From around the turn of the millennium to the present, there was a marked turn in
Hungarian ethnographic foodways research. Following the reconstruction of the historical
and spatial processes of changes in Hungarian food traditions, the attention of the
experts shifted more and more to the present. The study first summarizes the most important
phenomena of contemporary gastronomy and their research perspectives, and then it
examines the relationship between today’s food culture and children’s public catering.
It concludes that children’s catering and canteen menus cannot be discussed without
knowing about the changes taking place in contemporary food culture, which in turn
cannot be understood without considering current social and cultural processes. Until
the slowly changing food culture of public catering starts to approximate the rapidly
changing ways of dining at home and in restaurants, fewer and fewer children will
use the canteen, and even when they do, they hardly eat any of the food and remain
hungry.
