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It is a truism to suggest that obesity has emerged as one of the most significant issues for public health policy in the last 10 years. Globally, an estimated 1.2 billion people are classified as overweight, of whom 300 million are categorized as obese. In 2004 when Eat Well Do Well was developed and introduced in the UK, around 10% of children aged 6–10 years were classified as obese. In addition, according to the Department of Health (2006) 36.6% of children in Hull were estimated to be living in poverty compared to the national average of 21.3%. This chapter presents a description and evaluation of the lessons learned from the Eat Well Do Well program, which was delivered between 2004 and 2007 by the Kingston-Upon-Hull City Council in England. This was an ambitious, innovative and exciting programme which provided all children (approximately 25,000 school children) in seventy-four primary and special schools access to free school meals which may have included healthy breakfasts, hot lunches/dinners, fruit up to Key Stage 2 (ages 11/12), and after school snack. The evaluation of Eat Well Do Well considered ‘what worked’ from the perspectives of the major stakeholders: the children, parents, caterers and schools. The chapter discusses several characteristic features of the program such as addressing health inequalities, complexity and whole of system change, and developing a spatial imagination. It presents some of the difficulties encountered including the problems associated with school meals as a political project, school meals as a service intervention, and how to relate Eat Well Do Well to other projects in schools.

In various Platonic dialogues we meet phrases like ‘first friend’, ‘be happy’, ‘doing well’ used to connote a final end of action. Related goods may be useful instruments (but their use needs to be guided by reason), or aspects of acting well. The final end of action is realized in action, and is not a consequence of action. eudaimonia is a goal set before each agent as soon as he starts to act; it is not chosen and cannot be renounced. This conception underlies the Socratic paradox, ‘No one does evil willingly.’ The value of acting well consists in order and structure, values also found in the universe outside the world of action.

This chapter talks about the turn-of-the-century city guidebooks and urban sketches that promoted new ways of approaching and moving about cities, and which helped to create the tourist as a distinct social type, and tourism as a distinct spatial practice. The sense of corporate ownership through tourism became most clear in two related forms of visits: historical walking tours and slumming in the neighborhoods of ethnic minorities. Both inscribed on city landscapes the legitimate social authority of well-to-do Americans and encouraged them to repossess large parts of the city given over to commerce and the immigrant working class. Both practices contributed to the erosion of refinement and separate spheres, most obviously by easing the social dangers of public places. They also exemplified the uses of a historical narrative and racial ideas to create a broad sense of social ownership that made genteel self-possession less culturally necessary.

This chapter talks about the separation of spheres and the elaborate etiquette of refinement that seemed prudish rather than prudent to many well-to-do Americans in the early twentieth century. The old sociospatial ideal impeded the cultural economy much as small local or regional businesses impeded the continuing growth of the market. Increasingly, a reformed middle class founded its identity on forms of cultural capital that did not rely as much on personal networks and local customs so central to refinement. The range of acceptable difference was limited, and was accompanied by dehumanizing stereotypes and the aestheticization of poverty. But the social distance that tourism drew on and encouraged did open up a space in which cultural differences became desirable for well-to-do white Americans. Urban tourism depended on the commodification and elaboration of hierarchically ranked differences, yet it also facilitated a kind of cultural pluralism not often found in the mid-nineteenth century.

Noting that Piers Plowman has often been described as multi-generic, the conclusion reviews the claim that the five diverse allegorical narrative structures analysed in the book all occur in Langland’s poem. It affirms that in Piers Plowman they bring with them their own internal conflicts and disruptions, but are also in constant tension with each other. They overlay, pressure and contradict one other, illustrating the entrenched nature of the text’s dialecticism and its inexhaustible determination to unpack its own terms. The Conclusion ends with an analysis of the feast of Patience, in which many different descriptions of ‘do-well’ are brought together to ‘undo’ each other. Its implicit claim is that this is the kind of work allegory does best.

Catholic Ireland in the nineteenth century had its share of the rich and of middle-class arrivistes. One obsession for these classes was the education of their children. Although there was some provision in Ireland for such families, many chose to send their off-spring to English Catholic boarding schools such as Stonyhurst, Beaumount and Downside. The aim was to have their children acquire an (English) accent and to make social connections. Like all such socially ambitious groups they kept the prevailing political wind constantly in mind, in contrast, it must be said, to the sons of the same classes who attended similar schools in Ireland such as Blackrock, or Clongowes Wood College. Drawing on data collected for 1000 children the chapter delineates a series of networks which helped to sustain Irish Catholic identity based on wealth, privilege and educational advantage.