Law nº 11.947/2009: dealing with formation without saying the person in training

Law 11,947/2009 (^{BRASIL, 2009}), the legal framework of the PNAE, does not have any specific article on the role of lunch ladies or food handlers - the latter expression being the object of criticism in this article. Although these women play an important role and are recognized as individuals in the training process, according to the legal provision, they do not gain representation in the legal framework. However, the aforementioned law emphasizes the responsibility of the FNDE to train the people involved in the execution of school meals:

Article 16. It is incumbent upon the Union, through the FNDE, the autarchy responsible for coordinating the PNAE, to carry out the following attributions:

[...] VI - To cooperate in the process of training the human resources involved in the execution of the PNAE and social control. (BRAZIL, 2009).

The lunch ladies, belonging to the group of individuals involved in the execution of the PNAE, must receive training promoted by the FNDE within the scope of the Program, as provided by law. The training of these professionals can occur via nutritionists. In the Support Manual for Nutritionist Technical Activities within the PNAE - Manual de apoio para atividades técnicas do nutricionista no âmbito do PNAE (FNDE, 2018), a document that guides the performance of this PNAE professional, the nutritionist is encouraged to act in partnership with the school community, to strengthen and disseminate actions and ideas about FNE at school. According to Resolution 465/2010 of the Federal Council of Nutritionists (CFN, 2010), which provides for the attributions of the school feeding nutritionist:

Art. 3º. It is incumbent upon the nutritionist, linked to the Executing Entity, within the scope of the School Feeding Program (SFP), to perform the following mandatory activities:

[...]

IV. To propose and carry out food and nutrition education actions for the school community, including promoting ecological and environmental awareness, articulating with the school's management and pedagogical coordination for the planning of activities with the content of food and nutrition;

[...]

VI. To plan, guide and supervise the activities of selection, purchase, storage, production, and distribution of food, ensuring the quantity, quality, and conservation of products, always observing good hygienic-sanitary practices;

[...]

X. To guide and supervise the activities of cleaning environments, food storage, food transport vehicles, equipment, and utensils of the institution;

Art. 4º. It is incumbent upon the nutritionist, linked to the Executing Entity, within the scope of the School Feeding Program (SFP), to carry out the following complementary activities:

I. To coordinate, supervise and execute actions of permanent education in food and nutrition for the school community;

[...]

IV. To participate in the recruitment, selection, and training of personnel who work directly in the execution of the SFP;

V. To participate in multidisciplinary teams designed to plan, implement, control, and execute policies, programs, courses, research, and events in the area of school meals;

[...]

VII. To collaborate in the training of professionals in the area of food and nutrition, supervising interns, and participating in improvement, qualification, and training programs. (CFN, 2010).

As supported by the legislation, the training of lunch ladies, in addition to being essential for the proper execution of the PNAE, must be an articulated action between school feeding managers and nutritionists. Each school and each municipality have a reality known as the nutritionist, that is, the cultural role played by the trainer is recognized, to the same extent that it is silent about the subject who deals directly with the school kitchen. According to the attributions provided for in CFN Resolution 465/2010 (^{CFN, 2010}), the nutritionist works in a set of technical actions of the PNAE, getting involved in various school feeding activities.

The nutritionist, as the technician responsible for the PNAE, must work together with the area of education, promoting the articulation between health knowledge and educational knowledge. By articulating and composing these interlocutions, this professional re-signifies their performance for a possibility of social transformation. All his attributions and the fact that he is inserted in the contexts of the school and the municipality, knowing their realities and acting in these microcosms, enable them as an important training agent for the people involved in school feeding. The training of lunch ladies is one of the PNAE nutritionists' attributions. Thus, it is up to the FNDE to promote actions that enable and encourage it in this task. This training should not only focus on health issues but also strengthen the role of the school lunch lady as a food and nutrition educator.

Government investments are necessary for the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of public policies that encourage the promotion and maintenance of adequate and healthy food in the school environment. Emphasis should be given to adequate funding in the execution of the Program and the continuous training of the actors involved with the coordination and execution of FNE actions. (^{SILVA; MONEGO; SOUSA; ALMEIDA, 2018}, p. 2679).

The training of nutritionists implies not only the review of their legally foreseen attributions but also the reflection on the scope of food and nutrition education guided by the PNAE legislation (^{BRASIL, 2009}, ²⁰²⁰) and by the Food and Nutrition Education Reference Framework - Marco de referência de educação alimentar e nutricional para as políticas públicas - for public policies (^{BRASIL, 2012}). These documents reinforce the importance of multi-professional, cross-sectional, and interdisciplinary knowledge, enabling the creation of a more sensitive look by the nutritionist for professionals in the school community, especially the lunch ladies.

The qualification of lunch ladies, not only in operational terms but also in the pedagogical process that involves the provision of school meals, is an item of paramount importance for the implementation of food and nutrition education provided for in the PNAE. The periodic qualification of school lunch ladies enables quality school meals and compliance with one of the Program's guidelines (^{PINHO; MARTÍNEZ, 2016}). For ^{Santos (2016}), the training in FNE of the actors involved in health promotion, in the school environment, allows the sharing of experiences, the theoretical basis, and the elaboration of strategies for the promotion and offer of an adequate and healthy diet. Courses, workshops, and discussion groups must be based on a social-constructive and problematizing approach, abandoning the traditional and non-dialogical models so often used. The nutritionist is the professional qualified to train and sensitize other school actors in FNE.

^{Kroth, Geremia, and Mussio (2020}), when analyzing the PNAE as a Healthy Public Policy that translates into great returns for society, suggest mechanisms that must be articulated with each other for the improvement and strengthening of the Program. Among the actions indicated is the elaboration of a PNAE technical training plan for federated entities, involving all the actors of the Program, such as nutritionists, lunch ladies, and teachers. According to the authors, “in times when the rational use of government resources is much discussed, prioritizing public policies with a great multiplier effect should be the natural path to be followed by the public sector” (^{KROTH; GEREMIA; MUSSIO, 2020}, p. 4073).

We understand that the concrete work of the lunch ladies, whose profile is very close to that of kitchen workers in our country, intersects race and gender (^{JANUÁRIO et al, 2019}) and goes beyond carrying, in this intersection, marks that subordinate them in a context marked by the coloniality of thought. Their role also represents the variety of their work within the scope of the precariat (^{STANDING, 2017}), whose permanent training, promoted by external agents, bears little relation to their daily work.

The lunch ladies were left out of the terms of Law nº 11.947/2009 (^{BRASIL, 2009}), which allows us to read their non-place in the field of the discourse of the individuals who effectively program public policy in the school environment. Many of the processes of oppression and violence that women go through, especially black women, in the context of work, make the active subject invisible. This is the first violence that authorizes others within this relationship, which, in the harsh words of ^{Collins (2019}, p. 99), reproduces the place of black women in a subordinate position, like the mule of the world: “As dehumanized objects, mules they are living machines and can be treated as part of the landscape”. The landscape, in the school context, contains a kitchen, and there is the lunch lady, as part of the machinery and utensils, which does not even appear in the law that deals with her training.

Resolution/CD/FNDE No. 6/2020 and Resolution/CD/FNDE No. 20/2020: from reduction to technical expression

Resolution 6/2020 (BRASIL, 2020) provides school meals to basic education students within the scope of the PNAE. Although this represents an advance, as it textually mentions lunch ladies, this Resolution ignores the entire process of producing the imagination of women who work in school kitchens, appearing in the device as food handlers, which represents a reduction of the subject and their role, in the school community, to the cold letter of the law. When analyzing this legislation, it is possible to verify that the role of the school lunch lady is addressed in the following articles:

Art. 14 It is the responsibility of Seduc, the Municipal Government and the federal school, within their respective administrative jurisdiction, through the coordinated action of education professionals and the technical manager and other nutritionists, to include food and nutrition education - FNE in the process of teaching and learning, which crosses the school curriculum, addressing the topic of food and nutrition and the development of practices and skills that promote healthy lifestyles, from the perspective of food and nutrition security.

Art. 42 It is up to the EEx or the EUx to adopt hygienic-sanitary control measures that guarantee physical conditions and processes suitable for good food handling and processing practices in the acquisition, transport, storage, preparation/handling, and distribution of food to students served by the Program.

[...]

§ 2 There must be periodic training of food handlers to implement good practices and SOPs⁷. (BRASIL, 2020).

Concerning the FNE, the aforementioned Resolution refers to the need for joint action by education professionals and school nutrition nutritionists. Understanding the lunch lady as an education employee, it is possible to verify that the legislation recognizes her strategic role in the implementation of food and nutrition education actions integrated into the teaching and learning processes of the school.

Article 42 reinforces the importance of measures that guarantee the supply of healthy food and within adequate hygienic-sanitary conditions. For this to occur, it is essential to train the lunch ladies, as discussed in the previous item. However, in this article, which explicitly mentions the role of food handlers, there is only an alert for the technical and hygienist issue of the work of lunch ladies, with no mention of their role as a school feeding educator. For food and nutrition education to be effective, school lunch ladies must be qualified both in operations and in how much they relate to the educational issues of their work and are recognized as such.

Resolution 20/2020 (BRASIL, 2020a) changes some items of Resolution 6/2020 (^{BRASIL, 2020}), but the analysis of the former indicated that there was no change on the points addressed in this study.

PNAE technical notes: normative invisibility

PNAE currently has fifteen technical notes aimed at ratifying the understandings, clarifying the Program's legislation, monitoring and meeting external demands, such as those of the Public Ministry, complaints, among others. The technical notes (FNDE, 2021) are prepared by the PNAE Coordination and help the good execution of the Program. These documents are available for access and consultation on the FNDE website. Below, we show a table containing the description of the technical notes prepared by the PNAE Coordination.

Source: Prepared by the authors, based on data obtained from the FNDE website (2021).

CHART 2 - Description of the technical notes referring to the PNAE prepared by the PNAE Coordination 

When analyzing the technical notes, we verified that there is not one that directly addresses the functions or roles of the lunch ladies in the Program. The documents available from 2009 to 2020, address issues related to food, menus, family farming, among other topics. But, so far, they have not included a subject related to food and nutrition education, which is one of the Program's guidelines, nor about the lunch ladies, which has a strategic role for the good execution of the PNAE. Technical notes that reinforce the importance of food and nutrition education for the PNAE and the educational role of the school lunch lady can collaborate to improve the management of the Program and to comply with its guidelines. The absence of a technical note on the lunch lady, or the FNE, corroborates the invisibility of this professional.

Guidance material [sic] for training food handlers who work in school meals

The Guidance Material [sic] for the training of food handlers who work in school meals (Material orientativo [sic] para formação de manipuladores de alimentos que atuam na alimentação escolar) (^{BRASIL, 2014}) is a document financed and published by the MEC/FNDE. It was prepared by the Collaborating Center for Food and Nutrition for Schoolchildren (CECANE- Colaborador Alimentação e Nutrição do Escolar) of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in 2014. The material's main objective is to “provide a theoretical and scientific basis for the planning and implementation of PNAE food handlers” (^{BRASIL, 2014}, p. 7). The material also presents suggestions for practical activities.

In chapter 2, entitled Training of Handlers, this material reflects on the role of educator of the food handler (^{BRASIL, 2014}). It is a very important item, but it could be better explored. The activities that can be developed by the food handler in schools are also pointed out. Below, we present a chart containing the description of the possible activities of the food handler available in the guidance material:

Source: Prepared by the authors, from the text Material orientativo [sic] para formação de manipuladores de alimentos que atuam na alimentação escolar (BRASIL, 2014, p. 15).

CHART 3 - Description of possible activities of the PNAE food handler 

The elaboration and dissemination of materials, such as those mentioned above, contribute to the training of the school lunch lady - in the materials, she is always treated by a food handler - and also to the strengthening of her role within the school. Her role as an educator must always be reinforced both for the professional herself and for other PNAE individuals who have access to these documents. The review and updating of this material, released in 2014, can contribute to the appreciation of the lunch lady.

Technical products of CECANEs

The FNDE establishes partnerships with federal public universities through the CECANEs, for the development of technical products for the PNAE. One of these technical products was the development of a methodology for training lunch ladies by CECANE/UFRGS (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul), in 2007. Courses were held for 226 handlers linked to the State Department of Education of Rio Grande do Sul, in 2007 and 2008 (^{BRASIL, 2014}).

^{Chaves (2011}) surveyed the training of lunch ladies from the perspective of educators and promoters of healthy eating in schools, in the training processes carried out by CECANEs. The author found that lunch ladies are valued through motivation and awareness and that there is a concern to stimulate reflection on their practice and to encourage creativity for the possibilities of eating. Chaves (²⁰¹¹) also reinforces the need for educational activities to be permanent, which enables the development of skills and attitudes of these professionals.

^{Camozzi, Monego, Menezes, and Silva (2015}, p. 36) highlight the importance of spaces that offer permanent education for school lunch ladies and other subjects in the school community, for the development of actions to promote healthy eating in the school environment:

It seems evident the need for continuing education programs that address not only issues related to hygiene in food handling, but also forms of preparation, menu structure, seeking to understand the role of the handler as an agent promoting healthy eating in the school space, offering healthy and varied preparations, and contemplating cultural aspects of the consumer people, restricting the supply of foods with excess fat, sugar or salt.

Currently, technical products aimed at training school lunch ladies are no longer signed. The coordination of the PNAE has focused on the training of nutritionists. As the training of school lunch ladies is one of the tasks of these school feeding professionals, as stated in CFN Resolution nº 465/2010 (^{CFN, 2010}), the FNDE has opted for their training, as discussed above, but the lack of training specifically dedicated to school lunch ladies, within the actions of the PNAE, subordinates them to nutritionists.

We question and reflect on whether it would not be important to resume the training of school lunch ladies by CECANEs, which have a technical, operational, and intellectual framework to produce this technical product, being able to carry out periodic training of school lunch ladies both in issues health and hygienists, especially in educational issues, strengthening their strategic role in promoting healthy and adequate food in schools.

“Best School Meal Recipes” Contest

The “Best School Feeding Recipes” contest took place in two editions. The first edition took place in 2015 and the second in 2017. It consisted of choosing, disseminating, and awarding culinary recipes prepared by school lunch ladies, who worked in public elementary schools (^{BRASIL, 2015a}; ^{FNDE, 2017}). The objective of the contest was “to value the role of school lunch ladies in promoting healthy and adequate food in the school environment and to promote the mobilization of the school community for the theme of food and nutrition education” (^{BRASIL, 2015a}; ^{FNDE, 2017}).

The first edition had the registration of 2,433 lunch ladies. Five of them had their recipes awarded and received the amount of R$ 5,000.00 (five thousand reais) and a trip to Santiago de Chile, lasting one week. The second edition received 2,252 entries, from which fifteen lunch ladies were awarded amounts paid in cash, and the first place, in addition to money, won international travel. The winning recipes, both from the first and second editions, gave rise to two FNDE publications.

This action promoted by the PNAE Coordination was a project focused on the lunch ladies. We believe that actions like this helped to give visibility to these professionals, being a way of valuing and recognizing their work. However, we need to question the scope of this action, that is, to verify if it improves the work of the school lunch ladies. For this, studies and research capable of specifically addressing the impact of these actions would be needed.

Super Lunch Ladies

The reality show “Super Lunch Ladies” was a television program developed by the FNDE, with support from Banco do Brasil. It took place in 2018, showing competition between the ten winners of the first and second editions of the “Best School Feeding Recipes” contest (BRASILa, ²⁰¹⁵; ^{FNDE, 2017}). The program was shown by the TV channel TV Escola and also on the YouTube channel, under the command of the actor Eri Johnson. There were thirteen episodes, and in each one, a professional left the program and another won a prize worth one thousand reais, very similar to the various television products of culinary competition that fill the schedules of Brazilian TVs.

Actions such as contests and the reality show are important to give visibility to the work of lunch ladies and can help them to value their role. However, we believe that this type of action can also highlight her role as a cook. These actions focus on the preparation of tasty and healthy recipes, which is an extremely important role of the school lunch lady but they do not emphasize their role as an integral subject of the school as an educator. It is also necessary to evaluate the scope of this type of action, verifying if it arouses the interest of the lunch ladies and the people in general.

To understand the impact of this TV show on the lives of the lunch ladies, both participants, and non-participants, it is necessary to carry out studies and research with this focus. It is important to understand if there is still some impact not only on the lives of the lunch ladies but also on the eyes of those who can interfere with their work, improving their quality of life or strengthening their profession; besides questioning the reach of production of this nature on a channel with a very low audience, such as TV Escola.

What we can undoubtedly say is that, unlike the legal provisions analyzed so far, the use of identity is present, working with the way subjects produce their temporary identification with a group, in this case, the lunch ladies, and alluding to the production of their imaginary, as an important character in the school community, not only being lunch ladies but also super lunch ladies, in an evident production of a language of social empowerment (^{HALL, 2009}; ^{CASTORIADIS, 1982}; ^{BERTH, 2019}).

Food and Nutrition Education Journey⁸

Aiming to strengthen the FNE in the school environment and the inclusion of the theme in the teaching-learning process, the General Coordination of PNAE has implemented some initiatives that involve several subjects of the Program. One of the actions is the Food and Nutrition Education Journey, which has taken place annually since 2017. The program consists of the selection, dissemination, and publication of FNE actions carried out in public early childhood and elementary schools, encouraging debate and practice in the school environment and giving visibility to those actions already developed in public schools.

The FNE Journey raises the pedagogical purpose of drawing attention and debating, in a stimulating and creative way, the following themes: healthy eating, obesity prevention, and food culture. Each edition of the Journey took place throughout the school year, in stages, each with a different theme for the development of action.

At this time, we intend to bring an analysis of the theme “School lunch as a transforming agent of school meals”, which was worked on in 2019, in the third edition of the program. For each theme proposed in the program, some materials were available to the participants to support them in the planning and execution of an FNE activity. The PNAE Coordination team responsible for the program recorded videos with specialists on the topic, offering books, legislation, manuals, booklets, and any material that could support the participant.

Participants sent 520 reports with photos of FNE activities carried out by schools, with a focus on school lunch ladies. Five of them were selected to compose the publication Best Reports of Early Childhood Education, Elementary and Middle School - Melhores Relatos da Educação Infantil e Ensino Fundamental I e ​​II (BRASIL, 2020b). The selected reports describe the activities carried out by the schools, such as presentation of ancestral recipes, reproduced by the lunch ladies and served in school meals; actions to get to know the lunch ladies, since “most of the students did not know their names, referring to them as the ‘lunch aunt’” (^{BRASIL, 2020a}, p. 33); tributes to the lunch ladies, such as the preparation of snacks made by the students, recitation of poetry, delivery of thank-you letters and exhibition of posters highlighting the importance of these professionals. Playful games were also held between the lunch ladies and the students. Another report described interviews with the lunch ladies, and a book was made about the biography of one of them.

After reading the reports, we verified that these activities value the lunch ladies, giving a prominent role to their performance both in the preparation of a healthy diet and in the role of educator. All activities involved the school community, with the participation of students' families, teachers, and the school's management, creating possibilities for the recognition and appreciation of the lunch lady. By placing this school professional as the protagonist of pedagogical activities, FNE's actions contributed to raising awareness and valuing her role as an educator, both for herself and other members of the school community.

Actions such as those proposed by the FNE Journey create powerful spaces for reflection on the role of school lunch ladies in public schools, which can contribute to the appreciation of these professionals. In a study carried out by ^{Lourenção (2019}), in Municipal Early Childhood Education Centers in the city of Lavras, Minas Gerais, the FNE Journey was used as one of the modules of the educational intervention to qualify directors, pedagogical coordinators, teachers, and general service assistants. He concluded that the proposed food and nutrition intervention program was effective in improving the educators' knowledge about food and nutrition.

For these actions to be effective, they must be proposed and worked on continuously by the FNDE, encouraging schools to participate and develop FNE activities with the entire school community. It is also necessary that there are initiatives that contribute to the adherence of a greater number of participating schools, strengthening the FNE in the school environment and contributing to the appreciation of the lunch ladies.

Fourth cover of textbooks

Since 2016, the covers of books distributed by the National Book and Teaching Material Program (PNLD- Programa Nacional do Livro e do Material Didático) contain illustrations and messages that promote adequate and healthy eating. Seeking to arouse interest and generate reflection with the proposal of including FNE in schools, each fourth cover of each curricular component addresses a specific mobilizing theme. The intention is that each theme generates dialogues between the actors of the school community. In this way, we propose, in this item of the article, to verify if any theme related to the role of the lunch lady has already been worked on in any of these covers.

The illustrations and messages contained on the covers of textbooks distributed by the PNLDs, from 2016 to 2020, deal with various topics in food and nutrition education, ranging from a food culture, the food system, healthy eating habits to other issues involving human relationships and sustainability. When researching environmental issues intertwined with adequate and healthy food on the back covers of textbooks distributed by the PNLD 2018 - High School, ^{Melgaço (2021}) found that the topics covered on these covers provided spaces for reflections and discussions on Environmental Education and sustainability, such as relations of production, consumption and environmental crisis, gender identity, relations of belonging to nature and society, among others. For the author, the messages contained on the back covers of textbooks help to build a dialogic space between the themes that are fundamental for the education of schoolchildren, enabling a democratic and liberating education.

When analyzing the aspects that permeate the PNLD, ^{Di Giorgi et al. (2014}) placed the textbook as an important element in the formation and expansion of the cultural capital of the student and his family, in an extended way, especially for students who belong to the most disadvantaged strata of society and who may have impaired access to books. Furthermore, the authors consider that textbooks constitute an excellent teaching and pedagogical resource for teachers.

^{Greenwood and Fonseca (2016}) describe how the FNE is constituted within the Basic Education textbook, visualizing spaces and paths that allow its optimization. The authors indicate that the spaces for the production and use of textbooks, such as government bodies, publishers, and public schools, potentially contribute so that public school students have access to FNE, and there must be dialogue and interaction so that FNE present in books is optimized. The books can offer questions that instigate the discussion about school feeding, facilitating and strengthening the educational process in food and nutrition, within the local school.

Considering the dimension of the PNLD and its importance for the formation of schoolchildren, the textbook can be an important instrument for the promotion of adequate and healthy food and good habits of life. The space provided by the back covers to generate reflections on these themes has become an important tool for food and nutrition education.

This space can be strategic to work on the importance of the lunch lady for the PNAE, highlighting her strategic role as an educator. A cover containing a specific message about the lunch ladies has not yet been made. On the cover “It is nice to eat with friends at school", distributed through the PNLD 2019, for the early years of elementary school, there is the figure of two lunch ladies, one serving the children in the cafeteria and the other positioned inside the kitchen, watching. Although they appear in this illustration, the theme of the cover reflected the act of eating in company and did not have the role or importance of the lunch lady at school as its main theme.

The inclusion of the theme that involves the cook on the back cover of the textbook can be a good strategy to debate the importance of this professional for the PNAE, generating reflections on her role for and in the school community.

PNAE Monitoring Questionnaire

The General Coordination of the National School Feeding Program (CGPAE- Coordenação Geral do Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar) of the FNDE has, in its organizational structure, specific coordination for monitoring and evaluating the Program. According to Resolution CD/FNDE n° 6/2020, the monitoring of the PNAE is permanent and aims to correct possible distortions, improve management and support its evaluation through data collection, analysis, and systematization of information and verification of execution. of the Program (^{BRASIL, 2020}).

This coordination verifies the compliance of the execution of the PNAE in loco and at a distance through questionnaires, interviews, and observations, considering the current legislation and the following aspects: financial, family farming purchases, social control, and food and nutritional security (^{BRASIL, 2015}). During the monitoring visit, a questionnaire is applied to the lunch ladies, consisting of thirteen questions, as described below.

Source: Prepared by the authors, based on data obtained from the FNDE's internal system.

CHART 4 - Description of the questions that make up the monitoring of the PNAE carried out by the FNDE 

These questions are related to the legislation that involves the execution of the PNAE and the norms that regulate the profession of food handlers. In this way, the questions want to verify if the following regulations are being complied with Opinion nº 9/2010 and Resolution nº 5/2010 of the National Council of Education/Chamber of Basic Education (CNE/CEB- Conselho Nacional de Educação/Câmara de Educação Básica), which establish the National Guidelines for the Career Plans and Remuneration of Public Basic Education Employees (^{BRASIL, 2010}, ^2010a); RDC ANVISA nº 216/2004 (^{BRASIL, 2004}); Regulatory Norm NR 7 (Medical Exams) of the Occupational Health Medical Control Program, published by the Ministry of Labor Ordinance 3,214/1978 (^{BRASIL, 1978}); Ordinance SVS/MS 326/1997, (“Documentation”) of Annex II of RDC ANVISA number 275/2002 (^{BRASIL, 1997}, ²⁰⁰²); Resolution/CD/FNDE number 6/2020 (^{BRASIL, 2020}).

Considering that adequate and healthy food is a fundamental human right (^{BRASIL, 1988}), the PNAE seeks to guarantee food and nutritional security for students in schools. The guarantee of FNS for schoolchildren depends on a series of procedures that must be strictly followed throughout the process involving food handling. These procedures are described in a series of regulations and legislation, and it is up to the FNDE to be aware of and monitor compliance with these rules. The nutritional and hygienic-sanitary issues of school meals are intrinsically involved with the school lunch ladies, who must use adequate food preparation techniques, ensuring the health of schoolchildren. The execution of school meals must be evaluated and monitored by the PNAE/FNDE team, as well as by the Program's nutritionists and by the executing agencies.

We can observe concern about the hygienic-sanitary issues of school meals in the thirteen questions, aimed at the lunch ladies, which are included in the monitoring. However, there is no question directed to the role of the lunch lady as an educator. This may be an indication of the invisibility of this role of the school lunch ladies by the Program.