Food and home are central issues in the Home Economics curriculum. The aim of the present paper was to explore how Home Economics teachers make sense of and manage being teachers in this particular subject and how they talk about food and home. This was achieved by conducting four focus groups with 25 participants, 23 women and two men, all with experience from working as Home Economics teachers. Participants were recruited from all over Sweden through emails. The data analysis was conducted in three steps and was guided by social constructionist theory. The main findings were the themes of Home Economics as food with a purpose, teachers with a public health commission, the fostering teacher, tangible cooking and the deficient home. The results show that Home Economics is constructed as a site for ‘proper knowledge’ about food in relation to a ‘deficient home’. Food in Home Economics was thus constructed as having a purpose.

Home and Consumer Studies (HCS) is a subject in the Swedish compulsory school that has sustainability issues clearly enrolled in its syllabus. Among other things, students should learn to make sustainable food choices, i.e.they should understand the consequences concerning health, finance and environment of what food they choose to consume. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion about education for sustainable development (ESD) by investigating how students act in different decision-making processes during foodwork in HCS. Subsequently challenges when teaching sustainable food consumption are highlighted. The empirical material consists of video-recorded students (year 9) foodworking in an HCS classroom. Based on John Dewe ys philosophy, Practical Epistemological Analysis (PEA) is used to analyse how the students make choices and proceed in their work. The taste of food is decisive for how the students move on in their foodwork. Sustainability aspects are raised to some extent but do not have the same significance. It is concluded that it is complex to teach sustainable food consumption and possibilities to modify the teaching so that taste become part of the content when teaching sustainable food consumption is discussed.

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Is the ideal food consumer, educated in Home Economics in Sweden, one who makes sustainable choices? By examining Home Economics textbooks for lower secondary school published from 1962 to 2011, we explored what kind of food consumers emerged and thus open up a discussion on sustainability and food consumption. One standard textbook from each decade, in total six, was included in the study, and the passages dealing with food, as core content, were analyzed. Discourse analysis was used to reveal different characterizations of the ideal consumers, specifically in relation to sustainable food consumption. Three different discourses emerged: (a) the healthy and obedient consumer, (b) the healthy, thrifty, and caring consumer, and (c) the healthy, thrifty, and environmentally conscious consumer. There were both similarities and differences among these consumers, specifically regarding what knowledge they are shown to need and how they are supposed to learn. All three consumers are primarily motivated by health arguments, even though health is related to finances in the second and to both finances and environment in the third case. Furthermore, we found a common tendency for textbooks to express knowledge in a prescriptive way, with the implied belief that people are rational food consumers. This tendency leads us to suggest that the discussion about future consumer education and textbooks could be broadened and strengthened by the inclusion of a participative and critical approach and social responsibility.