Sixty years of the National Food Program in Brazil

School meals were introduced in the Brazilian political agenda by a group of scholars known as 'nutrition scientists' in the 1940s. In 1955, the Campanha de Merenda Escolar, the first official school food program, was stablished, and sixty years after its inception, school food in Brazil stands as a decentralised public policy, providing services to students enrolled in public schools, which involve the Brazilian federal government, twenty-seven federative units, and their 5,570 municipalities. Throughout its history, school food has gone through many stages that reflect the social transformations in Brazil: from a campaign to implement school food focused on the problem of malnutrition and the ways to solve it, to the creation of a universal public policy relying on social participation and interface between other modern, democratic, and sustainable policies, establishing a strategy for promoting food and nutrition security, development, and social protection. In this article, the School Food Program is analyzed from the perspective of four basic structures that support it as public policy: the formal structure, consisting of legal milestones that regulated the program; substantive structure, referring to the public and private social actors involved; material structure, regarding the way in which Brazil sponsors the program; and finally, the symbolic structure, consisting of knowledge, values, interests, and rules that legitimatize the policy.