Food Discourse Research Articles

On the epistemological limits of “real food” discourse

ABSTRACT As part of the wider discourse of “real food,” consumers today are exhorted to “know where their food comes from” and “know their farmers.” This paper presents a critical analysis of real food discourse through an analysis of popular food writing, supplemented with participant observation in farmers markets. Real food discourse argues for a “natural” way of knowing based on direct sensory experience of food and the land it comes from. Farmers figure prominently in this discourse because they are said to retain the natural wisdom that the rest of us have lost. I argue that, while intuitively appealing, ways of knowing advocated for in real food discourse obscure as much as they reveal. Specifically, I find that these ways of knowing mystify issues pertaining to labor and urban-rural relations, and conclude that their valorization limits the radical potential of local food politics.

Eating at school: on children, biopower and care in Turin, Italy

ABSTRACT Food concerns practices with material and discursive effects on bodies, involving, at the same time, relations of power and care. The international debate has widely analysed food in terms of biopolitical technologies and ethics of care, paying particular attention to school meals. In particular, school canteens constitute physical and relational contested spaces, characterized by different rationalities and perspectives. Drawing from qualitative research carried out in Turin, Italy, this paper unpacks school food discourses and practices by analysing the coexistence and entanglements of biopower and care. Starting from the awareness of the fluidity of these categories, the paper suggests that food at school be neither connected nor reduced to a dichotomous and static view. It proposes a more nuanced understanding of food practices, in which forms of productive biopower and subversive care are deeply intertwined and it discusses how children, staff and parents daily negotiate these entanglements.

Rhetoric of Food Authenticity and National Identity in the New Media

The global discourse on food often pivots around the issue of food security. With the new media, the discourse of food as a signifier of a national identity is constantly renewed and contested. This constant renewal and perpetual debate about food authenticity as the nexus of national identity from the Cultural Studies perspective is both the significance and the problem that the present study acknowledges and addresses. The aim of this paper is to identify, analyze and interpret the rhetorical strategies used by the media audience to reveal their attitude towards the issue. Using convenience sampling technique, a set of discourse samples is selected from the comment sections of articles on food authenticity across the new media. The corpus is analyzed using key concepts or canons in rhetoric, which are Logos, Ethos and Pathos. In addition, three rhetorical canons, invention, arrangement and style, are also used as units of analysis. The study finds that rhetors did not use the Logos (logic and fact) as one of their strategies to persuade readers to be on their side. Instead, they appealed to ethos (character and credibility) and Pathos (emotion). This evinces the idea that the media audience writing in a comment section in the new media are not basing their writing on the need to appeal to logic and fact (Logos), or proactively, but instead they are more reactionary (personal and emotive). This finding contributes towards the understanding of the media audience’s rhetorical strategies in the new media.

Style-shifting in Usage Instructions of Food, Beverage, and Pharmaceutical Products in Japanese Language

The present article attempts to describe the shifting use of formal and informal styles in usage instruction discourse of food, beverage, and pharmaceutical products in Japanese. The aim is to explain the background of style-shifting from a formal style, indicated by -desu in adjectives and nouns and -masu in verbs, into an informal style without any -desu or –masu forms in place. The background is reviewed through the perspectives of both sociolinguistics and pragmatics. The data were collected from various food, beverage, and pharmaceutical product packages containing usage instructions in Japanese. Study results indicate that style-shifting does not only occur through spoken language (orally) but via written discourse, which maintains unchanging external factors or definite contexts. Style-shifting is not only affected by the status of the speech partner but also more likely affected by the content of the information delivered to the consumers. Aside from occurring within a single discourse, style-shifting is also observed at a narrower level, namely within one element of discourse conveying a relatively homogenous information.

Consumption and the Indian Diaspora: A Study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

For the diaspora, consumption remains a significant exercise, as it acts as a means of appropriation of the host land, while also being an agency of assimilation and categorisation. Moreover, the fact remains that consumption or eating simultaneously entails regeneration and violence. As such, this paper justifies how the locus of consumption is multifaceted, being not only physical, but also metaphorical, and at times hyperreal, whereby the diaspora exists not only as consumers, but also as an item of consumption by the hosts. For this purpose, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) has been analysed through the methodology of close reading, to present how food and its narrative is used as a repetitive metaphor and an ideological implement, which further illuminates the technicalities of consumption among the Indian diaspora. To set the stage, this paper briefly summarises the development of food studies as a genre, which has successfully enlarged the scope of literary criticism and research. Theoretically, this paper draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s discourse of food and eating as presented in his work Rabelais and His World (1965). By examining the unifying trope of food, this paper attempts to study the numerous dichotomies between the diasporic body and the concept of the grotesque body, as put forward by Bakhtin. This paper also attends to the concept of “culinary citizenship” (Mannur, 2010, p. 20) and traces the way it is overturned in favour of culinary “interorientation” (Bakhtin, 1965/1984, p. 317).

Connoting a neoliberal and entrepreneurial discourse of science through infographics and integrated design: the case of ‘functional’ healthy drinks

ABSTRACT Riding on the rising concern of public health and the growing neoliberal self-care agenda, the food market has witnessed a surge in ‘healthy’ food despite the criticism of this food does not help consumers eat more healthily. A growing interest in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is how food marketers colonise not only the food discourse but also the broader ideas and values such as health, politics, and environment. Contributing to this growing body of research, we look at one of the fastest-growing food trends, ‘functional drinks’, which claim to target physiological and psychological processes in the body, so that consumers can manage their health and performance. Company websites rely on forms of infographics to communicate how the products work. Adopting the notion of ‘integrated design’ from multimodal CDS, we show how these infographics, drawing on their affordances, are particularly useful in symbolising classifications and causalities which could not be accounted for in running texts. The paper argues that this is a way health and science converge with a neoliberal discourse of self-management and enterprise culture. Given the increased use of forms of integrated design in communication, more critical discursive work is needed in this area.

Recognising indigenous vegetables as potential contributors to livelihoods development: a case of two district municipalities in northern KwaZulu-Natal

South Africa is a food sufficient country. Native South Africans, however, continue to suffer from food insecurity at a household level, even under contemporary democratic leadership. Influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, the study was conducted to determine the role of indigenous vegetables in rural livelihoods in the two selected district municipalities of northern KwaZulu-Natal, namely iLembe District Municipality (IDM) and the King Cetshwayo District Municipality (KCDM). A purposive sample which consisted of 130 participants (n=130) was drawn, and data were analysed descriptively using Microsoft Excel Software. Our findings point in the direction that indigenous vegetables have the potential to contribute to livelihoods development. It was also found that these vegetables can thrive under diverse climatic conditions, including both irrigated and rainfed areas. This is especially important in a country like South Africa which faces major challenges of water scarcity and household food insecurity. Most household heads in the study were unemployed and relied on government monetary incentives for survival. It is concluded that there is a need to include these indigenous crops as part of the main discussions in the food discourse and to recognise them as a tool to enhance livelihood development.

Free lunch, structural violence, and normalization: A neo-Gramscian analysis of food waste and dumpster diving

Augmenting Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony with Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence and using multiple data sources this study examines the structural phenomenon food waste and the agentic phenomenon dumpster diving. I derive my interpretations from an analysis of reports on food waste by international organizations, US media coverage of food waste, and interviews with dumpster divers. At the structural level, the analysis shows how international organizations and media frame food waste as an economic and environmental—rather than a social justice issue and how they reproduce hegemonic neoliberal conceptualizations and discourses of food and food waste. At the agentic level, the analysis shows how these hegemonic conceptualizations and discourses affect dumpster divers and how an environmental ideological motivation contains an anticapitalistic ideological motivation. Building on my neo-Gramscian analysis, I highlight the potential threat that environmental discourses might stabilize neoliberal hegemony by offering appealing consent-structures and contain more fundamental, social justice-based, critique of the neoliberal social order. To preserve its inherently critical and counter-hegemonic potential, I develop a conceptual model of food waste and discuss its relevance for critical management and organization studies.

Making privilege palatable: Normative sustainability in chefs’ Instagram discourse

AbstractIn this article we consider the discursive production of status as it relates to democratic ideals of environmental equity and community responsibility, orienting specifically to food discourse and ‘elite authenticity’ (Mapes 2018), as well as to recent work concerning normativity and class inequality (e.g. Thurlow 2016; Hall, Levon, & Milani 2019). Utilizing a dataset comprised of 150 Instagram posts, drawn from three different acclaimed chefs’ personal accounts, we examine the ways in which these celebrities emphasize local/sustainable food practices while simultaneously asserting their claims to privileged eating. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we document three general discursive tactics: (i) plant-based emphasis, (ii) local/community terroir, and (iii) realities of meat consumption. Ultimately, we establish how the chefs’ claims to egalitarian/environmental ideals paradoxically diminish their eliteness, while simultaneously elevating their social prestige, pointing to the often complicated and covert ways in which class inequality permeates the social landscape of contemporary eating. (Food discourse, elite authenticity, normativity, social class, locality/sustainability)*

“People Eat Their Dinner, Just Eat Their Dinner…”: Food Discourse in Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters and Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart

Abstract The essay sets out to explore the functions of food discourse in the plays Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov and Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley. Based on the critically established continuity between the two plays, the essay looks at the ways the dramatists capitalize on food imagery to achieve their artistic goals. It seemed logical to discuss the alimentary practices within the framework of everyday life studies (Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schütz, Fernand Braudel, Bernhard Waldenfels and others), moved to the forefront of literary scholarship by the anthropological turn in the humanities. Enhanced by a semiotic approach, this perspective enables one to understand food products and consumption manners as performing a variety of functions in each play. Most obviously, they are instrumental in creating the illusion of “everydayness” vital for new drama. Then, for Chekhov, food comes to epitomize the spiritless materiality of contemporary life, while in Henley’s play it is predominantly used, in accordance with the play’s feminist agenda, as a grotesque substitute for the lack of human affection. Relying upon the fundamental cultural distinction between everyday and non-everyday makes it possible to compare representations of festive occasions in the two plays seen through the gastronomical lens of “eating together.” Despite substantial differences, the emphases on alimentary practices in the plays serve to realize the inexhaustible dramatic potential inherent in the minutiae of quotidian life.

White Bread and Whitewashing: Whiteness and Food in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf

Summary Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf, published in Afrikaans in the year of South Africa’s transition to democracy, and in English five years later, remains one of the most powerfully cogent deconstructions of whiteness and Afrikaner nationalism to have appeared in local literature in the last twenty-five years. While a relatively large body of scholarship has analysed Van Niekerk’s interrogation of whiteness in the novel, this article focuses specifically on the everyday quotidian practices through which white- ness is maintained and perpetuated as an epistemic formation. Most Afrikaans and English criticism briefly emphasises food imagery in Triomf to signify not only the Benades’ economic impoverishment but also their moral and cultural degeneracy: the Benades – the family on which the novel centres – subsist on an unwholesome diet of margarine-smeared white bread, polony and Klipdrift brandy. However, critics’ cursory mentions of food imagery do not do justice to the nuanced and dexterous manner in which Van Niekerk employs food discourse to destabilise whiteness and show it up as a heterogenous construction. In this article, I analyse instances in the novel where the family interacts with food in various spaces in order to offer new and different ways in which whiteness can be read productively in the South African context.

Powered by healthism? Marketing discourses of food and health

PurposeDriven by the visible proliferation of marketing scholarship dedicated to the topics of food marketing and consumer well-being, this study aims to examine the prevailing meanings and assumptions around food and health in marketing research.Design/methodology/approachFollowing the guiding principles of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge and the methodological orientation of critical discourse analysis, the authors analyze a systematically produced corpus of 190 academic articles from 56 publication outlets.FindingsThe study identifies three discourses of health and food dominant in marketing and consumer research. Each of the three discourses blends the ideology of healthism with market(ing) ideologies and provides a unique perspective on the meanings of health and health risks, the principles of appropriate consumer conduct and the role of marketing in regard to consumer and societal well-being.Research limitations/implicationsThe study contributes to research into ideologies in and of marketing by introducing useful concepts that help explain the role of healthism in marketing discourse.Practical implicationsThe finding of three dominant discourses could help reduce at least some of the existing complexity in regard to conflicting knowledge existing in the domain of health and food, and thus could inspire a more reflective body of work by researchers, policymakers and marketers towards improved food-related well-being.Originality/valueThis analysis of assumptions and consequences of the meanings mobilized by the dominant marketing discourses contributes to a better understanding of the current state of knowledge about health in the market reality.

El estudio de los discursos alimentarios desde una perspectiva crítica

La alimentación, por su condición esencial como parte indisociable de la naturaleza humana, constituye una de las temáticas más relevantes para la población mundial y, por ello, se conforma como un objeto de estudio fundamental desde los ámbitos económico, antropológico, médico y, por supuesto, discursivo. Este último interesa especialmente en cuanto que las sociedades contemporáneas se caracterizan por la información excedente y normalizada sobre la alimentación que se vehicula a través de las publicaciones científicas y divulgativas. Este contexto propicia el interés que, fundamentealmente desde el año 2000, despierta el estudio de los discursos alimentarios dentro del ámbito del análisis del discurso con perspectiva crítica, pues los discursos de la alimentación resultan determinantes en la conformación del ethos de la nueva figura de consumidores y consumidoras. En este artículo se resumen las principales investigaciones que vinculan ideología y discurso alimentario realizadas en clave principalmente lingüística, más allá de los estudios de comunicación y marketing. Se conforma así como un estado de la cuestión y una reflexión teórica de utilidad para afrontar el abordaje de investigaciones lingüísticas y críticas de los discursos alimentarios.

Livestock in Evolving Foodscapes and Thoughtscapes

Humanity’s main societal and epistemic transitions also mirror changes in its approach to the food system. This particularly holds true for human-animal interactions and the consumption of animal source foods (red meat especially, and to a lesser degree dairy, eggs, poultry, and fish). Hunter-gathering has been by far the longest prevailing form of human sustenance, followed by a diffuse transition to crop agriculture and animal husbandry. This transition eventually stabilized as a state-controlled model based on the domestication of plants, animals, and humans. A shift to a post-domestic paradigm was initiated during the 19th century in the urbanizing populations of the Anglosphere, which was characterized by the rise of agri-food corporations, an increased meat supply, and a disconnect of most of its population from the food chain. While this has improved undernutrition, various global threats have been emerging in parallel. The latter include, among others, a public health crisis, climate change, pandemics, and societal class anxieties. This state of affairs is an unstable one, setting the conditions of possibility for a new episteme that may evolve beyond mere adjustments within the business-as-usual model. At least two disruptive scenarios have been described in current food discourses, both by scientists and mass media. Brought to its extreme, the first scenario relates to the radical abolishment of livestock, rewilding, a ‘plants-only’ diet, and vegan ideology. A second option consists of a holistic approach to animal husbandry, involving more harmonic and richer types of human-animal-land interactions. We argue that - instead of reactive pleas for less or none - future thoughtscapes should emphasize ‘more of the better’.

Global halal food discourse on social media: a text mining approach

ABSTRACT No previous studies have explored the distinct role played by halal food discourse on social media. This study fills this research gap by investigating the structure, dynamics and sentiments related to halal food tweets using methods borrowed from text mining and social network analytics. Based on sample of 11,700 world-wide random tweets, we used both the NRC and the AFINN lexicons to gauge worldwide sentiments towards halal food. Although results show a generally positive sentiment, the tweets also reflect a general concern about animal welfare. Community detection techniques revealed a strong homophily effect among different halal food communities. This effect occurs when actors in an environment similar to a virtual room deal with topics of common interest or discuss common agenda. Our findings hold important implications for different stakeholders as they underscore the relational nature of halal food networks and the importance of the strategic management of social media as a critical communication tool.

Food politics and development

• Current food systems are unsustainable and inequitable, requiring political transformation to meet development goals. • Understanding food politics requires combining plural approaches underpinned by diverse theories of power. • Problematiques around food production, consumption and nutrition illustrate material and knowledge politics across scales. • A 4Ds framework highlights Directions, Distribution, Diversity and Democracy in pathways of food system change. • Future food politics research agendas require triangulation amongst approaches, interdisciplinarity and engagement. Food has become both a pivotal topic in development and a lens through which to integrate and address a range of contemporary global challenges. This review article addresses in particular the interrelationship between food and sustainable, equitable development, arguing that this is fundamentally political. We offer a set of approaches to understanding food politics, each underlain by broader theoretical traditions in power analysis, focused respectively on food interests and incentives; food regimes; food institutions; food innovation systems; food contentions and movements; food discourses , and food socio-natures. Applications of these approaches are then illustrated through a set of problematiques, providing a (selective) overview of some of the major literatures and topics of note in food politics and development. Starting with the role of the state and state-society relations in different forms of food regime, we then consider the role of science and technology (and its discourses) in shaping agricultural and food policy directions before looking in more detail at rural livelihoods in agri-food systems and the politics of inclusive structural transformation. Broadening beyond agri-food systems then brings us to interrogate dominant narratives of nutrition and review literature on the cultural politics of food and eating. A concluding section provides a synthesis across the cases, drawing together the various approaches to power and politics and showing how they might be integrated via an analytical framework which combines plural approaches to describe different pathways of change and intervention, raising critical questions about the overall direction and diversity of these pathways, their distributional effects, and the extent of democratic inclusion in decisions about food pathways. We find this extended ‘4D’ approach helpful in highlighting current food systems inequities and the political options for future food systems change, and conclude by considering how it might be harnessed as part of a future interdisciplinary, engaged research agenda.

Developments and Regulations About Functional Foods in Turkey: A Literature Review

The aim of this study is to define the functional food market in Turkey and to present the official regulations concerning the labeling, promoting and advertising of functional foods. This present study is based on literature studies reported previously. Functional food market is a new sector in Turkey. So far, significant progress has been made in terms of legislation regarding this sector but it has not been finished yet. Defining the relationship between functional foods and public health, the ways in which consumers are informed and the impact of media are the major fields of argument in Turkey. Functional foods are in the growing phase in Turkey. In developing countries like Turkey, when correct and appropriate information is not provided, consumers are likely to try to compensate for their unhealthy dietary habits by consuming "functional foods" and try to cure their diseases with these products. A functional food discourse without any ethical concern could cause nutritional science to be overlooked. While the functional food market is creating opportunities and creating potential positive impacts on human health, new communication technologies are also presenting possible new threats.

The soup of the scholar: food ideology and social order in Song China

This essay explores the food discourse elaborated by Chinese intellectuals in the Song period (960–1279) and puts forward a hypothesis concerning its social function. Starting from the Bourdieusian idea that different consumption styles support different visions of the social order, I first define luxurious eating and describe its social diffusion in Song. I then document and analyze the food ideology of frugality, characterized by an emphasis on simple cooking and naturalness as well as by a form of controlled hedonism which I call “Epicurean.” Finally, I offer a sociological interpretation of this food ideology, which I understand as an expression of Song intellectuals’ cultural capital: the scholars euphemistically took position against luxurious eating and the “temporal” (i.e. economic capital dominated) vision of the social order it signified; through the ideology of frugality, they supported an alternative, “spiritual” vision of society in which status is based on culture rather than wealth.

Towards Food Policy for Europe: A Comparison of the Post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy Discourses

Abstract This paper dives into the world of policy discourses to assess the extent to which the European agencies’ discourse of the post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy incorporates the innovative impulses presented in the Common Food Policy proposal of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES food). The discourse analysis performed on European Commission and IPES food documents, showed fundamentally different foci and goals, proposed actions and understanding of the concept of sustainability. However, although the differences between the two discourses are still very large, the analysis points out that some features of the IPES food discourse are starting to become part of that of the European Commission.

건강관련 식품광고에 재현된 식품담론분석 : 몸. 안전성. 상품

본 연구에서는 건강관련 식품광고에서 식품담론이 구성되고 유포되는 방식을 탐사하기 위해 담론분석을 수행했다. 푸코의 분석범주들을 차용해 식품담론의 대상들, 식품담론을 구성하는 주요 주체 그리고 새롭게 구성된 식품개념들의 영역을 규명하고자 했다. 분석결과, 안전성, 몸, 상품, 효능, 전문성이 식품담론의 주요 대상으로 다루어지고 있었다. 주요 주체는 전문가로서 생산자, 식품구매자로서 소비자 그리고 정보 전달자로서 기자였다. 식품담론은 자아통제규율에 의해 작동되는 지속가능한 몸 관리와 소비규율에 의해 작동되는 자본주의 실존이란 새로운 개념영역으로 구성되고 있었다. 몸 관리는 나이를 초월한 필생의 프로젝트라는 새로운 지식이 수립되고 있었으며 집단정체성을 실천하는 표준적 행동규범으로서 건강관련 식품의 소비 트렌드를 추종해야 한다는 점이 강조되고 있었다. 결국 건강관련 식품은 ‘관리의 주체되기’와 ‘현대인 되기’라는 차원에서 재구성되고 있었다. 지속가능한 몸의 유지를 위한 건강관련 식품소비의 필요, 실재성의 확보를 위한 트렌드의 강조는 소비주의 이데올로기를 강화하고 있었다. 또한 몸의 생물학적 동질성, 건강관련 식품의 집단적 소비상황을 강조함으로써 집단주의 이데올로기가 재구축되고 있었다. 자유로운 선택권을 지닌 소비주체는 식품산업에 의해 통제되는 후기 자본주의적 실존을 의미한다.