Mapping moralities of food and health in marketing research literature

ABSTRACT

Inspired by a former review of four sets of moralities that orient food and health research and lead to potentially harmful consequences for consumer wellbeing, this study seeks to qualify and nuance their original arguments by mapping them in a broader (epistemological, methodological and historical) context of research agendas relevant to marketing. We do so with the help of a systematic review and content analysis methods of a corpus of marketing research articles published from 1988 until today. In addition to a quantification of the extent to which various ‘symptoms’ of moralities of health and food manifest in marketing scholarship, the study provides a critical reflection on the more nuanced expressions of the alleged moralities. Consequently, it calls for increased researchers’ awareness about moral assumptions structuring formulation of research questions and operationalisation of the studied health-related concepts.

KEYWORDS:

• Food
• health
• morality meta-analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. TCR can be defined as a multidisciplinary academic project that explicitly promotes channelling theory-based research at improving the welfare and quality of life for all those affected by markets and consumption (Anderson et al., 2013; Crockett et al., 2013; Mick, Pettigrew, Pechmann, & Ozanne, 2011).

2. Food safety refers to conditions and practices that preserve the quality of food to prevent contamination and foodborne illnesses. While certainly related to health, food safety is not within the scope of this research. We are rather concerned with the more ‘positive’ health-related benefits, such as when consumers expect certain food products to possess a health-related benefit on top of the non-harm quality ensured by food safety.

3. No limits were pre-set for the timeline of articles at the stage of database search and retrieval. The earliest article dating back to 1988 reflects the ‘natural’ composition of the set of scholarly marketing publications dedicated to health and food available for researchers in the electronic bibliographic databases.

4. See (Silchenko et al., 2020) for a more detailed quantification of the bibliographic features of the sample.

5. Prior to the formation of ‘obesity’ discourse in the early 2000s, authors relied on ‘poor diet’ framing instead. A good example is a 2001 article [49] that talks about alarming statistics of people not meeting dietary guidelines, the costs of poor dietary choices to society (including direct medical costs and loss of productivity), and the connection of such behaviour to the ‘top 10 causes of death’. In other words, the article uses essentially the same ‘metaphors’ as we see in the articles that talk about obesity, without mentioning the term.

6. Given length constraints in the present work, we engage more profoundly in this discussion in a different context (Silchenko & Askegaard, In press).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ksenia Silchenko

Ksenia Silchenko is a Post Doc researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society of Università della Svizzera italiana (Lugano, Switzerland). Prior to joining academia and obtaining her PhD from the University of Macerata (Italy), she has gained experience in the field of consumer insights consulting in pharmaceutical and consumer health markets. Her research falls broadly in the area of critically-oriented and socio-cultural marketing and consumer research, with particular focus on the study of market and marketing ideologies and the topics of health and wellbeing, medicalization of life, consumer responsibilization and sustainability.

Søren Askegaard

Søren Askegaard (b. 1961) is professor of marketing and consumption studies at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) as well as a Chair at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. He has a postgraduate degree from University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a PhD in business studies from Odense University. Current research interests are globalism and localisms in consumer culture and market systems, ideologies and cultures of food and health, and the anthropos of marketing and consumption. He is the initiator of the European Doctoral School of Consumer Culture Theorizing and the Market & Management Anthropology study program at SDU. He is currently the president of the international Consumer Culture Theory Consortium.