Gwen E. Chapman

“Junk food” and “healthy food”: meanings of food in adolescent women's culture

Abstract A qualitative research project was conducted to examine the meanings of foods within adolescent female culture by looking at ways in which young women classify and use foods. Ninety-three young women ages 11 to 18 participated in semi-structured individual interviews or small group discussions in which they talked about what, where, and with whom they ate. The main food classification scheme that emerged from the data analysis was the dichotomization of foods into two groups: “healthy foods” and “junk foods”. The study participants agreed on the core foods and common characteristics of foods in each group. They associated consumption of junk food with, among other things, weight gain, pleasure, friends, independence, and guilt, while consumption of healthy food was associated with weight loss, parents, and being at home. Through these associations, the food-meaning system relates to issues of adolescent development such as the maturation of relationships with family and friends, and societal pressures on women to be thin. Appreciation of meanings given to different foods within adolescent womens culture and the links between these meanings and social and developmental issues may help nutrition educators in designing intervention programs for this age group.

`It's Just Easier for Me to Do It': Rationalizing the Family Division of Foodwork:

While women continue to do the lions share of foodwork and other housework, they and their families appear to perceive this division of labour as fair. Much of the research in this area has focused on families of European origin, and on the perceptions of women. Here we report findings of a qualitative study based on interviewing multiple family members from three ethno-cultural groups in Canada. Women, men and children employed similar rationales for why women did most of the foodwork, though explanations differed somewhat by ethno-cultural group. Explicitly naming foodwork as womens work was uncommon, except in one ethno-cultural group.Yet more individualized, apparently gender-neutral rationales such as time availability, schedules, concern for family health, foodwork standards, and the desire to reduce family conflict were grounded in unspoken assumptions about gender roles. Such implicit gender assumptions may be more difficult to challenge.

A decolonizing approach to health promotion in Canada: the case of the Urban Aboriginal Community Kitchen Garden Project.

Aboriginal people in Canada suffer ill-health at much higher rates compared with the rest of the population. A key challenge is the disjuncture between the dominant biomedical approach to health in Canada and the holistic and integrative understandings of and approaches to health in many Aboriginal cultures. More fundamentally, colonization is at the root of the health challenges faced by this population. Thus, effective approaches to health promotion with Aboriginal people will require decolonizing practices. In this paper, we look at one case study of a health promotion project, the Urban Aboriginal Community Kitchen Garden Project in Vancouver, Canada, which, guided by the teachings of the Medicine Wheel, aims to provide culturally appropriate health promotion. By drawing on Aboriginal approaches to healing, acknowledging the legacy of colonization and providing a context for cultural celebration, we suggest that the project can be seen as an example of what decolonizing health promotion could look like. Further, we suggest that a decolonizing approach to health promotion has the potential to address immediate needs while simultaneously beginning to address underlying causes of Aboriginal health inequities.

Men, Food, and Prostate Cancer: Gender Influences on Men's Diets

Although healthy eating might enhance long-term survival, few men with prostate cancer make diet changes to advance their well-being. Men’s typically poor diets and uninterest in self-health may impede nutrition interventions and diet change. Food choice behavior is complex involving many determinants, including gender, which can shape men’s health practices, diets, and prostate cancer experiences. Developing men-centered prostate cancer nutrition interventions to engage men (and where appropriate their partners) in promoting healthy diets can afford health benefits. This article presents an overview and synthesis of current knowledge about men’s food practices and provides an analysis of diet and diet change behaviors for men with prostate cancer. Masculinity and gender relations theory are discussed in the context of men’s food practices, and suggestions for future applications to nutrition and prostate cancer research and diet interventions are made.

Being a ‘good mother’: Dietary governmentality in the family food practices of three ethnocultural groups in Canada

In this qualitative study with three ethnocultural groups in two regions of Canada, we explore how official dietary guidelines provide particular standards concerning ‘healthy eating’ that marginalize other understandings of the relationship between food and health. In families where parents and youth held shared ways of understanding healthy eating, the role of ‘good mother’ was constructed so as to include healthy eating expertise. Mothers expressed a perceived need to be personally responsible for providing skills and knowledge about healthy eating as well as guarding children against negative nutritional influences. Governing of family eating practices to conform to official nutritional advice occurred through information provision, monitoring in shopping and meal preparation, restricting and guiding food purchases, and directly translating expert knowledges into family food practices. In families where parents and youth held differing understandings of healthy eating, primarily families from ethnocultural minority groups, mothers often did not employ the particular western-originating strategies of conveying healthy eating information, or mentoring healthy meal preparation, nor did they regulate or restrict children’s food consumption. Western dietary guidelines entered into the family primarily through the youth, emphasizing the nutritional properties of food, often devaluing ‘traditional’ knowledge about healthy eating. These processes exemplify techniques of governmentality which simultaneously exercise control over people’s behaviour through normalizing some family food practices and marginalizing others.

People Are Just Becoming More Conscious of How Everything's Connected': 'Ethical' Food Consumption in Two Regions of Canada

In this qualitative study with three ethnocultural groups in two regions of Canada, we explore the ways reflexivity and tradition may help explain regional differences concerning ‘ethical consumption’ in relation to food. We argue that ‘reflexive modernity’ cannot be said to apply unambiguously in contemporary Canada. The food concerns of Punjabi British Columbian and African Nova Scotian participants centred more on cultural traditions than on ethical consumption. While European Canadians in British Columbia (BC) and Nova Scotia (NS) appear similar on the surface, British Columbians expressed strong commitment to discourses of ethical consumption, while those in Nova Scotia displayed almost no engagement with those discourses. In contrast, tradition was a more prominent concern in food decision-making. Availability of resources for ethical consumption both shaped and was shaped by local discourses. Differing relationships to community may contribute to reflexive ethical consumption.

Being ‘thick’ indicates you are eating, you are healthy and you have an attractive body shape: Perspectives on fatness and food choice amongst Black and White men and women in Canada

Abstract Despite recent critiques of contemporary obesity discourses that link ‘modern Western lifestyles’ to an ‘obesity epidemic’, the population’s weight remains a central concern of current dietary guidelines. Food choices that are considered beneficial to maintaining a certain weight are understood to play a key role in one’s health. This concern reflects medico-moral assumptions about the properties of food and what people should eat. However, the impact of obesity discourses on different individuals and social groups is rarely considered, although there is some evidence that people do generate, reflect and resist the norms and standards set for them, including those that relate to food/weight. In this paper, we will examine the perspectives on fatness and food choice amongst Black and White women and men living in Vancouver and Halifax, Canada. With this examination, we will challenge conventional assumptions about the singular ‘modern Western lifestyle’ that leads to obesity concerns by teasing out some of the social, cultural and political contexts within which people conceptualise issues regarding weight and make their food choices. By examining the experiences of both women and men we will also provide important insights into the gendered ways in which people engage with obesity discourses and the injunction to ‘eat healthily’ as a form of weight management.

Meanings of Food, Eating and Health in Punjabi Families Living in Vancouver, Canada.

Objective: South Asians living in western countries have increased risk for developing diet-related chronic disease compared to Caucasians of European heritage. To increase understanding of social and cultural factors associated with their food habits, this study examined the meanings of food, health and well-being embedded in the food practices of families of Punjabi heritage living in Metro Vancouver, Canada. Design: Qualitative research design. Setting: Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Method: Data collection included individual interviews with 39 members of 12 families of Punjabi Sikh origin (ages 13 to 70 years) and participant observation of a grocery shopping trip and family meal. Themes were generated through constant comparative analysis of transcripts to describe, organize and interpret influences on participants’ food decision-making in families. Findings: Participants’ descriptions of their eating habits were characterized by contrasts between elders’ reliance on traditional Indian foods and young people’s desire for their diets to include at least some ‘western’ food. Participants articulated two different understandings of how food habits affect physical health: a scientific approach that related specific food components (eg, fat, cholesterol, vitamins) to risk of chronic disease, and a view based on centuries of traditional knowledge about food. Food choice was also shaped by concerns for the psychosocial well-being of individual family members, exemplified by women’s attention to food preferences of individuals in the family. Conclusion: These findings add to understanding of the varied ways food practices are implicated in constructing ethnic identities, and provide insight into cultural influences on health behaviours.

Grocery lists: Connecting family household and grocery store

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate grocery list use in the lives of participant families in a study on decision making about food choices and eating practices.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 46 families from three ethno‐cultural groups living in two regions in Canada participated in the study: in British Columbia, 12 Punjabi Canadian and 11 European Canadian families; in Nova Scotia, 13 African Canadian and ten European Canadian families. In each family, at least three individuals over the age of 13 years, one of whom was a woman between the ages of 25 and 55 years, were interviewed. Researchers participated in a meal and accompanied each family on a grocery trip.Findings – Most family members contributed to a grocery list. The shopper(s) in the family may take the written list with them, have the list in memory, use a combination of both memory and written list, or shop without a list. Finds the articulation of taken‐for‐granted, intersecting knowledge about family, household and grocery s...

I Don't Want to be Sexist But ... DENYING AND RE-INSCRIBING GENDER THROUGH FOOD

Abstract Reporting the results of semi-structured interviews with adults and teenagers in twentytwo urban and rural families in British Columbia, Canada, this paper explores how gendered divisions of food consumption continue to exist within a supposedly “non-sexist” ideological context. With a photo elicitation technique used to stimulate discussions of food and gender, investigators found that most interview participants reproduced stereotypically gendered categories of food and ate in typically gendered ways; they did so even as they resisted the naming of particular foods as gendered. We therefore argue that while food and foodways remain gendered, the denial of them, through a process we call “performing individualism,” strengthens gender inequality by allowing gender disparities to appear not as systematic instances of inequity but rather as isolated instances of “natural” tastes and personal choice.