens new spaces for students to experience success. This is an important finding for educators and school administrators: through materiality and affective labor, FTS has the potential to make school environments more inclusive of different learning styles, offer more opportunities for students to excel and build self-efficacy during the school day, and redefine educational success in collaborative terms. Thus, FTS programming can create the foundation for a more inclusive and collaborative community at large.

Catalyzing collective responsibility

In addition to redefining success in collaborative terms, the FTS program at HMS has also spurred collective responsibility across the school body. In particular, we have witnessed students and staff working together to transform the cafeteria’s food waste into valuable material resources, such as compost for the school garden, healthy snacks for hungry students, and ingredients for FCS food labs (see Fig. 1). To organize these efforts, color-coded cans line the center of the cafeteria and “share bowls” dot the center of each table. Green cans are for compost, blue for recycling, and black for landfill waste. Signs are posted on the different cans and bowls illustrating what items go in each, and the school VISTA helps students identify what will go where. In the cafeteria, therefore, FTS has changed both the material landscape and students’ labor—reorganizing students to be collectively responsible for managing food waste as a shared natural resource.

Justine, the LID teacher, saw the waste reduction program as a unique opportunity for her students to contribute to the FTS efforts at HMS. Twice each week, she helped a dedicated group of students to weigh, record, and empty the compost and recycling. AB observed their work one day during participant observation:

Four Low Incidence Disability (LID) students and one [teacher’s aide] come down to outside the lunchroom to help [Virgil, the FTS coordinator] weigh and empty the compost and recycling. They do this regularly on every Monday and Friday. One of the students is SUPER excited to be there. Her teacher tells [Virgil] that she has a special interest in the composting and recycling, and wants to become more involved. Students take turns putting the bins on the scale, and get extra excited about pressing the button on the scale that holds the weight intact. One student records the weights in the sustainability binder. After everything is weighed, the containers go back on the carts, and we wheel them down to recycling bins behind the school. Students take turns emptying them into the big bin with [Virgil]’s help. Then we go back through the school and out to the compost piles to dump the compost. We head back into the Ag Science courtyard where students spray out the bins, emptying the dirty water into a compost container next to the greenhouse [Field Notes, October 2, 2015].

As this example illustrates, the LID students’ gain a sense of excitement, satisfaction, and connectedness to the school community through their affective labor; but it also has had direct material effects at HMS by diverting thousands of pounds of food waste from the landfill each year and transforming it into rich soil. When the Sustainability Squad noticed that whole pieces of fruit were ending up in the compost pile, they created the share-bowl program, where students place uneaten and unwanted fruit or pre-packaged items in a bowl at the center of the table. This food gets reused two ways: other students can take items out of this bowl during lunch and anything left over at the end of the last lunch period is brought to the FCS and LID classroom refrigerators, where the teachers incorporate this food into cooking labs. Making applesauce muffins or carrot cake, students work together to materially transform unwanted food into something valuable that simultaneously reduces food waste, tastes great, and reinforces the collective value of affective labor, and (as we discuss above) gives students a sense of success, satisfaction, and connection.

Notably, the waste reduction component of the FTS programming organizes the affective labor of a diverse set of actors to collectively manage a commonly held natural resource (Hardin 1968). Food waste is a prime example of what Marshall (2013) calls a “wicked problem of collective action” (p. 185). Because neoliberalism largely rewards individuals (rather than communities) it is generally ineffective in addressing natural resource issues that require collective solutions to ensure that benefits are commonly (rather than individually) reaped. Through composting and repurposing uneaten food, students at HMS collectively create valuable material products from something viewed at the individual level as waste and, thus, practice collectively managing “common pool resources” (Ostrom 1999, p. 278) for the benefit of the whole school community.

Building relationships across difference

Finally, our data also demonstrate that the work of FTS also holds the potential to facilitate relationships across socioeconomic and racial difference—relationships that are often inhibited in traditional, neoliberal learning environments. In focus groups, students noticed the way that the affective labor and materiality of FTS helps to catalyze these relationships. One student observed,

People can make friends when they’re doing [farm to school]. And even if they are different from each other, then they can still make friends and even if one of them speaks another language, you don’t really have to talk to each other when you’re doing work. You can just like sort of work together. [Wanye Kest]

Several key characteristics of the FTS program allow students to more readily form these relationships: First, at HMS the Ag Science and FCS classes are not ‘tracked’ according to perceived academic ability, allowing students to have greater opportunities to interact and collaborate with students from different social groups than in their core academic classes. Tracking, which occurs in most core academic classes at HMS, is a practice where students are placed in sections of a given class based on prior academic achievement. As we discuss above, tracking normalizes (and largely naturalizes) the stratification of students by social class and race, reproducing social inequalities in the context of schools (Rist 2000).

Like other non-tracked courses at HMS (e.g., band, orchestra, and art), the FTS program certainly does not entirely undo the effects of tracking elsewhere in the school; however, it is an opportunity within the school day for students to interact across race and class differences. Broadly speaking, school and classroom diversity is associated with increased socio-emotional well-being among middle schoolers (Juvonen et al. 2018). Yet, as we describe above, the materiality and affective labor of FTS activities further facilitate opportunities for social interaction around shared goals—cultivating a sociality essential for breaking down stereotypes in a diverse educational environment (Gurin et al. 2004; Hughes 2014). As students from different racial and class backgrounds work together in FTS activities, they are able to see, smell, taste, and harvest their collective efforts in a productive garden or a meal to be shared. These material outcomes reinforce the notion that students can get ahead together—and (as the student quote above illustrates) offer opportunities for them to critically reflect upon, and perhaps transform, the social stratification they experience elsewhere in their lives.

In particular, we observed that the novelty of FTS activities facilitates “playful labor” (Moore et al. 2015) in which students can be more receptive to building relationships with classmates despite social differences. Specifically, few incoming students at HMS have prior experience with growing food. In fact, in our student survey, only 35% reported that either their grandparents or parents had a vegetable garden. Michelle, the Ag Science teacher, echoed this finding in her interview, stating that if students have any connection with gardening, “it’s a grandparent… something from the past.”

Likewise, Virgil, the school garden coordinator, emphasized how FTS activities have the potential to break down social barriers and pave the way for students to have novel and playful interactions—with the natural world, and with one another. He shared an anecdote about three students he observed busily picking handfuls of green pea cover crops from the garden to feed to the goats. Virgil knew that these students came from divergent racial and class backgrounds, and he knew that they did not interact in other school settings. Yet, on this day, they made this activity into a game, running back and forth together between the garden and the animals. Since Virgil knew these students quite well, he was able to discern something deeper about what was going on. He explained:

[The garden is] like a school trip somewhere and nobody’s been there before and everybody’s kind of quiet and kind of like, okay, ‘Where do I fit in?’ ‘What is my place?’ ‘This is not normal.’… So it’s both foreign soil and common ground for everybody… It kind of grows their circle of awareness.

Virgil’s observation captures the way that the materiality and affective labor of FTS allows for a novelty of experience that facilitates relationships across the social and economic divides that too often dominate public school life. The literature on experiential education emphasizes the value of novelty: Falk and Balling (1980) ague that novelty is essential for students to remain engaged, and that the “typical contained classroom may have too little environmental novelty” for optimal learning (p. 8). In this light, we find that the novelty of FTS activities, and their material engagement in it, creates a playful space where students are more open to learning and to forging new relationships. This is an important finding for educators and administrators because it demonstrates the potential for FTS to build relationships that resist the naturalization of social and economic stratification in schools.

Persistent challenges to disrupting neoliberalism

Our research demonstrates that thoughtfully organized FTS programs can help destabilize the production of neoliberal subjectivities that underpin our current educational paradigm. At the same time, it is important to recognize that FTS is “not a panacea for all the ills of modern education and socioecological relations,” (Moore et al. 2015, p. 407). FTS remains embedded within a larger neoliberal school reform structure, which is nested within a larger neoliberal economic structure that reproduces vast racial and class inequalities across River County and the US as a whole.

In this case, the Sustainability Squad understands that FTS is not a silver bullet. Throughout our interviews, they discussed the myriad issues that students face when living in poverty, and the immense class and racial divides reflected in the student body. They also express that the current school structure, along with persistent gaps in the social safety net, impedes their ability to adequately address these issues in their students’ lives. Eliza, the FCS teacher, notes,

I really think about the lower income families that come here… I might see ‘Joe’ for literally two hours a week, right? And it’s hard to have an impact because Joe has ten teachers here and he also has no parents. And he’s getting ping-ponged from family member to family member, and you know, his parents were murdered. There’s always a back story that is so intense in how they’re affected in their just-like-everyday life… I know there’s only so much that we can do. I wish that there was more, that there was an answer to reaching out to kids who need all that other stuff in their lives.

It is clear both through our interviews with the Sustainability Squad and our observations at HMS that there is still much work that needs to be done beyond the FTS program to address and challenge the trauma and poverty that are a direct result of persistent, multigenerational racial inequalities, further exacerbated by neoliberal economic and educational policies.

We also observed some key ways that the FTS program itself has been unable to maximize its potential to affect greater food system and educational equity. For one, the weekly garden market held after school at HMS offers half-priced produce to SNAP (food stamp) recipients; yet, it is mostly attended by wealthier families with the flexibility to pick up their students after school. Although this market was conceived with the intention of expanding access to affordable, locally-grown, fresh produce, in its current form it is not reaching low-income families in the school community. Further although the FTS program creates an important experiential and collaborative learning environment, Virgil and the VISTAs have had a hard time infiltrating core academic classes because of the pressures of standardized curriculum and testing, which largely reproduce neoliberal subjectivities grounded in individualized success or failure.

Finally, despite the material ways that this FTS program creates a general spirit of collaboration, we continue to observe the reliance on personal responsibility and volunteerism to underpin the success of the school’s FTS efforts. For example, motivated by the success of the waste reduction efforts in the cafeteria, Principal Tom wanted to further reduce lunchroom waste by replacing the Styrofoam lunch trays and plastic utensils with reusable trays and metal utensils. This presented an unmet need for extra labor to wash the trays and utensils. Reflecting on this, Tom says,

We’ve talked about the plates and the forks and stuff and I go in there and all of a sudden they have the Styrofoam plates back and… they’ll say ‘Oh, we’re shorthanded. And so, we don’t have enough people.’ …And the last time I said, “If you’re shorthanded, will you call [my administrative assistant] and tell her, and I’ll come do the dishes.” I said, “That’s how important it is for me. I will do the dishes.”

While this demonstrates Tom’s dedication to the program, it also illustrates the persistent reliance on volunteer labor (whether from the school principal, the AmeriCorps VISTA, or students from the nearby university) for the success of FTS program. This echoes one of the main social critiques of FTS programs: that communities with greater access to extensive volunteer capital (generally wealthier communities) have more success implementing FTS—thus, simultaneously serving the broader objectives of neoliberalism and reproducing social inequalities in the context of FTS (Allen and Guthman 2006).

During this research, we witnessed ways that the visible effects of FTS at HMS have managed to disrupt (albeit imperfectly) neoliberal school policy and labor hierarchies at the district level. Media attention and a district commitment to equity drove the expansion of this FTS program-model into the other middle schools in the district and into the district’s Wellness Policy. The expansion facilitated the creation of district-wide FTS coordinator position and three more VISTA positions (all collaboratively funded) to support FTS efforts at each middle school. Together, these positions coordinate FTS knowledge, resources, and labor across the district. In subsequent years, we have watched multiple VISTAs transition into permanent positions as the FTS coordinator, and as Ag Science, FCS, and science teachers in River County and in neighboring districts. In other words, while not formally codified in school policy, we have observed both a deepening and broadening of the ways that this FTS program has reshaped the region’s material and social landscape.

Nevertheless, there is still work to be done: without clear policy commitments, shifting leadership and priorities at the district and university-levels mean that funding and support for FTS is always at risk. In response, our team’s current work focuses on developing a FTS community of practice among teachers and staff across the district and into neighboring districts to support more formal opportunities (e.g., school or district supported Professional Learning Communities) to facilitate greater agency, collaboration, and advocacy in the context of FTS.

Conclusion: FTS as a resource for social change

FTS is an experiential educational movement being implemented in heterogeneous ways across the United States. As scholars and practitioners collaborating with educators to support K-12 public education that works toward greater social, economic, and environmental justice, we agree with critical scholars that there is a vital need to explicitly incorporate a critical lens into FTS initiatives (Allen and Guthman 2006; Meek and Tarlau 2015, 2016). We also believe it is important to provide evidence that FTS programs are “much more complex, contradictory, and changing than current scholarship admits” (Hayes-Conroy 2010, p. 67).

Our research contributes to a small body of literature that is neither an uncritical celebration nor sweeping critique of FTS, but rather embraces the complex, heterogeneous nature of these projects and supports FTS partners to create the foundation of a more equitable food system. (Carlisle 2015; Goodman and DuPuis 2002; Goodman et al. 2011; Hayes-Conroy 2010; Kloppenburg and Hassanein 2006). Our analysis has led us to key insights about the potential for FTS as a resource for social change. Using lenses of materiality and affective labor, we find that FTS has the potential to reframe success in collaborative terms, engage the school community around collective action, and foster relationships across racial and economic difference. While there is continued need to expand policies to ensure adequate and durable funding for the food, labor, and resources needed to sustain FTS for all children, our research demonstrates that the hands-on work and collective subjectivities produced through FTS can mitigate the harms of neoliberalism and be a force for positive social change within a school.