Interrogating Moral and Quantification Discourses in Nutritional Knowledge

Biltekoff, Charlotte; Mudry, Jessica; Kimura, Aya Hirata; Landecker, Hannah; Guthman, Julie

doi:10.1525/gfc.2014.14.3.17

Cited by 25 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…4. For critiques of normalizing and moralizing tendencies in food advice, see Biltekoff et al (2014); Hayes-Conroy et al (2014); Mudry et al (2014); Yates-Doerr (2012). 5.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking with La Cocina: fats in Spanish kitchens and dietary recommendations

Martín

2018

Food, Culture & Society

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In Spain, dietary recommendations for "healthy eating" hinge on the nutrient content of foods. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in domestic kitchens, I argue that this essentializing approach fails to attend to the multiple "registers of valuation" of foods -and especially of fats -that are at work in the practice of cooking. This argument has policy implications: for dietary recommendations to transform eating practices it is necessary to take into account how, while cooking, actors draw on these various forms of valuation. Such a re-focus will make dietary recommendations more sensitive to the social and material conditions under which cooking is done and better attuned to the eating practices present in mundane culinary contexts.

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“…4. For critiques of normalizing and moralizing tendencies in food advice, see Biltekoff et al (2014); Hayes-Conroy et al (2014); Mudry et al (2014); Yates-Doerr (2012). 5.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking with La Cocina: fats in Spanish kitchens and dietary recommendations

Martín

2018

Food, Culture & Society

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“…For example, Charlotte Biltekoff (Biltekoff et al. , 22) argues that “charismatic nutrients” have helped render nutritional problems (such as micronutrient deficiencies, excess lipids, or simple carbohydrates) calculable. Charismatic nutrients index more than nutrition, in that they also carve out an evidentiary space for advocates to rally (wittingly or not) behind specific nutritional interventions in a context where nutritional experts need to “satisfy increasingly quantification‐oriented parameters.” Much of the scholarship in the area of evidence‐based policy focuses on the difficulties of knowing complex realities, but less has focused on the way in which complexity and uncertainty are both productive and actively produced.…”

Section: Complexity Uncertainty and The Scalar Logics Of Public Heamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The French National Program for Nutrition and Heath (PNNS) identifies "information education communication" (IEC) as its main strategic lever to shape food behaviors. Yet despite considerable investment in such campaigns, obesity rates continue their progression, leading some to suggest that this represents a weak strategy in the face of our strong biological drive to seek out and enjoy calorie-dense foods (Brownell and Gold 2012;Kessler 2009). Today, the idea that education through the conveying of messages could impact health behaviors seems quaint.…”

Section: Beyond Knowledge and Its Absence: Health Education And Behavmentioning

confidence: 99%

Circulating Ignorance: Complexity and Agnogenesis in the Obesity “Epidemic”

Sanabria

2015

Cult. Anthropol.

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This article examines what is said to be un/known about obesity and the ways in which attributions of knowledge or ignorance circulate in the field of public health nutrition. Risks caused by individual behaviors have been an overstated concern in public health. Obesity, like many of today's complex problems, is determined by myriad nested interactions spanning the political economies of market regulation, modes of agricultural production, the biochemistry of appetite regulation, and changing family structures. Yet public intervention—and the science produced to validate it—remains wedded to a mode of intervening that has limited purchase on the complexity with which it contends. This article draws on scholarship on the social construction of ignorance to argue that the field of evidence in obesity science is fashioned in a way that deflects attention (and responsibility) away from questions of food production and marketing and continues to frame the problem as one of individual responsibility. Rather than discrediting the veracity of evidence produced out of industry‐research partnerships that increasingly dominate public health research, this article examines how the field of evidence has been structured by these relations. It argues that the demonstration of causal relations between political and socioeconomic determinants of malnutrition and measurable health indexes is largely impossible, not simply because of the absence of good evidence but because the existing parameters of good science cannot straightforwardly reveal such relations. This, in turn, is due to the configuration of the knowable in terms of whether knowledge can be made operational.

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“…In the modern food system, and echoed in gastronomic and nutrition discourse, inequity is facilitated by practices of breakdown: of ecologies, symbioses, and organisms into parts and functional units, into insides and outsides. Scholars have put other words to this phenomenon, describing it as nutritionism (Scrinis 2008;Biltekoff 2013) and quantitative reductionism, such as equating all food to calories (Mudry 2009;Biltekoff et al 2014;Cullather 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Guest editors’ introduction: on the creative destruction of food as science

Tracy

Vaughn²

2019

Food, Culture & Society

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This introduction and special issue takes as its inspiration Kyla Wazana Tompkins' 2012 articulation of Critical Eating Studies. We examine how value is produced through the circulation and transformation of the parts that constitute eating and edible bodies. Guided by the presumed dead, done, and discarded, we find material and structural meaning by focusing not on finished goods but on by-productsboth intended and unintended. The Edible Feminisms special issue foregrounds scientific methods through which neoliberal market relations write-off matter and bodies as wastes and metabolic discontents. We explore how devaluation, or systemic discard, is built into technical modes of capitalist value production and echoes in social structure and cultural forms. In asking: what does feminism have to do with edibility? with waste and metabolic science? we illustrate the stakes of how, why and who of devalued parts and bodies. In the eleven essays of this special issue, we examine how cultural logics of devaluation (classism, racism, sexism) are related to the technical practices of revaluation (e.g. quantitative reductionism, nutritionism). We attune our readers to the messy insides of things, to food science through the Marxian concept of creative destruction.What does edibility have to do with feminism? With waste, or with metabolic health?In the late 2010s, women around the world produce a significant portionsome speculate more than halfof the world's food. Yet, women (particularly women of color) also face sharp hunger trends and gender-based barriers to resources like the land, tools and financing necessary for production (FAO; Doss 2011; Braich 2018). The lack of precise statistics, and the barriers to data collection

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Interrogating Moral and Quantification Discourses in Nutritional Knowledge

Cited by 25 publications

References 24 publications

Thinking with La Cocina: fats in Spanish kitchens and dietary recommendations

Thinking with La Cocina: fats in Spanish kitchens and dietary recommendations

Circulating Ignorance: Complexity and Agnogenesis in the Obesity “Epidemic”

Guest editors’ introduction: on the creative destruction of food as science

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