"Ecological food” discourse at school: the linguistic continuum through vagueness and technical language

The significance of food is increasingly recognised within the ecological discourse as a means of strategically safeguarding the ecosystem against the impacts of climate change. This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the language portrayal of ecological food in textbooks in a bilingual school setting. To investigate this, I selected a corpus consisting of ten textbooks used in the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades at Herman-Nohl-Schule Berlin, a school under the bilingual system SESB (Staatliche Europa Schule Berlin) that offers education in both German and Italian. The selected textbooks mostly focus on disciplines such as Geography, Science, and Social studies. The findings indicate that primarily in Italian language textbooks, the subject of food is intricately connected to agriculture. Still, the same agricultural system is seen as something stereotypically “close to nature” instead of recognising its fundamental association with human involvement in the production process. Simultaneously, in German language textbooks, the topic of ecological/biological food is affected by the agriculture/nature binomial, with an additional emphasis that omits overly technical information (mainly intended for industrial agriculture) in favour of vagueness strategies (for biological food) emphasised by both the lexical dimension and images.