Grow, Cook, Eat: Public Relations’ Role in the Healthier Eating at School Movement

2011 Center for Global Public Relations March 15, 2011

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Research Conference

UNCC Charlotte

GROW, COOK, EAT: PUBLIC RELATIONS’ ROLE IN THE HEALTHIER EATING AT SCHOOL MOVEMENT

Ashli Q. Stokes, Ph.D., UNC Charlotte

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Abstract Research suggests that combining public relations expertise with nutrition education is more likely to be successful in changing children’s eating habits than “dry” approaches because it creates a positive image for specific foods and behaviors (Seaman & Kirk, 1995). Through rhetorical analysis, this essay provides an initial exploration of public relations’ role in shaping children’s perceptions and actions regarding healthier eating in the U.S. and U.K. The essay’s constitutive examination of governmental, advocacy, and state-based examples of school-based healthy eating campaigns provides scholars with the opportunity to see how public relations can work successfully at the crossroads of corporate, non-profit, and social movement public relations.

Grow, Cook, Eat: Public Relations’ Role in the Healthier Eating at School Movement Make the Healthy Choice the Easy Choice – Health in Schools.org, 2005 Statistics about poor health outcomes in children related to diet continue to raise concern in the United States; for example, since the 1970s, the prevalence of overweight among American preschoolers ages 2-5 and 12-19 year olds has more than doubled, with overweight tripling for students aged 6-11 years (health in schools.org, 2005). Looked at another way, these numbers mean that one in four American children is overweight or obese and one in three will develop diabetes in their lifetime (Slow Food USA, 2011). Concern about these statistics is justified, as they indicate major risk factors in children in developing chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, osteoporosis, and some cancers. There are societal costs to children’s obesity and overweight as well; in 2008, obesity added more than $27 billion in costs to Medicare and Medicaid and contributed $49 billion to private health insurer costs (catch.org, 2011). To address the problems associated with the overweight and obesity increase among children, both the U.S. and UK have implemented a number of healthy living campaigns. From Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move AntiObesity Initiative to the Eating Healthy, Growing Strong Alliance in the US to celebrity chef’s Jamie Oliver’s Feed Me Better Program in the UK, numerous campaigns now attempt to improve the eating habits of kids.

Some research suggests that combining public relations expertise with nutrition education is more likely to be successful than “dry” approaches because it creates a positive image for specific foods or food habits (Seaman & Kirk, 1995). Currently, however, only a few studies explore attempts to use public relations techniques to change eating habits (Stokes, 2009; Schneider, 2008). Through rhetorical analysis, I argue that public relations has an important role to play in promoting healthier eating among children in school settings. This essay provides an initial exploration of public relations’ role in promoting healthy food to children by examining a selection of school-based public relations campaigns in the U.S and UK. Along with parents, schools have emerged as a major “place” for childhood nutrition education and development, because they allow multi-faceted, long-lasting healthy eating interventions (healthinschools.org, 2005). School-based campaigns also have good timing because people’s food habits become fixed after childhood, with habits dependent on attitudes, prejudices, and the like formed early in life (Seaman & Kirk, 1995). There is evidence that campaigns employing savvy public relations based techniques are working. For example, in the UK, the hands-on, experiential Feed Me Better campaign’s ability to involve students in meal preparation and in changing the meals on offer during lunch boosted educational outcomes. Students who ate the healthier lunches did better in science classes, were absent less, and boosted English SAT results by 4.5% (Clark, 2010).

Similarly, in the U.S., the Farm to School Movement, which tries to reach the 28 million children who receive lunch in the National School Lunch Program, is generating similar successes. Students involved in the experiential programs demonstrate greater knowledge about healthy eating, willingness to try new foods and healthier options, and consume less unhealthy foods and sodas (Joshi & Azuma, 2008). In essence, the Farm to School Movement is a school based program that “connects schools (k-12) and local farms with the objectives of serving healthy meals in cafeterias, improving student nutrition, providing health and nutrition

education opportunities, and supporting local and regional farmers” (http://farmtoschool.org, 2011). The Farm to School movement began in the 1990s in Florida and California. By 2008, 2,000 programs operated, up from only six in 1997, and by 2010, each state had a farm to school program. The schools that participate in these programs buy produce and meat from local farmers, using it in the curriculum as well as in school lunch creation. If the goal is to offer a greater variety of healthy food choices to increase the likelihood that students will select them, both the UK and US programs seem to be off to a good start.

Indeed, this essay’s examination of governmental, advocacy, and state-based examples of school-based healthy eating campaigns provides scholars with the unique opportunity to see how public relations can work successfully at the crossroads of corporate, non-profit, and social movement public relations. This “combining of forces” represents an increasingly popular approach to addressing the children’s obesity epidemic. The Uncle Ben’s Nutri-Programme in Scotland, for example, combined corporate, university, and independent nutrition educators to execute a healthy eating campaign. Nutrition educators worked with the Uncle Ben’s company to create a campaign encouraging children to increase complex carbohydrates and decrease fat intake. In the campaign, children were given a talk by an independent nutritionist, a swimming session with a member of the Olympic swimming team, and a meal produced from Uncle Ben’s rice in the school’s kitchen. The campaign was evaluated as successful by College nutritionists in increasing nutrition knowledge and influencing food choice patterns (Kirk and Seaman, 1995).

In the U.S., the Clinton Foundation, American Association of Pediatrics, and Penguin Books recently joined forces to develop the “Eating Healthy, Growing Strong” campaign, featuring curricula developed using Eric Carle’s famous children’s book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”

More than 17,000 pediatrician offices around the country will receive the book and educational materials. These types of campaigns show promise in educating children about healthy eating when the interests of the food industry and health educators overlap (Kirk and Seaman, 1995).

To investigate this potential, this essay employs a constitutive approach, which explores public relations’ ability to shape stakeholder identity, to investigate how these three different types of organizations attempt to change children’s perception and actions regarding healthier eating.

It argues that these organizational efforts, including two state-based lunch programs, two nonprofit campaigns, and two governmental efforts, help move past attitudinal to behavior change by employing the rhetorical public relations technique of definitional interaction. This strategy helps change the way children consider school lunch, engaging them and instructing them in healthier eating habits. Additionally, although public relations scholarship has privileged commercial uses of public relations strategies, examining these campaigns’ unique blend of corporate, governmental, and non-profit approaches answers the scholarly call to explore how non-corporate entities successfully use public relations techniques to effect social change (Hon, 1997; Karlberg, 1996; Meisenbach & McMillan, 2006). To construct my case using school-based nutrition campaigns as the example, I first establish the significance of rhetorical theory in analyzing the key public relations strategy of the different types of organizations involved in these campaigns (Hon, 1997). I then argue rhetorical perspectives strengthen knowledge about public relations efforts in children’s health initiatives by considering their constitutive implications.

The Sustainable Eating Movement, Rhetorics of Reform, and Public Relations Theory Understanding the role of public relations in the attempt to improve children’s eating habits through school based educational campaigns calls for a closer look at the sustainable food movement in the U.S. It may go by different names, but a sea-change regarding food choices is happening (Black, 2008). Michael Pollan’s books about sustainable food and healthier eating remain on the bestseller lists. The Whitehouse now has an organic vegetable garden planted on its grounds, the first time since Eleanor Roosevelt planted a “Victory Garden” in World War II. Michelle Obama is drawing on this experience to write a book about gardening, cooking, and child nutrition. As Pollan (2009a) observes, “Americans today are having a conversation about food and agriculture that it would have been impossible to imagine even a few short years ago” (p. x). There are more farmer’s markets, the word “locavore” won word of the year, and the growth rate of natural, organic, and local foods is now higher than the growth rate of Wal-Mart (Innes, 2007; Martin, 2009). These ideas of the sustainable food movement are creeping into the mainstream and onto children’s lunch plates. Indeed, in some schools using a farm to school program, local produce makes up 15% to 30% of school lunches (Time for Kids, 2008).

The influence of the sustainable food movement may be growing, but understanding the role of public relations in it and other social movements has been limited because of two scholarly trends. Hon (1997), Murphree (2004), Holtzhausen (2005), Smith and Ferguson (2001,) and Obserchall (1993) have all identified public relations elements like communicating issue positions, soliciting support, and sharing alternative ideologies in social movement activity, but the dominance of the “publics perspective,” where publics appear to exist only when an (typically corporate) organization acknowledges and identifies them as a public, has overlooked these more non-traditional uses of public relations (Karagianni & Cornelissen, 2006). Although social movements as a whole cannot be considered “public relations campaigns,” Hon (1997) points out that textbooks cite the use of public relations strategies in social and political movements. Hon’s (1997) own research, for example, examined the public relations elements of the Civil Rights Movement, demonstrating that public relations helped, for example, the SCLC achieve its basic goal of eradicating state-supported segregation and discrimination.

Nevertheless, Smith (2007) notes that “managerial bias” in public relations scholarship can sometimes ignore activists’ use of the types of public relations involved in the school lunch campaigns efforts, although some public relations scholars have addressed the role of activism in developing and evolving issues (Dozier & Lauzen, 2000; L. Gruing, 1992; Leitch & Nelson, 2001; Smith, 2005; Heath, 1990; Heath & Nelson, 1986; Heath & Palenchar, 2009. In general, however, public relations scholarship has tended to focus more on how corporations overcome activist challenges than understanding how public relations also serves activist goals (Coombs & Holladay, 2007; -----, 2009). Second, public relations scholarship about these types of cultural social movements represented by the healthy eating campaigns remains in its infancy (Schneider, 2008). Studying these types of movements is important because although they focus on the economic and political goals common to many traditional social movements, they have cultural goals like shaping audience identity, challenging social norms, and remaking social systems (DeLuca, 1999b). This paper helps examine how broad-based movements use messages to create change in public consciousness, measured through changes in the “meanings of a culture’s key terms” (DeLuca, 1999b, p. 36; Enck-Wanzer, 2006, p. 177).

Of course, the messages of the sustainable food movement that inform the school lunch campaigns are not alone in influencing the way we think about food. A variety of institutional actors, including corporations and governments, are interconnected in creating and managing meaning about children’s healthy eating. Henderson, Weaver, and Cheney (2007) show how marketing, popular, policy and technical discourses, for example, all mutually influence each other in New Zealand’s genetically modified food debate. Livesey (2002) uses the term “discursive mingling” to describe how discourses exist in this dynamic interplay (p. 139).

Similarly, drawing on Gidden’s (1984) structuralist paradigm, Durham (2005) explains how knowledge is contingent and malleable by a variety of institutional actors. In this view, a variety corporate, institutional, and social movement messages all combine to influence the overall societal discourse about healthy food.

The interconnected nature of these organizations’ messages suggests that rhetorical perspectives are well suited in examining school lunch campaigns. Rhetorical perspectives focus on illustrating how symbolic strategies used in the school campaigns create meaning and shape worldviews among their target audience of children (Cheney & Vibbert, 1987; Elwood, 1995; Heath, Toth, & Waymer, 2009; Meisenbach &McMillan, 2006; Toth and Heath, 1992). This perspective also helps evaluate how symbolic messages are used to successfully advocate organizational stances, shape knowledge, motivate action, and solve problems (Heath, 1992). A constitutive rhetorical approach is particularly suited to exploring these organizations’ meaning- generating public relations capabilities. If these organizations are successful in getting children to revise their perceptions about food and eat differently, they are also reshaping students’ identities in the process. Constitutive rhetorical frameworks explore how collective identities can be created through public relations. In other words, these messages can do more than influence one child’s eating habits; together, many children can begin to expect and call for healthier food while at school and elsewhere. Charland (1987) is the seminal rhetorical theorist credited with arguing that a person’s identity is shaped through persuasion leading to a collective identity that helps create, for example, social change regarding healthy eating.

Building on Burke’s (1950) ideas about rhetoric’s qualities of identification, he argues that constitutive rhetoric facilitates the development of a more committed movement identity because it does more than address people; it attempts to remake them by replacing one reality with another. By telling a story that is generalizable to a broad group of people, audiences can become identified with a social movement (e.g. Morus, 2007; Tate, 2005; Zagacki, 2007). In essence, constitutive approaches are useful for exploring school based lunch campaigns because they “must continually articulate particular identities in order to invite individuals – supporters and others – to view themselves in a certain way (Atkins Sayre, 2010, p. 5). Of course, exploring the constitutive implications of strategies among children introduces a new set of theoretical challenges. Children may not be able to say that they want to be part of a “unified front regarding healthier food options” or be able to say “I want to be able to eat sustainably,” but they can certainly ask for their schools to feed them better, as seen in this one example: “How do you expet us to stay healthey? How do you expect us to live with the meatlof? Well, I hope you do sumthing.” (spelling original, Davis, California, Joint Unified School District student letter, 2008).

Similarly, when examining school-based lunch campaigns used with young elementary students, scholars need to look at more than just the words, or text, used. A number of scholars

suggest that different rhetorical forms (text, visuals, WebPages, etc.) combine to create messages that are greater than the sum of their parts (Griffin, 1964; Enck-Wanzer, 2006; DeLuca, 1999b; Finnegan, 2004; Olson and Goodnight, 1994). Several scholars argue that the combination of discursive and nondiscursive rhetorical forms is needed to reorder social norms, conventions, and habits, an idea that might be particularly important when getting children to think differently about food (DeLuca, 1999a; Olson & Goodnight, 1994). Olson and Goodnight (1994), for example, note that nondiscursive arguments “usher into the public realm aspects of life that are hidden away, habitually ignored, or routinely disconnected from public appearance” (p. 295). Enck-Wanzer (2006) builds on this idea, noting that diverse forms of rhetoric (speech, embodiment, image) can intersect to challenge rhetorical norms and articulate collective agency. These scholars’ ideas are relevant to the types of things schoolbased healthy eating campaigns attempt to do. They must shake up students’ perceptions of food to influence behavior and then sustain these behaviors among groups of children, successfully creating a collective member identity that expects healthier food. Examining how different types of organizations try to pique interest, improve attitudes, and encourage students to taste and try new things is best suited to rhetorical criticism.

Methodology Rhetorical criticism helps examine how the different school-based campaigns make meaning about food because it explains how the campaigns seek to convincingly shape knowledge and opinions and motivate action (Heath, 2009; Foss, 1996). I chose to analyze the following campaigns: 1) North Carolina and Wisconsin Farm to School/State-based school nutrition campaigns, 2) Slow Food USA and Slow Food UK’s advocacy campaigns, and 3) The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the UK’s Food Standards Agency national nutrition standards campaigns. As these campaigns must create common ground or shared meaning in order to generate support and commitment, in addition to looking for examples of Burke’s (1950) idea of identification, classified as part of dramatistic criticism, I looked for other identifying features of the collection of artifacts, such as key words, metaphors, themes, narratives, and images, noting their intensity and frequency (Berkowitz, 2003; Condit, 1994; DeLuca, 1999; Foss, 1996).

Upon noting there was a key way the organizations reach out to children, each one trying to influence their identities concerning healthy eating, I sought to explain it through application of the rhetorical strategy of definition, specifically, the definitional interaction strategy. Successful rhetorical definition is essential in creating new ways for children to consider food because it defines key aspects of events and issues so that they can be perceived and decided in particular ways (Dionisopoulos & Crable, 1988; Zarefsky, 1986). With these campaigns’ target audience of young children, this type of definition is crucial, and it must be engaging, age-appropriate, and interactive. The definitional interaction strategy helps this issue by “defining by doing,” or teaching through experiencing (------, 2011; Zarefsky, 1986; Dionisopoulos & Crable, 1988). This strategy is important, because while educators can try to explain why eating better is important, showing children what they mean by particular words allows them to experience its meaning more fully. Examining the use of this strategy in the framework of constitutive theory helps explain how the organizations shape knowledge about food and creates students who are committed to healthier ways of eating. To compare and

contrast the definitional interaction strategy’s potential in constituting new ways for students to think about food cross-nationally, in each campaign example, I looked for both visual and textual examples of efforts to define what healthy eating means for young children in ways that engage and interact with them. Although I attempted to examine campaigns representative of the main forms of school-based healthy eating campaigns available today, this essay’s findings are limited because I had to make choices as to which campaigns to initially explore (Hon, 1997). This study chose a campaign from each of the main types of school-based nutrition education campaigns available today and then examined each student-targeted component, including lesson plans, flyers, images, activities and the like. Even though I tried to be representative in choosing and analyzing this archival data, this study represents the interpretation of the critic, which is an accepted method in rhetorical studies, as claims are judged by the ability for critics to interpret the meaning of symbols convincingly (Meisenbach & McMillan, 2006; Toth, 2009).

Key Rhetorical Analysis Findings from the School-based Healthier Eating Campaigns This section explores the use of the definitional interaction strategy to constitute new ways for children to think about and act regarding healthy eating. I first explore two state-based examples of campaigns, then examine two campaigns generated by social movement advocacy, and then look at two government created campaigns. Where possible, I examine the role of corporations in the creation and implementation of the campaigns.

Regional Examples of School Based Healthier Eating Campaigns The Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch Campaign is part of the REAP Food Group and the UW-Madison Center for Integrated Agriculture Systems. It offers six different lesson plans designed for elementary age students, ranging from the “six parts of plants we eat” to the “nutrient cycle.” In Unit Three, the Wisconsin Foods Unit, the plan offers several engaging ways to help students achieve the three goals of the unit: 1) to understand the concept of seasonality as it relates to food, 2) to develop reading, writing, and research skills in creating a class cookbook, and 3) to learn how to make healthy food choices. These plans offer a strong use of the definitional interaction strategy. In addition to connecting each learning objective to stateoutlined learning directives, the “Feed the Garden, Feed Ourselves” part of the Unit provides detailed instructions, a list of materials, and helpful suggestions in creating a successful handson learning experience. For example, in teaching students about how nutrients get into plants and/or the foods we eat, educators are encouraged to first ask: “What time of year do plants grow? What happens to plants in the Fall? What happens to plants when they die?” After discussing decomposition by having students pick up a handful of compost and examining it for twigs and leaves, students are taught about the importance of composting and planting cover crops. But instead of using a dry lecture to explain these concepts, students get to examine a small handful of seeds and toss them on the garden the class is planting. They are encouraged to help the seeds grow by saying “Good luck little seeds!” as they toss them down and cover them. This experiential portion of the lesson helps introduce students to the benefits and joys of eating seasonal foods.

As a whole, the lesson plan illustrates how a definitional interaction strategy helps students move beyond memorizing concepts to truly beginning to connect food to the community, landscape, and seasonal cycles. After working in the garden, students come back

inside to prepare a healthy snack of carrot and corn quesadillas, talking about which ingredients come from which plants as they do so. They also learn to identify the plant parts that are represented in the quesadilla. Students also get to take a copy of the recipe home. Through this variety of engaging activates, the plan also helps constitute, or generate, new ways for students to think about food and their relationships to it. It plants the idea of broader change by linking the children to the society and culture in which they live. By planting, cooking, and sharing recipes, the students become active participants in the food system, not passive audiences to whom food is merely delivered. This interactive approach may help students take a larger role in creating a healthy lifestyle for themselves because it connects food to something more than sustenance. Children learn how Wisconsin has a culture of particular foods, to build community through the cookbook project, and how to make something healthy for themselves.

Like Wisconsin, North Carolina has a vibrant sustainable farming landscape with 57 family farms and 13 CSA’s (Community supported agriculture) in Western North Carolina alone, and 84 farmers markets. However, North Carolina’s approach to teaching healthy eating in school differs from Wisconsin’s. The state’s Farm to School program began in 1998 with various state governmental agencies developing a system where North Carolina schools receive produce grown by local farmers (ncfarmtoschool.org, 2011). It tested the market for apples in Western North Carolina, and now schools can receive strawberries, watermelons, cantaloupes, apples, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage, broccoli and blueberries. Schools receive order forms of seasonal produce, and various state agencies work together to deliver the produce to the school systems. Instead of producing lesson plans for students, the North Carolina Farm to school organization markets its products to the school systems themselves. Further, rather than promoting the foods of a particular state as a whole as in found in the Wisconsin Home Grown Lunch curricula, the North Carolina Pecan Growers Association and North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission reach out to students directly about the benefits of incorporating their products into their diets. The Sweet Potato Association’s program is in keeping with the healthier eating goals seen in the Wisconsin program, while the other veers more towards serving primarily as a promotional outlet for the North Carolina Pecan Industry.

Similar to the Wisconsin lesson plans, the Sweet Potato Commission offers detailed, experiential lesson plans that educate as well as promote the Official State Vegetable of North Carolina. For example, the cartoon character Spencer Sweet Potato conducts a “Carolina Sweet Potato Investigation” that helps students learn about the nutrition benefits of the food (insert Figure 1). The CSI theme continues with the lesson plan organized into a year-long program with students keeping a field lab notebook to record observations from their investigations.

Students participate in everything from helping Spencer find other nutritious products in the grocery store, hearing guest speakers from the Cooperative Extension office, planting their own sweet potato plants, and learning letter writing and etiquette skills by contacting sweet potato growers to learn about micro-propagation or tissue culture. Each month provides teachers with at least four experiential activities to choose from, and the lesson plans clearly state how each activity links to state learning standards. Occasionally, however, the suggested activities can be quite dry and do not involve students in an experiential fashion, as in the following example where students learn about the USRDA values of a sweet potato: “From the figures given on the USRDA sheet, determine the percentage of the recommended daily allowance that is met by

consuming one sweet potato” (www.ncsweetpotatoes.com). Nevertheless, on balance, the suggested activities are engaging.

Like the Wisconsin program, the NC Sweet Potato Commission has the children up and engaging in experiential learning rather than seated and completing worksheets. Although the curricula could do a better job in providing teachers with some resources and supplies (though it does suggest websites and some contacts), it helps students learn how vegetables like sweet potatoes contribute to healthy eating habits and helps define by doing what healthy eating can mean for children. The decision to focus on just one healthy food, however, does not go far enough in helping students see the importance of creating a healthy diet from a variety of foods.

Although the sweet potato curriculum is limited, it succeeds as an experiential healthy eating lesson plan. In contrast, the lesson plans offered by the North Carolina Pecan Growers Association serve more as a marketing tool to reach a new market of young students than an experiential educational lesson defining types of healthy eating. In introducing the plans to the teachers, for example, the Association discusses the purpose of the lesson plans in this way: “Our goals are to assist you in planning and delivering interesting, fun, and appropriate learning experiences and to heighten the awareness of today’s youth to the importance of pecans and agriculture in our state, nation, and global community” (www.ncpecans.org). It is clear from this statement that the intent here is not as health-minded as some of the other lesson plans examined. This difference is seen throughout the lesson plans, which are less experiential and more traditional. That is, more worksheet type activities are provided, along with an emphasis on using pecans in typical elementary school learning objectives, i.e., “Unscramble the following pecan related words,” “complete these math problems to find out some interesting facts about pecans,” etc. Although the specific learning activities are clear and help students reinforce language arts, math, and science skills, they do not work to follow the learn by doing concept that can help implement the definitional interaction strategy. Providing students with more worksheets and series of facts about pecans, rather than showing creative ways that pecans can become part of a healthful diet, does not execute the definitional interaction strategy well. Ultimately, neither North Carolina state-based campaign example examined here helps children understand the definition of healthy eating as a whole. The decision to focus on specific products is too limited for that, with Wisconsin’s program better able at promoting state products and teaching nutrition at the same time. Of course, there may be other programs that do a better job in North Carolina than I was able to locate for this initial exploration.

Advocating for Reform in Children’s Lunch Programs/Options In addition to examining some state-based examples of campaigns used to educate children about healthy eating options, it is important to look at how some non-profit, social movement organizations advocate for change. One Slow Food USA lesson plan, for example, attempts to use the definitional advocacy strategy for more advocacy, or policy-changing purposes. Slow Food USA is part of the sustainable food social movement. It has been called “one of most significant global political movements of modern times” with more than 100,000 members who are organized into local chapters around the world, including 250 U.S. chapters (Chapman, 2008, p.4). In the U.S., Slow Food has been called the “country’s most prominent food-culture group” (McMillan, 2008, p. 1). Slow Food’s key slogan is that food should be

“Good, Clean, and Fair” and it encourages consumers to become more knowledgeable about food, to reject industrialized commercial food production, and to protect the environment. Its “Time for Lunch” healthier school lunch campaign was designed to help reduce the childhood obesity epidemic by changing school lunch policy (slowfoodusa.org). To help the Child Nutrition Act be signed into law, it organized more than 300 eat-ins in 50 states, had its members write 17,000 letters, and partnered with a number of like-minded organizations. Specifically, the “Time for Lunch” campaign lobbied Congress to 1) raise the school lunch meal reimbursement rate by $1 a day, (2) establish strong standards for all the food sold at school, including in vending machines; and 3) link local schools to local farms by funding grants for Farm to School programs (http://slowfoodusa.org/timeforlunch.com).

Although it organized many events to mobilize support among a variety of publics, one of its Time for Lunch advocacy programs targeted children. Its lesson plan tries to help kids make the connection between food, legislation, and schools, but it does not use the definitional interaction strategy to its full extent. Slow Food cautions teachers that it is not expert in teaching children and suggests altering the lesson plan to better meet specific student needs, but the lesson plan needs quite a bit of modification to achieve its advocacy goal. For example, it suggests that teachers discuss how the government decides what food will be served through the Child Nutrition Act, but devotes only a few sentences to help teachers explain this process: Who decides on what is served at my school?

This fall, the United States Congress will be re-considering the Child Nutrition Act, which determines how much is spent on lunch at schools across the country.

It also influences what type of food is served and where that food comes from. (Time for Lunch, 2010) This brief explanation belies the complexity of the issue, the need for change, or why students and teachers need to become involved.

Other parts of the lesson better employ the definitional interaction strategy. Its sample questions for discussion are thought-provoking, for example, including such questions as: “What can you buy with $1? Can you buy a healthy lunch?” (this is the amount school districts are left to buy lunches once paying overhead and administrative costs). Similarly, the section teaching students how to write letters to their legislators is well-conceived and puts another experiential component into the lesson. To be more persuasive to legislators, children are told why explaining how healthy food is important and how drawing pictures and including photos may be helpful. They are also told that as little as ten letters or phone calls can make a big difference in passing legislation, which makes their individual efforts seem important. Still, teachers are not given enough information to help them explain the law making process, the complexity involved, and how to make the project successful. Time for Lunch advises teachers to mail the letters to their local administrators, for example, but does not answer such basic questions like how the stamps will be paid for, or how teachers might need to get the lesson plan approved before using it. As a fully ready to implement experiential lesson plan, this one has flaws. It does not fully help teachers define for students the need for change in legislation and policy. Constitutively, therefore, it cannot strengthen children’s commitment to changing the ways they eat at school. There are too many gaps between teachers, legislation, and student understanding for the kind of involvement that’s needed to be created.

On the other hand, Slow Food in Scotland offers an educational program that well executes the definitional interaction strategy, particularly for a young audience. Designed for children ages four to ten, the Taste Adventure program is a special event that can be incorporated into festivals, school events, and the like. The goals of the program are to help teach children to use all five senses when eating and enjoying food, specifically to appreciate food using each sense individually, to understand how each sense affects the others, to understand the basic elements of taste, and to learn the difference between taste and flavor.

These goals sound quite complex, but the program approaches them in a relatable, interactive way. Its visuals and text reinforce the experiential strategy. The text, for example, introduces the program this way: “Have you looked at your food really closely? Does your food smell like it tastes? Which foods go crunch and which foods go slurp? Can you tell the difference between sweet, salty, and bitter tastes?”

The program aims to bring these sensations to life, offering Young Taste Adventurers a cartoon filled passport that they are invited to fill with stamps as they “explore, interact, and make new food discoveries” (http://slowfood.org.uk/tasteadventure) (insert Figure 2). During the Taste Adventure, children explore food through five zones, including the Seeing Zone, Noisy Zone, Smelly Zone, Touchy Zone, and Tasty Zone. The Noisy Zone, for example, is “about trying to get people to understand the impact of sound on the way we interpret food in our mouth,” while the Smelly Zone tries to explain the link between smell and taste. The program’s experiential focus helps define in an interactive way key concepts in the sustainable food message, eschewing terms like “processed” and “calories” to create an interesting, joyful approach to exploring healthy food. One father of children aged eight, nine, and 13 remarked about the program: “Excellent concept! Great way to engage children with food!” Another remarked: “Superb activity – thoroughly enjoyable, educational and inspiring. It is a fantastic tool to spring the Slow Food message to children and adults alike.” The Taste Adventure clearly shows the constitutive potential provided by correct execution of the definitional interaction strategy. By defining the different aspects of healthy food in a fun, interactive way, children can learn to view their relationships to food in new ways, therefore revising perceptions about what it means to eat healthfully. The Taste Adventure also helps bridge attitudes and behavior through its experiential interactions with food.

National Nutrition Standards Agency Healthier Eating Campaign The USDA promotes the agricultural industry, funds farm to school programs, and offers nutrition education campaigns for elementary age students. I analyzed its MyPyramid for Kids Lessons Plans designed for first and second grade to see whether or not it used the definitional interaction strategy to help form healthier eating habits among children and constitute new perceptions about food. Visually, in addition to featuring the MyPyramid graphic (Insert Figure 3), the materials highlight a variety of cartoon children participating in sports, outdoor, and generally active activities. The lesson plan has three parts, designed to explore the Pyramid itself, to learn about eating smart with the Pyramid, and to learn about the importance of eating a variety vegetables and fruits. Each part of the lesson contains an activity, Lunchroom Link, and Home Connection, where students can explore healthy eating with their parents.

There are some fantastic interactive group activities that should boost learning outcomes, such as “Play Pyramid Go Fish,” where students ask other card players if they have particular fruit or

vegetable cards in their hands. Another activity asks kids to keep a fruit and veggie diary to learn about and possibly improve their eating habits. The materials for making the diary are provided.

Ultimately, though the lesson plans offer experiential ways to define different types of healthy eating, there are some problems with the execution of the lesson plans. First the diary activity and other activities assume all children will have access to these healthy fruit and vegetables outside of school once learning about them. Similarly, the “Lunchroom Link” sections of the lesson plan show the difficulties of putting some of the healthy eating recommendations into place. For example, one Lunchroom Link suggests that students put the food items available on that day’s menu into food groups, but then cautions, “You may need to explain mixed foods like pizza and hamburgers, which fit into several groups.” Another Lunchroom Link suggests that teachers, “Work with the Cafeteria Manager to introduce new foods to students.” These links highlight the problems when the USDA tries to boost nutrition education along with achieving its promotional goals. As the agency is responsible for promoting the products of our agricultural system and setting nutritional standards, as well as for nutrition education, these goals can sometimes conflict. This problem is seen when the Lunchroom Link students to categorize unhealthy foods like hamburgers and pizza into food groups, products that are available to students at school because of controversial nutrition standards. Likewise, the USDA campaign makes getting new foods introduced into the lunchroom seem like an easy, non-policy driven activity, when raising the school lunch reimbursement amount by one dollar was a huge political battle.

A UK based program uses a similarly interactive, experiential approach to teaching young children about the importance of a health lunch. The Million Meals program, created as part of the UK Government’s School Food Trust, designed lesson plans available for a range of ages, but I looked at one designed for first graders here. Compared to the USDA’s program, the Million Meals curricula is more developed and engaging. The curriculum introduces young students to the Food Detectives, Frankie Fork and Karen Knife, through a video (insert Figure 4).

The Million Meals program carefully considers the credibility of the campaign’s speakers, choosing Frankie and Karen to talk to children and function as teaching aids throughout the lessons. For example, in a lesson discussing “Ingredients Found in a School Meal,” Frankie and Karen encourage students to help identify the various ingredients use to make healthy and less healthy school meals. Children are asked to write their favorite school meals up on interactive white boards, to brainstorm words that could be used to describe a nice meal, to try a selection of foods from small containers (ginger, mint, vegetables, jelly, soy-sauce, etc.). Year 1 children are then asked to think about the foods they have tasted and what meal the foods could go in (e.g., soy sauce does not belong in apple pie but does nicely in stir fry). Children are also then encouraged to have fun and come up with a “nonsense” dish based on the foods tasted during the lesson (e.g. Sweet Jelly Pasta, based on coconut, jelly, pasta, ginger, and cinnamon). This light-hearted approach encourages children to experiment and enjoy themselves while learning what foods do combine together well and not to make healthy dishes.

Incorporating all these different campaign elements helps children make connections between food, health, and themselves. Contrasted with merely showing the Eat Well Plate (figure 5) to children, a pictogram similar to the Healthy Eating Pyramid, these fully developed lesson plans offer a much more thorough way for students to understand how and why to eat.

The Eat Well Plate and the Healthy Living Pyramid graphics both show students how to divide up their calories among given food categories, but they don’t explain why, how to do it, and how eating healthy can be enjoyable in the way the Million Meals curriculum does. Further, like Slow Food UK’s Taste Adventure, Million Meals makes progress in defining what it is to eat healthfully in ways that may help students adopt a new lifestyle regarding food. It stresses children’s ongoing involvement in determining what it means to them to live healthfully.

Further, similar to the REAP Wisconsin Program, this particular lesson plan links up to learning standards, offers resources to help teachers prepare for and execute the lesson (handouts, etc.)., and provides criteria teachers can use to help evaluate how well the students have learned the material.

Evaluation, Implications and Conclusion This essay provides an initial look at the use of particular public relations techniques in crafting successful campaigns that help change children’s eating habits. Although rhetorical public relations studies cannot “prove” whether or not a campaign is successful and children’s eating habits are going to change slowly over time, making evaluation difficult, it is clear that public relations does have a role to play in creating strong campaigns (Olasky, 1989). Relying on techniques generated by traditional public relations campaigns helps nutrition educators with new ways to the children’s obesity issue. This section first evaluates the use of the definitional interaction strategy as a nutrition education tool and then suggests other ways that public relations techniques can be used for other non-traditional, societal change oriented campaigns or problems.

In looking closely at the use of the definitional interaction strategy in children’s nutrition education campaigns, there are several advantages in incorporating this approach. First, the strategy is relevant for children. When used correctly, it can help in “normalizing something that should be normal” and make fruits, veggies, and healthy proteins seem less “icky” and intimidating to children (Black, 2009, p. 1). Constitutive theory may talk about creating collective identities and uniting together to create broad social change, but the use of this strategy helps explains why and how this change process might occur. That is, being able to explore, taste, and discover in the various iterations of the campaigns is far more important in creating change among students than by using worksheets and lectures. It is important to stress the idea of “defining by interacting” in terms of thinking differently about food. If the strategy succeeds in getting children to think about healthy eating in new ways, this new approach can become what they know simply as “eating,” not just “eating healthy.” In other words, by using a variety of methods to teach children what it is that the campaigns seek in terms of food, children can begin to think of food in these ways and can then begin to seek this approach outside the school setting. Perhaps we have been witness to children’s enthusiasm and insistence about change in other arenas; for example, young children can be adamant that their parents recycle or not smoke. Similarly, the use of the definitional interaction strategy may cultivate, or constitute, that same kind of commitment to healthier food among children outside the school setting.

In this way, we see how the acceptance of new approaches to eating on an individual level can help cultivate demand for new food approaches collectively. These campaigns’ interactive activities, in concert with other organizations, gradually help pressure the status quo

to consider changes. Nutrition professor Marion Nestle, for instance, contends that the food industry realizes it must respond to the trend of wanting to appear, or indeed produce, food that appears nutritious, environmentally-minded, or kind to animals as a result of rising pressure from various groups (New Zealand Herald, 2009). As one local food organization advocate notes about the rise in interest among companies to respond to the healthier eating trend, “I think it is a response to consumer demand. New values are starting to enter this” (Elton, 2009, p.2).

Ultimately, this essay reveals that studying school-based nutrition campaigns through a constitutive lens has two advantages. On a practical level, it helps public relations practitioners determine best practices. Anderson, for example, (2004) points out that non-profit public relations studies reveal successful techniques in volunteer recruitment and fundraising.

Similarly, understanding how these nutrition education organizations use the definitional interaction strategy to create changes helps other groups see how they might construct collective identities that can encourage member participation and action on other issues.

Second, rhetorical perspectives strengthen our theoretical body of knowledge by explaining public relations’ powerful force in society (Toth, 2009). Seeing how public relations techniques are used in non-traditional settings provides a refreshing way to think about what the discipline can do and what its limitations are. This study only provided an initial, exploratory look at how a variety of campaigns use a particular technique. Further, thinking about the use of our techniques outside the corporate arena certainly presents new challenges. Nevertheless, these types of studies reveal new insights about the value of our skills. Here, incorporating the definitional interaction strategy helped generate livelier and more change-sustaining nutrition education on behalf of a variety of organizations. Future studies could explore how the use of strategic public relations has constitutive implications in advancing change in a variety of arenas. In doing so, we continue to move beyond only examining the specific outcome of public relations strategies and tactics to a broader understanding of the discipline’s role in building a better society.

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