The fantasy of healthy food: desire and anxiety in healthy food guide magazine

ABSTRACT

Healthy Food Guide (HFG) has been a hugely successful magazine, both dominating the health magazine market and becoming deeply imbedded within the public health discourse, sanctioned and legitimated through a range of State apparatuses. Central to this has been an ability to differentiate itself from ‘restrictive diet programs’ and other forms of ‘misleading’ health advice, which they claim, unlike their magazine, are ungrounded in the latest scientific evidence. Through a qualitative analysis of the lead article in every issue of HFG from 2005 to 2017, we question its endorsement by New Zealand public health agencies, arguing that it acquires revenue through the intensification of health anxiety within its target readership. It does this through constructing its ideal reader as a health entrepreneur within the discourse of new public health, able to collect the right information to make the appropriate consumer choices, within a risk-saturated marketplace. A key contribution of this article is bringing a Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to the broad area of public health, which has been so far under-applied. By linking Lacanian theory to the health entrepreneur, we developed that concept by foregrounding the roles of desire and anxiety in healthism discourse. We argue that the consumer of HFG is bound to its libidinal economy in a relation of domination, whereby they are given the task of allaying anxiety through the collection of data on their bodies, information which only produces more anxiety.

KEYWORDS:

• Lacan
• public health
• desire
• anxiety
• health magazines

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Figure accurate as at April 2017 (see Magazine 360°, 2018).

2. New Zealand is broken into 20 different districts, each run by a health board – hence a District health Board is a front-line health agency, each of these include a public health promotion function.

3. An academic database search using the terms ‘Magazine’ and ‘Lacan’ retrieved only two relevant results, and another search under the terms ‘Health ‘Magazine’ and ‘Lacan’ retrieved no results.