The Subject of Functional Foods: Accounts of Using Foods Containing Phytosterols

Abstract

This paper explores the notion of the late modern or reflexive subject, for whom consumption, rationality, autonomy and a reflexive attitude to risk are said to be constitutive. Drawing on an example of ‘ordinary’ health consumption ( GRONOW and WARDE, 2001 ), the paper addresses what kinds of consumer identities emerge in people's talk about buying or eating foods containing phytosterols. These are ‘functional foods’ which are marketed on the basis that they actively lower cholesterol. Based on interviews with people who say that they buy or eat these foods, the analysis focuses on participants’ reported trajectories relating to how this came about. Participants’ accounts contain a number of explicit and implicit reasons for buying or eating the foods, which I characterise as agential, contextual, or non-agential, depending on the degree to which they draw on the agency of the actual purchaser or eater. These different types of explanations can be ordered in terms of their appeals to rationality, risk consciousness and autonomy. In agential explanations, people talk, for example, of doing something good for themselves, or experimenting with the foods. These explanations explicitly position consumers as health conscious, autonomous and rational to varying degrees. Contextual explanations drew on, for example, the role of doctors or family history in alerting people to a potential problem. These suggest both a different sense of risk consciousness, which may be prompted or contextual, and a less autonomous kind of consumer who is connected to others through a set of family and other relationships. Non-agential explanations, for example, where people attributed their consumption to others or to habit, appeal neither to the rationality, the health consciousness nor the autonomy of the actual consumer. The analysis helps to reinforce the potentially contextual or fluctuating nature of risk consciousness, and the relational and non-instrumental aspects of daily practices.