Mundane negotiations around official Danish dietary advice: connection, expert knowledge, and everyday agency

ABSTRACT

In this article, I argue that citizens’ relations with, and uses of, dietary health campaigns may be more heterogeneous than just pragmatic adaptation or tactics of resistance. The article takes a practice theoretical approach in order to focus on the links between the existing food practices and the socially expectable and normatively acceptable ways of performing healthier shopping, cooking, and eating. The empirical study, on which the article is based, is a qualitative study of Danish citizens, and the analysis shows three different, but related, kinds of mundane negotiations of the official Danish dietary advice, according to connection, expert knowledge, and everyday agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Dietary advice
• normative regulation
• healthier food
• mundane practices

Acknowledgements

This research was funded through a competitive seed funding award from Roskilde University, 2013–2016. I would like to warmly thank my colleagues in the research team around this specific data set, Pernille Almlund, Nina Blom Andersen, and Kim C. Schrøder.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This data set is one out of four in a larger research project on campaigns, carried out as part of Centre for Power, Media and Communication, Roskilde University, 2013–2016.

2. Three focus groups with 18- to 25-year-old city dwellers, three focus groups with 30- to 50-year-old people living in provincial towns or the countryside (with and without children), and two focus groups with people above 55 years living in provincial towns or the countryside. We did not explicitly sample for ethnic differences, because it would have meant too many differences inside each focus group. Although ethnic differences are of course relevant in relation to health issues and other public campaign issues (Tørslev, Nørredam, & Vitus, 2017), we prioritised gender and educational level.

3. All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

The research project, ‘Public campaigns and everyday agency’ under Centre for Power, Media and Communication, Roskilde University, 2013-16, was financed by Roskilde University as a strategic research area.