Biopower and biopolitics in the field of Food and Nutrition

Abstract

A conceptual discussion on the discourses of the social actors in the field of Food and Nutrition is proposed, presenting the existing conflicts, discursive strategies and struggles for academic legitimacy. The line of argumentation follows the biopower concept developed by Michel Foucault, who presents medicine as a knowledge-power focused at the same time on the body and the population, the human body and the biological processes, producing disciplinary results and widespread regulatory effects on society. Based on this concept it is argued that the discourses produced in the field put hegemonic and counter-hegemonic interests in confrontation, political disputes disguised by "abstract" epistemological discussions, strategies to lure consumers, life standardization and medicalization. Such discourses translate instances of power in dispute, economic interests, structural conflicts, political impasses. New elements are presented for the production of knowledge for professionals of Nutrition and for the perception of the feeding act beyond the nutritional, biological, biomedical and epistemological parameters, which in essence are clearly political once they convey tensions between the conceptual structures that also operate in the interior of the field. It is assumed that there is no such health or nutrition as abstract, neutral fields, detached from reality; such dimensions are part of the material, concrete life and carry symbolic, cultural and subjective values. Considering only the nutritional aspects of nutrition is to impoverish and weaken it, and the discussion that seems to be "merely conceptual" brings to light important issues that the professionals in the field of Food and Nutrition should address.