I don’t need anybody to tell me what I should be doing’. A discursive analysis of maternal accounts of (mis)trust of healthy eating information

Abstract

Healthy eating initiatives, and messages about what one should be eating, are prolific in contemporary British society. This paper examines mothers’ talk around food and feeding to determine how trust or mistrust in healthy eating information is established and rationalised. Discursive analysis of interviews with mothers (N=12, aged 25–45) isolated two prominent discursive positions that mothers established with regards to healthy eating messages. First, they legitimised an extensive mistrust of healthy eating information and messages on the grounds that they are at best, inconsistent and at worst, grossly contaminated by stakeholder bias. Second, and in contrast, they established (most) mothers as having a wholesome, privileged, and entirely sufficient instinctive knowledge about how to feed their children. However, an out-group of failing mothers, deemed to have inadequate nutritional knowledge, was also formulated. Mothers talk thus established a central dilemma whereby to accept nutritional advice compromised a good mothering identity. We argue that nutritional messages and interventions should be sensitive to this dilemma so that they facilitate, rather than threaten, a good mothering identity.