“Healthy” food configurations: critical analysis of power relations in context

ABSTRACT

In this article, we delve into the contexts, knowledge and power relations that lead to the emergence of what we call “healthy” food configurations. These configurations are the result of particular arrangements of realms of practices, sets of knowledge, actors, events, institutions, and more that contribute to the production of various understandings and ways of approaching “healthy” food. Mobilizing a cultural studies approach and theoretical framework, we question the power relations negotiated in how/when/for whom these configurations emerge and what knowledge at the intersection of food, bodies and health they convey and produce. We analyze the elements of local context and the broader socio-cultural ideologies that permeate food cultures and inform these configurations’ emergence. Working with and navigating through public debates, alternative food practices, political and community-based discourses and practices, and food products and trends retrieved from Quebec’s (Canada) food culture, we offer a new way of approaching different understandings of “healthy” food – as many different configurations – to unveil the diversity of the actors, knowledge, and power relations at play in their situated emergence.

KEYWORDS:

• “Healthy” food
• power/knowledge
• cultural studies
• critical food studies
• food knowledge
• bodies & health

Acknowledgments

We want to express our gratitude to the reviewers of this paper who generously engaged with our ideas and our writing and shared with us insights that made this manuscript richer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Irena Knezevic contributed to the theorization of findings and writing this manuscript. She is a white, cis-gender female, who immigrated to Canada as a young adult.

2. See for instance Probyn (2016) and her situated and relational ethnographic methods, and her way of situating herself among the human-fish relationships she observes; Abbots (2017) who situates herself in the analysis she proposes; Myers (2015) and her full acknowledgment that her research work and ethnographical portrayal of lab practices bring forward certain practices or phenomena while silencing some others; or Mol (2021) who explores and theorizes her own eating.

3. Both the Health Minister and the Minister of Family and Seniors defended the powder potato meals before changing their political stance in the following months, under the popular pressure. The debate incited the government in service at that time to work on new menus to be offered (Gagné 2016), which provoked a few changes in the food served in the health care centers (although it is not clear to what extent it did).

4. The powder potato polemic is reminiscent of the traces of another “healthy” food configuration more concerned with the “natural” or “unnatural” character attributed to certain foods, which is used to assess their level of “healthiness”. This configuration appeared in other contexts such as in discussions surrounding food produced in laboratories, genetically modified food, or food heavily processed or transformed.

5. “Successful aging” discourses refer to a set of norms and ideals that promote autonomy, productive inclusion in society, and health (defined in biomedical and normative terms) in later life (Katz 2013). They are part of contemporary modes of governance of the aging bodies as they contribute to transfer the responsibility for aging healthily on the shoulders of the individuals, thus neglecting the structural and systemic inequalities that inform one’s health throughout life. Successful aging discourses have been largely criticized for imposing new norms and injunctions with regards to one’s aging body and health and for contributing to discrimination and exclusion processes of those who would not have “aged successfully” (Katz 2013; Katz and Marshall 2004; Marshall 2018).

6. This is unfortunately something that we have seen during the Covid-19 pandemic as the pressure put on the health care system and the staff shortage in these care centers (amplified by the pandemic and the prevention measures) has led to situations where elders did not have their basic needs (including being fed) met. See for example “Elders hungry and dehydrated: ‘They died of hunger’” (My translation, Richer 2020)

7. The group has announced in 2022 the end of its activities.

8. In the quote from NousRire’s website, claims are made about the purportedly altered, lowered nutritional value of the food grown or produced using chemical agents. Therefore, chemical-free crops or growth techniques are praised, in opposition to those that would modify or alter the “natural” food composition. This evokes the “healthy” food configurations discussed in the previous section and hence demonstrates how the various configurations intersect and co-inform each other.

9. This urban area is home to a very diverse population as “67% of [its] citizens are either born in a foreign country, or have at least one of their two parents born outside Canada” (Durocher’s translation, Montréal en statistiques 2018, 5). Almost half of Montreal-Nord’s population identifies as a visible minority (Montréal en statistiques 2018, 23), and “22% of the population in private households are in situation of low income” (Durocher’s translation, Montréal en statistiques 2018, 29), with its “population over 15 years-old median annual income of $23,412 per person in 2015” (Durocher’s translation, Montréal en statistiques 2018, 27).

10. “Companion” bacteria are hence opposed to the bad, threatening ones (Beck 2019; Helmreich 2014). The framing of bacteria (or germs) as a threat emerged in other contexts such as in discourses surrounding food contamination (e.g., Romaine lettuce and E. coli, or chicken and Salmonella), in industrial, commercial and domestic settings. These concerns result in the emergence of another “healthy” food configuration concerned with food safety and sanitization. We do not address further that configuration in this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture