Peer-reviewed article

Beyond the menu: how student agency, cultural acceptability, and equity shape realized sustainability in school food environments.

Xing L, Wu X · 7 Sept 2026

Abstract

School food environments influence dietary intake, nutritional inequities, food habits, and exposure to sustainable eating during childhood. A nutritionally adequate, lower-impact meal yields public-health and environmental value only when pupils can access, select, consume, and accept it without disproportionate burden or waste. This structured Mini Review asks how student agency, cultural acceptability, and equity-related conditions shape the translation of sustainable school-food provision into selection, intake, waste, lived experience, and distributional outcomes. Web of Science and Scopus searches returned 1,521 records and 871 unique records. Rule-based prioritization and author-verified source assessment of 85 publications produced a 25-publication analytic set representing 23 study families: 13 Direct-child, two Direct-caregiver, five Direct-service/program, and five Adjacent publications. Study quality was appraised against the strongest available source using design-specific Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool criteria or adapted model-credibility domains; relative support was synthesized at study-family level. Sensory fit showed Moderate support for liking/acceptance only. Menu reform, waste feedback, education/information, agency, affordability/governance, and lower- and middle-income country transferability had Limited support, while identity/commensality and digital influence remained Very limited. In a multicountry non-randomized study, service-level plate-waste tracking was associated with lower measured waste; educational studies reported mixed or null outcomes, precluding comparative causal claims. Evidence for religion, migration, disability, commensality, and decision authority remained sparse. The framework changes the unit of evaluation to a provision-access/selection-intake-waste pathway with a cross-cutting equity audit and identifies governance, cultural recognition, and implementation capacity as conditions of realized sustainability.