Governing peanuts: the regulation of the social bodies of children and the risks of food allergies

This paper explores the way in which children with life-threatening food allergies, their parents and their public caregivers have increasingly been made subject to both projects of moral regulation and mechanism of governance aimed at the management of risk. We argue that new regulatory measures in Canada designed to significantly change the food consumption practices among children in elementary schools have three main consequences. First, they structure the relationship between ideologies of individualism and community so as to blur the distinction between the public and private dimensions of school life. Second, such efforts ensure that a discourse, formerly concerned with the problem of health promotion, has been supplanted by new sets of discourses styled by absent experts that focus on the management of risk. Third, such regulatory practices have a particular dual effect that is characteristic of liberal welfare governance. On the one hand, they encourage the individualized development of self-governing subjects, and on the other, they stimulate a heightened moral problematization of 'safe' eating habits within the environment of the elementary school. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.