One day I sent cake to my child's preschool. The cake came home. Untouched. When I asked ‘Why?’, my little boy explained, ‘Because it wasn't on the healthy chart and Claire didn't get to eat her lolly too.’ ‘What!?’ I replied.
Two things come to mind when reflecting on the above incident: first, the power of the ‘healthy chart’ to define what is healthy or not; and second, my middle-class invoked reaction to the incident — which was one of anger, followed by shame. Was I a bad mother because I sent cake in my son's lunchbox? The teachers didn't know it was a hummingbird cake, baked at home together as a family, with mostly organic ingredients. This ‘healthy’ chart did not take into consideration any of these aspects as ‘healthy’ or ‘good’. Without a thought, the cake was effortlessly defined as unhealthy, or, as my little boy later stated, ‘bad’. The cake coming home flew in the face of my middle-class imperatives of health and self-constitution as a ‘good’ mother.
It did not take long to find out that the motivating force behind the cake coming home was the government's intentions to curb ‘obesity rates’. After speaking with the teachers about the chart, I was informed that the staff had recently taken part in a Munch & Move training day. This led me to look up the NSW Health Munch & Move program on the healthykids.nsw.gov.au website. The website presents the rationale for the program as: ‘Establishing sound eating and activity habits from an early age gives children the best chance of leading a healthy life and maintaining a healthy weight. Munch & Move supports the NSW government's priority of preventing childhood overweight and obesity’ (Healthy Kids, 2014).
As a critical health researcher (and a mum) who grapples with the impact of her food choices on the environment and on local and global communities, I felt compelled to write about the ease with which my priorities in choosing and cooking food (and my choices for my children) were easily overlooked, or seen as irrelevant or misplaced. I also felt compelled to contrast the simplistic and calculative ways of engaging with food, espoused by many obesity health campaigns, with the messy and complex place of food in my own life. To do this, this article includes a number of personal reflections generated by my position as a mother and critical health researcher in relation to food.
In this article, I take the Munch & Move health campaign as a case to examine how dominant notions of obesity, health and food, silence environmental sensibilities and relations to food. I am not suggesting that this particular campaign is the source or course of the silencing of environmental priorities of food. The power of dominant obesity/health discourses lies with their proliferation and saturation. The Munch & Move campaign, however, provides a useful case to interrogate the power of dominant meanings of obesity/health in subjugating other ways of knowing, experiencing and valuing food. I examine the campaign's use of language to construct a notion of food tied to obesity and weight that is not only difficult to challenge, but difficult to think about otherwise. Specifically, I consider how obesity discourses construct a notion of food (and a healthy self) at odds with environmental ways of knowing and thinking about food. These environmental discourses involve questioning food in relation to what Belasco (Reference Belasco, Watson and Caldwell2005) terms the process, not the product. For Belasco, questioning the process involves: developing knowledge of the impact of food production on the environment; contemplating the impact on the people producing the food (i.e., are the conditions fair, just and equitable for the farmers and workers producing the food?); and examining who benefits and profits from the food production and consumption. Specifically, Belasco (Reference Belasco, Watson and Caldwell2005) writes: ‘It means asking about environment and agriculture: Where did the plastic bag come from and where will it go after I discard it? How will the greenhouse effect affect grain production?. . . Did the farmer get a fair share of the profits? And down the road will the farmer's land be in good enough condition to feed our grandchildren's grandchildren?’ (p. 230). What is interesting about these modes of questioning are the ways they starkly contrast with the individualised focus of nutrition and obesity discourses — which ask what food can do to or for me.
To critically examine obesity discourses, I adopt a Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis. I interrogate the meanings of food and health espoused by the Munch & Move program, contrasting these with the types of selves and meanings of food supported by environmental discourses. Discourses, as defined by Foucault (Reference Foucault1978), are the building blocks or strategies that engender specific disciplines of knowledge and beliefs. These building blocks establish and regulate possibilities for thinking, speaking and writing, and form possibilities for practice. The productive capacity of discourse, to construct particular ways of being and thinking, demonstrates the way Foucault's (Reference Foucault1978) notion of discourse is connected to his notion of the power/knowledge relation.
In addition to producing particular ways of knowing, thinking and doing, discourses also compete against and silence other ways of knowing. In this article, I adopted the term ‘subjugated knowledge’ for its use in considering the ways dominant discourses silence non-dominant discourses (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Gordon1980). In his work, Foucault draws attention to the ways particular knowledges are ‘disqualified’ or unqualified through history and institutions (i.e., prisons, sex and medical institutions). Here, I draw on the term to examine the process through which environmental knowledges of food are, as Foucault (Reference Foucault and Gordon1980) explains, ‘located low down on the hierarchy’ (p. 82) of possibilities for organising or influencing how health issues are framed and understood. In other words, as calculative and individualised conceptualisations of food and health become more and more ‘common sense’ (Mudry, Reference Mudry2009), there is a ‘closing off’ of what is thinkable and doable in relation to food and health (Gard & Wright, Reference Gard and Wright2005).
Understanding the Power of Obesity Discourses
Last night my four-year-old daughter asked me to measure her waist. She had watched me measure her dad's waist, as he needed the measurement for a wetsuit. ‘48 cm. That's good,’ she said. ‘Why is that?’ I asked. ‘It's small. Small is good.’
Obesity discourses, as a set of regulative practices and understandings concerned with the size, shape and weight of the body, have been examined by a wide range of sociological literature (Evans, Rich, Davies, & Allwood, Reference Evans, Rich, Davies and Allwood2008; Gard & Wright, Reference Gard and Wright2005; Monaghan, Reference Monaghan2007; Murray, Reference Murray2008a, Reference Murray2008b; Rich & Evans, Reference Rich and Evans2005; Wright & Harwood, Reference Wright and Harwood2009). In particular, sociological researchers in the field of health education examine the power and effects of obesity discourses for the practice and curriculum of health education and on the lives and identities of children and young people (see, e.g., Burrows, Wright, & Jungersen-Smith; Reference Burrows, Wright and Jungersen-Smith2002; Gard, Reference Gard, Tinning, McCuaig and Hunter2006; Rich & Evans, Reference Rich and Evans2005; Wright, O’Flynn & Macdonald, Reference Wright, O’Flynn and Macdonald2006). This literature points to the ways obesity discourses are produced in relation to discourses of risk, health and science, and in relation to moral imperatives of thinness.
In particular, Gard and Wright (Reference Gard and Wright2005) examine the complex production and maintenance of obesity discourses in Western contexts. Their work is useful to this paper as it examines how obesity discourses are produced in ways that become difficult to challenge, question or think about otherwise. To understand this, Gard and Wright (Reference Gard and Wright2005) examine how obesity science is constructed as a set of knowledges based on ‘facts’ and ‘truths’. They highlight the ways models and scientific laws are used to render the problem and its causes as fixed, knowable and certain. For instance, one law/truth that governs the research and public health solutions is the notion of the ‘body as machine’. The ‘body as machine’ model relates to the simple assumption of obesity being caused by greater energy in (food) than energy expended (physical activity), thus contributing to weight gain. Gard and Wright (Reference Gard and Wright2005) critique the model:
Because it assumes that all humans adhere to the same mechanical law, it is not so good at handling human differences such as cultural values, socio-economic class, ethnicity, gender, geographical location and age . . . the question to be asked, however, is whether the ‘body as machine’ model makes it easier or more difficult to think about factors other than the amount of food people eat and the amount of physical activity they do? (p. 41)
The power of obesity discourses also lies in their production of the moral economy of healthy bodies and practices (Evans et al., Reference Evans, Rich, Davies and Allwood2008; Gard & Wright, Reference Gard and Wright2005; Halse, Reference Halse, Wright and Harwood2009). With its focus on individual behaviours of diet and physical activity, obesity (and its avoidance) is constructed as something individuals can control. Our food choices and body shape thus become read as markers of our ‘choice’ and actions. This positions slim, fit bodies as good and virtuous, and large bodies as defiant, abject and ‘bad’ (Evans et al., Reference Evans, Rich, Davies and Allwood2008; Gard & Wright, Reference Gard and Wright2005; Halse, Reference Halse, Wright and Harwood2009; Lebesco, Reference Lebesco, Metzl and Kirkland2010). This binary situates bodies, eating and food choices in a moral economy that shapes how we ‘know’ others and ourselves. As Lebesco (Reference Lebesco, Metzl and Kirkland2010) writes, we:
direct a great deal of hostility in the form of moral outrage at the presumed agents of the ‘obesity epidemic.’ For the most part, that means we point the finger at individuals who we understand to be lazy, out of control, without will, ignorant, or some combination thereof. (p. 73)
For many academics critical of obesity ‘panics’, such moralising can do more harm than good. It stigmatises people and privileges an engagement with the body and food built on fear, risk, guilt, shame and blame (Berlant, Reference Berlant, Metzl and Kirkland2010; Evans et al., Reference Evans, Rich, Davies and Allwood2008; Gard & Wright, Reference Gard and Wright2005; Halse, Reference Halse, Wright and Harwood2009; Lebesco, Reference Lebesco, Metzl and Kirkland2010).
This article aims to add to critical obesity literature through its specific consideration of the ways obesity imperatives silence other ways of thinking about, experiencing and engaging with food — namely, environmental sensibilities. In considering the place and feeling of food in our lives, this article engages with the work of Berlant (Reference Berlant, Metzl and Kirkland2010). Berlant draws attention to the importance of (re)imagining how we make sense of the place and ‘feeling’ of eating in contemporary lives. Drawing on Berlant (Reference Berlant, Metzl and Kirkland2010), this article considers the terms and possibilities upon which we are invited to engage with and ‘know’ food. While the Munch & Move resource itself is a focus, my intentions lie with contemplating how contemporary meanings of obesity, food and health function to organise our priorities, engagements and understandings of food and eating. This contemplation offers spaces for thinking about how environmental priorities of health and food are ‘closed off’ — both through their marginalisation and through how we are invited to define the place of food in our lives.
What is Munch & Move?
According to the website, Munch & Move is a ‘NSW Health initiative that supports the healthy development of children birth to 5 years by promoting physical activity, healthy eating and reduced small screen time (e.g., watching TV or DVDs, playing on computers and small hand-held games devices)’ (Healthy Kids, 2014).
Munch & Move offers resources, programming and policy materials and training to educators working in NSW early childhood education services. According to the website, ‘the training aims to assist educators to implement a fun, play-based approach to supporting healthy eating and physical activity habits in young children’ (Healthy Kids, 2014). The three main focus areas of the program include: food/diet, movement (Fundamental Movement Skills), and television time. Across the website there are countless resources for early childhood teachers to download and access. These include songs, factsheets for parents on healthy lunchboxes, ideas for activities, statistics on the diet and health of the population, and ways to incorporate information about food in the daily activities of the centre. There are also ways of incorporating the program directly into the official documentation, such as snippets for newsletters and predeveloped policies. The resources and information are vast and numerous. They are also colourful, user friendly, and organised with photos of children, parents and food. Many of the pages have cartoon drawings of happy tomatoes, oranges, apples and carrots playing tennis, soccer, basketball or skipping.
From a critical health perspective, the Munch & Move program is conceptualised as an institutional site through which ways of thinking, speaking and ‘knowing’ are reproduced. In analysing the Munch & Move resources, my interests lie with examining how obesity discourses are proliferated and how particular discursive devices of the discourses are employed to render the discourses powerful and difficult to question. From the analysis, two dominant discursive devices emerge. These include: (1) the construction of food and health as calculative, knowable and measurable; and (2) the use of futures to construct obesity reduction as an imperative for the health of children. In the following sections, I examine how these features of obesity discourses ‘play out’ in the Munch & Move resources. Part of the analysis involves contemplating how obesity discourses are at odds with environmental knowledges of food. As described earlier, to contrast and contemplate the simplistic meanings of food and health reproduced by the Munch & Move program, I have ‘peppered’ this paper with personal reflections generated by my position as a mother and critical health researcher in relation to food. The reflections offer a space to think about the complex and competing ‘foodscapes’ (Welch, McMahon, & Wright, Reference Welch, McMahon and Wright2012) I (and possibly others) grapple with in daily life, and provide spaces to consider the messiness of health and food in our lives.
Food, Health, Obesity and Calculative Logics
In one 24-hour period I have grappled with so many competing messages about food, health and mothering. Friends have eagerly asked if I have watched the new reality TV baking show. I have read two chapters of Michael Pollan's (Reference Pollan2006) The Omnivore's Dilemma and felt the need to return to vegetarian eating, while at the same time feeling thankful for (and overwhelmed by) Pollan's detailed recognition of the political, industrial and economic forces on Western eating. I have read food labels and craved chocolate. I have googled ideas for a pink princess cake for my daughter's birthday. I have chopped carrots for my children's lunchboxes and been rewarded by a parent at school with the comment ‘that looks like a lunchbox from a mum who loves’. And, I have had the dinner wars with my youngest — EAT your vegies or . . . !
The above reflection on one 24-hour day starkly contrasts with the simple and certain way food and health are defined in the Munch & Move resources. During my day there are many competing notions, emotions (both corporeal and psychological) and power relations that play out as ‘decisions’ are made about the food I eat and the food my children eat. My decisions are not linear or only influenced by me. Sometimes my decisions even contradict my own ethical and health priorities and positions.
In contrast, the meanings of food and health constructed by the Munch & Move program seem calculative, certain and resolute. This is a pattern highlighted by Mudry (Reference Mudry2009) in her critical historical analysis of food guidelines in America. Her work demonstrates ‘how intertwined and reliant discussions of food and nutrition have become upon a discourse of quantification’ (p. 70). With regards to the Munch & Move program, a calculative and quantified logic is evident in the information about food and what constitutes healthy eating. The language in relation to food is, on the one hand, colloquial, as evidenced through the use of terms ‘us’, ‘kids’ and ‘vegies’; on the other hand, the language is very specific in its detail of daily food amounts and measurements. This use of both colloquial and calculative language is evident in the excerpts below. These excerpts were taken from a factsheet written for parents. My critique here is not that children should not be eating ‘different coloured fruit and vegies’ or nutritious food, but with the certainty in which health and a healthy diet are constructed, and with the way we are invited to understand food as healthy:
All of us need to eat a variety of different coloured fruit and vegies every day — both raw and cooked. The recommended daily amount for kids and teens depends on their age, appetite and activity levels. (Munch & Move Resources, sourced from Healthy Kids, 2014)
One serve of fruit is 150 grams (equal to 1 medium-sized apple; 2 smaller pieces (e.g., apricots); 1 cup of canned or chopped fruit; ½ cup (125 ml) 99% unsweetened fruit juice; or 1½ tablespoons dried fruit. (Munch & Move Resources, sourced from Healthy Kids, 2014)
The language throughout the countless tips and ideas presented in the program constructs its version of healthy eating as easy to achieve, accessible and as unequivocally ‘good’. In short, this type of food knowledge is constructed as being ‘true’ and correct. Health is constructed as something that is easily accomplished — we just need to watch what we eat and measure what we eat.
The calculative language is not only used in relation to food. It also extends to television watching (or screen time) and physical activity amount, intensity and duration. For example, the resource states: ‘Children 1–5 years of age should spend at least 25% of their time at the service being physically active! In 8 hours care = 2 hours PA. In 6 hours care = 90 mins PA’ (Munch & Move Resources, sourced from Healthy Kids, 2014). Again, I am not trying to say that children should not move or enjoy a range of activities. My focus is on the ways in which children, teachers and parents are invited to understand their health and bodies. The focus on food (energy in) and activity (energy out) demonstrates the power of ‘body as machine’ law discussed by Gard and Wright (Reference Gard and Wright2005). It seems that every movement and mouthful must be scrutinised and monitored. What is more, in doing so, it is assumed that this unquestionably equates to health both now and in the future. An individualised priority towards health is reproduced, with our gaze and anxieties solely fixed on the waistlines and fat consumption of our children.
These calculative and individualised knowledges of health and food do not invite us to consider health as unpredictable or contingent on the political, environmental or industrialised contexts in which we live. Nor is there a consideration of the broader forces shaping food choice, access and cultures. Basically, health is obtained by individual choice and actions. Foods that are low fat and low in sugar make it to the list of healthy food — including crumpets, baked beans, lean beef, pork, chicken, tuna, salmon and crackers, which are all recommended in factsheets for parents and teachers as healthy ideas for lunchboxes. If we take tuna as an example, yes it can be a low fat and high protein source; however, what of its production? Is the tuna ethically and sustainably caught? What about the packaging? What about the conditions of the workers catching and packaging the fish? Who benefits and profits from this? And who ultimately can afford this choice? These lines of inquiry and questions, postulated by Belasco (Reference Belasco, Watson and Caldwell2005) as being important to environmental food cultures, contrast discourses of food concerned with knowing what food can do to, or for, my body.
Obesity discourses thus compel a relationship with food based on our own needs and interests. Our health is constructed as our health. Such personalised and selfish notions of health do not transfer well to considerations of others and environments or to what Belasco (Reference Belasco, Watson and Caldwell2005) terms the ‘process’, and not the product in relation to food production and consumption. Through individualised notions of health, we are invited to think about food choices as our own — something in my control and something determined by me and for me.
I am not suggesting that the Munch & Move program should take on environmental or sustainable issues, or that this is just a matter of passing the responsibility on to parents. My intentions lie with how this meaning of health is constructed and how this functions to organise our priorities towards health, our social world and selves. The ideal health self of this discourse is one who can make ‘healthy’ decisions by choosing low-fat food and food from a range of food groups. This healthy self monitors what s/he eats and how much, and is assured that this will equate to good health — both for oneself and one's children. We are not invited to question the impact of our ‘choices’ on others or situate the food choices available in a broader context of why the foods available are available. For instance, why industrialised foods dominate our supermarket shelves, or how history, policy and power relations have shaped the food we have access to (Crotty, Reference Crotty1995; Pollan, Reference Pollan2008). These are more than taken for granted, they seem redundant and not needed for a happy healthy life — both now and in the future.
Healthy Futures, Childhood and Obesity Prevention
In this section, I consider the discursive device of healthy futures to persuade and convince people of the imperative of the war on obesity, and of the self-regulation of their eating in their daily lives. The construction of a good, healthy future that is free from lifestyle disease echoes across many of the resources. There is an assumption that children must learn about ‘healthy food’ for good health, now and in the future. Health, weight and obesity are conflated, and we are invited to understand children's health in terms of risks and the prevention of lifestyle disease produced by their own choice or by the choices of their parents. As examples, the website and resources claim:
Establishing sound eating and activity habits from an early age gives children the best chance of leading a healthy life and maintaining a healthy weight. Munch & Move supports the NSW Government's priority of preventing overweight and obesity. (Healthy Kids, 2014)
. . . Children who develop healthy eating and activity habits from a young age are more likely to CONTINUE THESE HABITS IN THE LONG TERM — contributing to ongoing health and wellbeing. (Munch & Move presentation to teachers; original emphasis with capitals, sourced from Healthy Kids, 2014)
. . . Risk factors (of obesity) include poor food choices, lack of physical activity and too much time being sedentary. (Munch & Move presentation to teachers, sourced from Healthy Kids, 2014)
While the use of the word ‘chance’ implies a degree of variability, the excerpts demonstrate the construction of a linear and certain trajectory between eating healthy, exercise, and a good, healthy future. Through the use of possible futures (ideal and not so ideal), overweight and obesity are defined as risk factors that can be overcome — we just need to start kids early. As an example, a presentation resource informing teachers about the resource states: ‘Healthy habits start early!’ ‘Key risk factors for overweight and obesity can be modified from an early age through positive, health promoting messages and strategies . . .’ (Healthy Kids, 2014). Assembled with discourses of risk and obesity is a notion of ‘child’ as innocent and as holding the potential for a perfect life. The ‘child’ is also positioned as being easily corrupted by ‘poor food choices’ and ‘too much time being sedentary’. This assemblage of meanings (risk, futures, child and obesity) privileges the linear assumption that the mere imparting of knowledge to mothers/children/families will ‘fix’ the eating habits of children and reduce the ‘obesity epidemic’ (Pike & Leahy, Reference Pike and Leahy2012). Health and healthy food choices are also presented as something everyone can achieve despite their complex lives, access to food, or the place of food and eating in contemporary lives.
It is important to problematise the temporal logics deployed by the obesity-focused health promotion campaign. These temporal logics construct a linear and rational relationship between present-day ‘good’ food choices and a happy, healthy future. For Berlant (Reference Berlant, Metzl and Kirkland2010), linear, rational and crisis temporalities are not only unsuccessful in addressing ‘problems of embodiment in capitalism’ (p. 32), they also fail to consider the ways the capitalist context ‘choreographs not only (our) skill but (our) physical, cognitive and emotional energy’ (pp. 27–28). In other words, linear understandings of futures and food choice simplistically overlook the complex ways food, temporality and futures are experienced and shaped in the everyday. For Berlant (Reference Berlant, Metzl and Kirkland2010), eating is not always about a ‘projection toward a future’ (p. 35). We must also consider the ways eating and food involves ‘cultivating a feeling of well-being that spreads out for a moment’ (p. 35 italics added), and how it is an ‘episodic intermission’ (p. 34) from life, from ‘the long haul’, for happiness (Berlant, Reference Berlant, Metzl and Kirkland2010). And this critique could no doubt be useful to the use of futures in environmentalism — which at times also invites us to make ‘rational’, ‘linear’ ‘choices’, not for our future waistlines, but for sustaining future environments or more equitable working conditions.
Concluding Thoughts . . .
Why do I feel like the critical cultural end point for my children's food choices and likes? As the cultural end point, I don't actually feel like I have that much control. There are the ads, the celebrations, and the supermarket aisles jam-packed with hyper-processed food. There are the competitive baking and cooking TV shows, and MY complete ignorance of how food is produced or where it comes from. And then there's my loss of past recipes, cooking knowledge and gardening. Why does it feel like my fault that all of the above are too persuasive, too difficult or lost? Despite all these factors, mothers are expected to control their children's eating and diets. Bigger than this, are the difficult issues of sustainability and environmental compromise — while there, and real, they seem to be in the too-hard basket for a mum to conquer.
It is important to acknowledge that in the majority of early learning settings, there is a broad range of food-related activities implemented. Such activities, for instance, provide opportunities to explore how food grows, the impact of food production and packaging on the environment, food access, food preparation and the place of food in our lives. While there are a range of knowledges and learning around food in early years’ contexts, this article considers the dominance, power and effect of obesity discourses in relation to subjugating environmental approaches to food. In this article, the Munch & Move resources provided a context for examining the ways obesity discourses make ‘thinkable and practicable’ (Rose, as cited in Vander Schee, Reference Vander Schee2008, p. 857) particular ways of engaging with food, health and healthy futures. I focused on two dominant discursive devices that work to maintain obesity discourses, and meanings of food and health in terms of nutrition and the individual. I argue that these discursive devices render obesity discourses difficult to challenge and difficult to think otherwise. I have attempted to show that as the calculative and individualised conceptualisation of food, health and futures become more and more taken for granted, there is a closing off of what is thinkable and doable in relation to food and eating. These knowledges permit the sending of cake home on the basis of one definition of health only — fat and nutrient content. As Mudry (Reference Mudry2009) writes, ‘the most powerful and persuasive effect of the discourse of quantification has been its ability to produce the belief that science and qualification can tell us all that we need to know about food and eating’ (p. 171).
Put simply, nutritional and obesity discourses implore a relationship to food in terms of its impact on and function for my body and my weight. The ‘good’ subject of these discourses engages with food in terms of calculating amounts and understanding its function for the body. This subject seems apolitical — it is not compelled to consider the broader impact of food choices on others or on the environment or, to return to Belasco (Reference Belasco, Watson and Caldwell2005), question food in terms of ‘process’. Viewing food as a ‘process’ involves thinking about food in terms of its physical production and its production in power relations of access to wealth, resources, land and decisions. It involves thinking about the impact of food on others — human and non-human. The subject of environmental food discourses is critical, actively political and seems at odds with the ‘good’ subject of obesity-food discourses. This is an important consideration as it highlights the ways environmental discourses are subjugated and marginalised by dominant obesity discourses. This subjugation takes place, not just through their ‘marginalisation’, but also through the type of selves that are produced and how they invoke different ways of engaging with and knowing food in our lives. Of course, for this to take effect, we must not ignore that the power of obesity discourses lies with their saturation and proliferation in how we are invited to know food, health and our futures.
Given the power and dominance of obesity discourses in how health and food are understood in contemporary Western contexts, we must consider what this means for the future and hopes of environmental food knowledge. To bolster its position in the economy of knowledge of food and health, some may argue for the explicit inclusion of environmental, sustainable and socially ethical priorities into public health obesity campaigns such as Munch & Move. This is a problematic option. First, the coalescing of these knowledges would position environmental food priorities in an individualised approach that predominately ignores the complexity of people's lives, inequities experienced in accessing health and food, and the cultural and industrial forces shaping food, food culture and food production. Instead, environmental food concerns will be drawn into individualised discourses of blame, risk and ‘informed health choices’ that place the individual — not markets, policy, industry or commercialisation — at the ‘centre’ of the problem and thus the ‘solution’ to these complex issues (Pollan, Reference Pollan2008). In fact, these influences are precariously invisible in a discourse that constructs food choice and consumption as under the individual's control. More importantly, what we could see is a depoliticising and ‘dwarfing’ of the environmental priorities and interests themselves — a pattern heeded by Gruenewald (Reference Gruenewald2004) in his critique of the ways the ‘institutionalisation’ of environmental education ‘within general education diluted it of its political purpose of acknowledging and transforming (environmental) crises’ (p. 71).
In contemplating the future of environmentalism, we must also consider the harm that moralised, individualised health campaigns can do — for the promotion of blame, fear and guilt. From a critical health perspective, when health is equated with individual ‘choice’ and ‘effort’, bodies, practices and decisions are judged in a moral economy of good versus bad. Already highly individualised, normalised and moralised, the inclusion of environmental issues in obesity campaigns could thus problematically heighten the blaming of certain bodies (namely ‘fat’ bodies) for these complex problems. Furthermore, we must not ignore the constitutive affects of the coalescing of environmental discourses of food with an individualised imperative. These include the development of guilt, blame and fear when individuals do not have the resources or do not know how to live the ‘rules’ out. What is taken for granted is that we are all well placed to make ‘good’ decisions with the ‘right’ information. However, already we can see across literature on environmental food choices, that some people, more than others, are better placed to access and deploy environmental knowledge in relation to eating and food (Guthman, Reference Guthman2010; Pietrykowski, Reference Pietrykowski2004).
Finally, in considering the future hopes of environmental knowledges of food, we must take heed from Berlant (Reference Berlant, Metzl and Kirkland2010). What if, as Berlant describes, ‘knowledge is not really power where the appetites are concerned’ (p. 27), that ‘what it feels like to eat’ is so inextricably linked to the ways our bodies and lives are ‘choreographed’ by the coordinates and pace of capitalised time, that food and eating are a ‘reprieve’. Where food and eating are, as Berlant (Reference Berlant, Metzl and Kirkland2010) describes, not always about ‘the long haul’ or about a project of ‘making oneself or the world better, but instead involves attention to making a less bad experience better’ (p. 35). Then maybe the task ahead has less to do with ‘legislating more consciousness’ (p. 27) and more about mending the terms, demands, and desires that pace and contour contemporary capitalist lives. This is, of course, a much harder and difficult path to take.
Where does this leave me and my cake? In an act of dissonance, I will continue to send cake to school — no doubt with a nervous, apologetic reassurance that it is home baked and mostly organic. The more important question is: Where does this leave my children's engagement with food, the environment and their ‘healthy’ futures?
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Professor Jan Wright and Nicole Taylor for their feedback on early versions of this paper.
Author Biography
Dr Gabrielle O’Flynn is a Lecturer in the School of Education at The University of Wollongong. In her research, Gabrielle draws on post-structural theory to critically examine historical and contemporary notions of health and physical activity. Her areas of research and publication include sociological studies of subjectivity in the areas of health, sport, dance, gender, schooling, and physical and health education.
