Short horizons and obesity futures: Disjunctures between public health interventions and everyday temporalities

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThis paper examines the spatio-temporal disjuncture between 'the future' in public health obesity initiatives and the embodied reality of eating. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in a disadvantaged community in South Australia (August 2012eJuly 2014), we argue that the future oriented discourses of managing risk employed in obesity prevention programs have limited relevance to the immediacy of poverty, contingencies and survival that mark people's day to day lives. Extending Bourdieu's position that temporality is a central feature of practice, we develop the concept of short horizons to offer a theoretical framework to articulate the tensions between public health imperatives of healthy eating, and local 'tastes of necessity'. Research undertaken at the time of Australia's largest obesity prevention program (OPAL) demonstrates that pre-emptive and risk-based approaches to health can fail to resonate when the future is not within easy reach. Considering the lack of evidence for success of obesity prevention programs, over-reliance on appeals to 'the future' may be a major challenge to the design, operationalisation and success of interventions. Attention to local rather than future horizons reveals a range of innovative strategies around everyday food and eating practices, and these capabilities need to be understood and supported in the delivery of obesity interventions. We argue, therefore, that public health initiatives should be located in the dynamics of a living present, tailored to the particular, localised spatio-temporal perspectives and material circumstances in which people live.

Why do the public support or oppose obesity prevention regulations? Results from a South Australian population survey

“…As ethnographic work in low income areas has shown, mothers’ food practices can be a painstaking process of minimising food budgets (by choosing foods that are filling and unlikely to spoil), providing foods acceptable to husbands and children (for whom popular “junk” foods can provide social acceptance and gratification), and reducing the time and energy devoted to preparing food (by choosing convenience meals) . As well, “junk” foods can provide momentary pleasures and reduce stress arising from conflicts with children, and are an instrument used to cope with the stress of financial precarity . There are therefore a complex set of motivations stemming from mothers’ balancing of caring responsibilities (more so in single parent households) with scarce time and financial resources that converge to outweigh health concerns in the provision of food in families from low socio‐economic conditions.…”

The discordant pleasures of everyday eating: Reflections on the social gradient in obesity under neo-liberalism

“…Focusing here on health promotion, Crawford argues: The logic of pleasure -the propensity to immediately satisfy desires -is apparent in the accounts of participants in the study presented here, and it is the classed aspects of this which we seek to address in this paper. Our work shares similarities with Warin et al's (2015) study exploring how obese individuals oriented themselves towards a national anti-obesity campaign in Australia. Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study in disadvantaged communities, the authors use Bourdieu's (2000) insights about the temporal orientations to practice in order to advance the idea of 'short horizons' to conceptualise the ways in which future-oriented discourses around managing risk, which are features of public health campaigns, have only limited relevance to the immediacies of poverty, contingency and survival that mark disadvantaged individuals' lives.…”

“…In their emphasis on the pleasures to be gained from the immediacy of food consumption in the context of material lack, Warin et al's (2015), study contains useful parallels. Their argument is that participants' short horizons conflicted with a more synoptic and future-oriented public health perspective and this habitus was shaped by the embodied realities of unemployment, poverty and survival.…”

“…But the psychosocial does not refer to individual behaviour or aspects of culture -sociological interrogation of the factors underpinning the gradient by scholars such as Link and Phelan (1995), Pampel (2012) and others have shed light on a wealth of factors, practices, metamechanisms and political discourses that begin to explain the enduring presence of a socioeconomic gradient in health. Factors such as gender, age and ethnicity also result in social gradients, but here we focus on the socio-economic and its relationship to obesity, given recent contributions on this theme (Pampel, 2012;Warin et al, 2015).…”

“…Rich et al (2015) argue: "One of the most powerful forms of stigmatisation and discrimination circulating within contemporary health emerges when the social and cultural tensions of social class intersect with obesity discourse" (2015: 1). This stigmatisation is brought sharply into focus in the context of contemporary health policy in England, where personal responsibility represents the doxic narrative for addressing obesity (and other 'wicked problems'), despite increasing evidence of the shortcomings of individualistic models of 'behaviour' change to address health inequalities (Baum and Fisher, 2014 The attractions of this socially undifferentiated message are obvious to policy makers, who may not want to consider the troubling issue that the unequal distribution of resourcesmaterial and agential may be implicated in obesity and other health conditions (Ulijaszek, 2014;Warin et al, 2015).…”