This article presents a study on eating at school, whose main purpose was to investigate the meanings which school meals acquire, as concrete practice and as discourse, in the context of the public primary school. The theories of social representation, social action and curriculum criticism, complemented by social-anthropological concepts of food and nourishment, the home and street worlds and qualitative studies on school food constituted the main theoretical support for the investigation. With this study, it was concluded that the social representations on school meals elaborated by school professionals generate a corresponding habitus that tends to orientate those practical dispositions related to eating at school, to the organization of pedagogical work and to the school timetable.
school meals; curriculum; school policy; primary education