Blind spots in elementary students’ perceptions regarding the food system: expanding Fonseca’s research on depictions of animal food production in Portuguese textbooks

Abstract This forum paper aims to expand the discussion on the representations of food systems from Fonseca’s research, which pointed to several neglected contexts regarding food systems in school textbooks. The main aim of the paper is to analyze elementary students’ representations to identify the presence or absence of socio-environmental issues in the drawings of the life cycle of food products, and how they dialog with Fonseca’s results. We propose the metaphor of blind spots as a theoretical and analytical construct to explain how some socio-environmental issues are not taken into account, whether consciously or unconsciously, to avoid the discomfort of some thorny issues related to the topic. After conducting a qualitative content analysis in 68 drawings by elementary students in two different school contexts, our results show that there are three main blind spots in the stories about food products: (a) a blind spot regarding food production, which involves the simplification or sugarcoating of how the food is produced; (b) a blind spot regarding food transformation, which ignores social and environmental issues related to the food industry; (c) a blind spot regarding waste management. Findings suggest the need to explore these blind spots as well as creating alternative educational imagery and actions that do not avoid the complexity and the discomfort of the topic, and which have the potential to enable educators and students to respond to socio-environmental issues.