Lunchtime lock-in: Territorialisation and UK school meals policies

School food has recently become the focus of many international governments' efforts to address ‘the obesity epidemic’ among children and young people. The chapter attends to the issue of school meals by addressing the ways in which the management of the school site in the UK and the emergent spatial practices within and around school communities have been implicated in the delivery of school food policy objectives, specifically those that aim to produce young people as healthy subjects. It suggests that the management of the school site and its immediate environs have been integral to the way in which school food policy has been enacted at the local level. Drawing on notions of territoriality the chapter discusses the kinds of spatialised strategies and techniques that are deployed in relation to the ‘school boundary’ and the ways in which this boundary is policed to ensure the effectiveness of school meals policy. The chapter focuses in particular on the consequences for those that transgress the school boundary, both the physically and symbolically, with an analysis of the press reaction to the ‘junk food mums’ during a parent/school standoff that became known as ‘The Battle of Rawmarsh’.