Jennifer Brady

Theorizing health at every size as a relational–cultural endeavour

Mainstream dietetics buttresses a conventional weight management agenda that is associated with weight preoccupation, body dissatisfaction, size oppression, and troubled eating. Coterminous with this agenda is healthism, which taken together, impede dietitians’ engagement with a health at every size (HAES) paradigm, a paradigm driven by concern for equality. Yet, HAES has also been critiqued for having healthist tendencies. The purpose of this paper is to explore how HAES might be reimagined through the lens offered by relational cultural theory (RCT) to offer a radical and more socially just vision of dietetic practice. We posit relational–cultural theory as a complementary theoretical perspective to deepen understandings and to politicize HAES-based dietetic practice. We suggest that RCT permits a critical, relational, and political revisioning of the weight-centred canon and elaborates HAES by emphasizing mutual empathy and reciprocal growth within and between the client and practitioner concomitantly. Moreover, questions of power, ethical survival, and knowledge emerge which is what we contend makes it possible for a socially just, nonhealthist HAES practice to flourish.

Cooking as Inquiry: A Method to Stir Up Prevailing Ways of Knowing Food, Body, and Identity

The paper develops a method of research called ‘ cooking as inquiry. ‘ This method seeks to add layers to the typically disembodied practices of social research that have long overlooked the body and the mundane rituals of foodmaking as sites of knowledge. Informed by autoethnography and collective biography, cooking as inquiry recognizes bodies and food as sites of knowledge and engages researchers as researcher-participants in reflexive, collaborative study that explores the ways in which the embodied self is performed relationally through foodmaking. In addition to a discussion of the epistemological and methodological frames of this method, this paper offers a case study that describes a project conducted by a colleague and the author.

Beyond Television: Children’s Engagement with Online Food and Beverage Marketing

Background Food and beverage marketing has been implicated in the childhood obesity “pandemic.” Prior studies have established the negative impact of television advertising on childrens dietary intake, yet few have considered the role of online food and beverage marketing, particularly within the Canadian context. Objective This study explores childrens engagement in online marketing and investigates the potential impact on their dietary intake. Methods Participants were recruited from the Ryerson University Summer Day Camp to participate in a single one-on-one semi-structured interview. Results A total of 83 children (age 7 to 13 years; mean 9.99 years; 56.3% boys, 43.8% girls) participated in the study. Fewer children thought that there is food, drink, or candy advertising on the internet (67.7%) than on television (98.8%) (p > 0.001). Awareness of online marketing increased with age: 7 to 8 year olds (23.67%; 4), 9 to 10 years (63.89%; 23), 11 to 12 years (86.96%; 20); 13 years (100%; 9). Over one-third of children had visited a website after seeing the address advertised on television (n = 32; 38.55%) or on product package (n = 29; 34.94%). Conclusions Branded internet sites, commonly featured on television and product packaging, offer new opportunities for marketers to reach children with messages promoting commercial food and beverage items. These websites are subsequently spread via word-of-mouth through childrens peer networks. The independent impact of web-based food, drink and candy marketing, as well as the synergistic effect of multi-channel product promotion, on childrens dietary intake merits further investigation.

“Officially A Vegan Now”: On Meat and Renaissance Masculinity in Pro Football

In 2012 Arian Foster, a running back for the Houston Texans of the National Football League (NFL), announced via Twitter that he is “officially a vegan now” (Foster, July 6, 2012). Fosters announcement precipitated a torrent of attention by many who worriedly debated the impact that his new diet may have on his on-field performance. In this article, we unravel the threads that have woven together a picture of who Foster is and what his decision to go vegan means. We argue that a close look at the media response reveals deeply held beliefs about masculinity, race, class, and place and the ways in which food serves in the constitution of subjectivity in the context of pro-football in Texas. We conduct a contextual discourse analysis of the popular and sports media coverage of Fosters diet using an intersectional framework to elaborate how normative masculinity is further nuanced by the meanings attributed to race, place, sexuality, sport, aggression, violence, health, and productivity.

Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada's Home Front

Book review of Ian Mosbysxa0 Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front.

Exposed social flesh: Toward an embodied fat pedagogy

ABSTRACT Recently, a small but growing literature has emerged investigating and outlining what a fat studies pedagogy might entail. Missing from much of this literature is a discussion about how the material body becomes a site through which “obesity” discourse is resisted or reproduced in the classroom. The authors attempt to fill this gap by focusing in particular on the educator’s body. They present the deepened understanding that results when three differentially positioned feminist and fat studies educator-scholars engage in a reflexive analysis regarding their experiences of teaching fat pedagogy within the academy. They argue that for educators of a marginalized topic such as fat studies, corporeal risks emerge as classrooms become spaces where the social stigma of fatness intersects with and instigates careful surveillance of (fat) bodies. Each of the authors explores her experiences of these risks, interrogating how her body is voluntarily and involuntarily interpolated (or not) into the epistemological and theoretical frames of fat studies or critical weight curricula to become a site of learning for students. In addition, the authors reflect on how critical weight and fat studies—not only through the offering of critical fat studies literature, but also through students’ readings of their teacher’s flesh, can be used in the university as a means to resist “obesity” ideology and potentiate a reconstituting subjectivity, thus reinforcing a socially just pedagogy that upholds the necessary view that bodies of all shapes and sizes count.

Food for Thought Notes on Food, Performance, and the Athletic Body

Relatively little scholarly attention has been given to the theoretical and epistemological assumptions through which food and eating are implicated as vehicles to reproduce the athletic body. The purpose of this research note is to consider potential avenues for critical inquiry into the connections between food, sport, and athletic performance. More specifically, we will investigate the relationships of food to understandings of performance-enhancing technologies. While these studies tend to focus their attention on how certain substances and practices become classified as illicit or unnatural, we argue that much can be learned by examining the other side of this binary opposition and by considering why certain substances and practices are firmly positioned outside the realm of performance enhancers. We highlight food and eating as especially fruitful sites for this type of analysis and interrogate how food is firmly positioned as unquestionably more “natural” than illicit performance enhancers.