Abstract
Since the end of 1990s and facing up to numerous sanitary risks associated to food, schools became the favorite field of intervention to make children sensitive to so-called “proper”food. In France, diverse public authorities joined to develop and diffuse vast information and communication campaigns on a national scale. One purpose of these campaigns is educatingchildren in a set of standards, norms and values bound to what is seen today as healthy. This work is dedicated to understand what is at stake in this public communication as well as its progress through various authorities and various actors up to schools. It is built upon a semio pragmatic analysis of informative and pedagogical scheme produced between 2010 and 2015 by public authorities as well as observations and semi-directive interviews in schools. This work reveals two logics. On one hand, as messages about public health are translated into prescriptions, protocols and missions according to the various territorial and institutional scales, they demonstrate the will to instill normative models into children so that they learn to manage by themselves their conducts and those others. On the other hand, those prescriptions and devices are adapted, transformed and diverted from their first objective in every stage of their progress. At the origin of these transformations, the successive actors form a chain the last links of which are the children.