Addressing the complexity of school health promotion through interdisciplinary approaches: an invitation to think wildly about research

Schools are considered to be key settings to address the problem of childhood obesity. For researchers interested in school food programmes, the field is dominated by intervention studies and trials whilst policymakers tend to create guidelines for schools to adhere to. This chapter, drawing on critical health studies, deliberately eschews such approaches to examine the impact of initiatives on everyday school foodscapes and pedagogies. The chapter discusses findings produced via both interview and visual data curated by children to explore everyday experiences of school food programmes. The analysis revealed that everyday school food programmes are often experienced as ad hoc and fragmented, which in turn result in children and parents receiving contradictory messages about food - despite the best intentions. I conclude the chapter by suggesting that in order for us to grasp the complexity of school food, it is necessary for us to engage with interdisciplinarity and think more wildly about our research practices. As school food programmes are pivoting to respond to the global syndemic of obesity, malnourishment and climate change, school food initiatives are only going to become more complex and our research is going to need to be able to engage better with this complexity.