‘Jamie’s Sugar Rush’: A critical analysis of discourses around health, food, and responsibility

Abstract

In recent decades, there has been widespread concern pertaining to an ‘obesity epidemic’. This has been accompanied by considerable media attention documenting the causes, dangers, and ‘solutions’ to this apparent ‘health crisis’. Discourses circulating in the media about health, food, and eating practices are commonly taken up and reproduced by individuals and thus constitute our subjectivities. Previous work has identified that such discourses intersect with class and gender identities and therefore a key aim of this research was to identify some contemporary discourses available to us around the ‘obesity epidemic’, paying particular attention to the classed and gendered dimensions of these. The source analysed was ‘Jamie’s Sugar Rush’, a television programme about sugar and health, presented by celebrity chef turned health campaigner, Jamie Oliver. The data were analysed using a poststructuralist style of discourse analysis. It was found that obesity and poor health were constructed as a ‘risk’ to all and framed as a consequence of poor lifestyle ‘choices’. Although the food industry was somewhat acknowledged as responsible for the ‘childhood obesity epidemic’, it was predominantly individuals – and more specifically mothers – who were positioned as responsible for their health and that of their children, through the provision of healthy, home-cooked meals. It is argued that this positions ‘healthy’ individuals as those who have made ‘good, middle-class choices’. Conversely, those deemed ‘unhealthy’ are positioned as blameworthy whilst simultaneously detracting from wider structural factors that privilege some individuals over others. These discourses were underpinned by patriarchal gender roles and neoliberal ideologies.