In this article we draw on the methods developed by conversation analysis and discursive psychology in order to examine how participants manage rules, fact and accountability in a specific ideological area. In particular, we focus on how participants in online discussions on veganism manage the problem posed by alleged health threats such as vitamin deficiency. We show how speakers systematically attribute responsibility for possible deficiencies to individual recipients rather than veganism. The analysis focuses on a conditional formulation that participants use in response to the recurrent question about supposed health problems in a vegan diet (for example: if you eat a varied diet, there shouldn't be any problems). This specific construction presents the absence of health problems as a predictable fact, depending on individual practices. The use of a script formulationtogether with a modal expressionenables participants to blend morality with logic, and thereby to indirectly attribute responsibility and blame to individual rule-followers. The modal construction (including qualifications as certainly, easilyand in my opinion) also allows speakers to display a concern for saying no more than they can be sure of, thus enhancing the trustworthiness of their accounts. It is suggested that this way of managing rules and accountability may also be found in and relevant for other (than) ideological domains.

This article draws upon insights from discursive psychology to examine how participants in an Internet forum on veganism orient to the relationship between food choice, health and accountability. First, we explore the ways in which participants ascribe responsibility for health problems like vitamin deficiency to individual recipients. By suggesting individual practices as a cause for problems, speakers undermine the notion that problems arise through veganism as a matter of principle. Second, we show how participants construct solutions to individual health problems as involving mundane and simple actions. Both discursive procedures enable speakers to resist negative assumptions about the potentially complicated nature of veganism in relation to health protection.

No abstract

While identity has been a dominant topic in research on food choice, literature on identity in consumers' everyday life is scarce. In this article we draw on insights from discursive psychology to demonstrate how members of an online forum on food pleasure handle the hedonic appreciation of food in everyday interaction. We examined 40 discussions consisting of 1715 e-mails related to culinary topics. The analysis focuses on the way in which the participants of this forum work up and establish their identities as "gourmets". A dominant tool in performing this identity work is the discursive construction of independent access to knowledge of and experience with food items, so as to compete with or resist the epistemic superiority of a preceding evaluation. Data are presented with nine examples of the 73 manifestations of the construction of independent access. Contrary to sensory approaches to food choice, this study depicts the enjoyment of food as an interactional achievement rather than a pure physiological sensation. Wider implications of this study for the relation between food, identity and taste are discussed.

Responsible innovation requires mutual responsiveness between v arious stakeholders around technological innovation. But in public engagement exercises, concerns about ethical, cultural and political impacts are too easily set aside, so that no one is actually encouraged to discuss responsibilities for these impacts. A typical example in the field of food innovation is the consumer's recurring concern for natural food. In discussions, both consumers and engineers tend to consider the meaning of naturalness as subjective and private. In this chapter, we present an interdisciplinary design tool for public engagement that is more hospitable to such concerns, based on the Discursive Action Method and Techno-Ethical Imagination. We describe the advancements we made and the obstacles we faced when applying this tool in two dialogue workshops on novel foods and naturalness.