EDUCATORS AND FOOD LITERACY MEDIATORS: MEDITERRANEAN DIET ADHERENCE AS EXPERIENTIAL CAPITAL IN PRE-SERVICE INCLUSIVE TEACHERS

Abstract

Promoting Food Literacy (FL) in adolescence demands educators who themselves embody the cultural and experiential resources needed to translate nutritional knowledge into authentic, multisensory learning experiences. Within Italian inclusive teacher training, however, the food culture of future educators remains a structural blind spot: programmes assume the technical preparation of pre-service teachers while overlooking the corporeal and biographical foundations through which food acquires educational meaning. The present baseline study explores this gap by examining Mediterranean diet adherence in pre-service inclusive teachers enrolled in a southern-Italian specialisation programme, using the validated Italian version of the Mediterranean Diet Adherence Screener (MEDAS) as a proxy of their experiential FL capital. The Mediterranean diet is read here not as a clinical-nutritional reference but as a cultural grammar of seasonality, biodiversity and conviviality through which educators can build the embodied authority needed to accompany adolescents' food learning. Findings outline a profile broadly consistent with the Mediterranean tradition yet uneven on those very foods richest in multisensory pedagogical potential, fish, legumes and fresh fruit whose limited presence in educators' daily practice may translate into a thinner repertoire of didactic mediators for inclusive food experiences. Results are interpreted within a Critical Food Systems Pedagogy framework, arguing that the FL capital teachers bring into training is a precondition for designing inclusive, experiential FL curricula for adolescents. Implications are discussed for teacher-education policy and for the integration of food pedagogy modules, informed by the TASTE-MED multisensory approach,  into inclusive-teacher training pathways.