Figure 3 - uploaded by Merin Oleschuk
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
This article examines North American national news media's 2015-16 presentation of family meals. Analyzing 326 articles, I identify the ubiquity of a narrative of deterioration, or the presumption that families are replacing meals made from whole, unprocessed ingredients consumed communally around a table, with processed and pre-prepared foods eate...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... Narratives acknowledging structural conditions that limit low-income families' food choices, such as poverty and food insecurity, are highly prevalent when framing both the problem and the solution for this group. 10 As Figure 3 shows, structural narratives account for 77 percent of the diagnostic frames (p<0.001) and 72 percent of the prognostic frames (p<0.01) for low-income families. This differs from the findings within the general sample, by recognizing that structural constraints shape the social problem and acknowledging that solutions necessitate change beyond the individual when framing low-income families. ...
Citations
... They perceive a lack of control on purchases, denouncing the utter difficulty and impossibility of choice, even as they strive to comply to healthy and sustainable lifestyle standards. Information is often ambiguous, uncertain, and unreliable, leading to frustration and anxiety, with a poorly regulated and little transparent use of labelling (Oleschuk, 2020). The "technologisation of communication" manipulates and commodifies values of health, ethical worker's treatment, environmental sustainability (Eriksson & Machi, 2020). ...
In contemporary Western societies food and diet are strongly linked with health, in part due to the increasing medicalisation of nutrition. More recently, sustainability is also entering eaters’ kitchens, via their awareness that food production and consumption contribute to environmental and climate crises. An increasingly shared rhetoric suggests that the pursuit of health and sustainability might go together, so that promoting healthy eating might also encourage people to adopt more ecological diets. Yet, this nexus is little studied for how it is manifested in everyday life practices. This chapter considers three ways in which the health–sustainability nexus is manifested in people’s relations with food, with a special reference to digitalised consumption practices. The pursuit of health might promote less impactful ways of consuming food, but with caveats. If deployed individually, the rhetoric of responsibility and choice puts the burden of sustainability on single subjects, depoliticising these matters. If articulated within kin relations, concerns around health go hand in hand with caring for humans and non-humans; yet, there is the risk that these practices will remain depoliticised and reinforce unequal gender relations. The most transformative articulation of this nexus emerges in the context of experiences of collective consumption, where concerns of bodily health are understood as directly related to the health of the community and territory.
... However, we do not have evidence that this is explicitly the case. Authors have argued that the family meal has long been asserted as an ideal, and not a certifiable institution found in every home in the past (Murcott, 1997), and that the ritual of coming together for the family meal has been more variable over history than acknowledged by those proclaiming its decline (Murcott, 1997;Jackson et al., 2009;Oleschuk, 2020). However, contemporary families are still judged, and judging themselves, against these depictions of a family meal ideal that likely never existed. ...
... The associations between family meals and health outcomes place The family meal, a ritual frozen in time 9 additional pressures on parents to ensure not only that family meals occur regularly but that they are healthful, positive and instructional. Family meals are moralized as the 'right thing to do' for children's health, but the burden is consistently placed on parents to achieve them (Oleschuk, 2020). This was evidenced by participant's trade-offs between desires to expand their children's palates by exposing them to new foods, against fears of their children's growth and development suffering if they did not eat their meals, as seen in prior literature (O'Connell & Brannen, 2016a). ...
Family meals are recognized as an opportunity to promote the health of families. Popular discourse posits that changes to contemporary family life have made family meals harder to achieve and promotion of the ‘traditional’ family meal may be adding pressures to contemporary families. While research has been conducted on family meals over the last three decades, there is no explicit investigation of the experiences and practices of family meals over this time. Understanding the evolution of family meal practices across time is important for developing achievable expectations in relation to this ritual. Qualitative interviews were conducted with a diverse population of South Australian parents in the 1990s (n = 32) and with a separate population of parents in 2020 (n = 22) to gather their experiences of family meal practices. A comparative analysis, informed by grounded theory, was undertaken to identify similarities and differences in experiences across these two time periods. The results indicated stability in many family meal experiences across time, particularly in their value and significance in family life. Negotiations balancing time, cost, food preferences and responsibility persisted. The stability of family meal values and practices is important to consider when making recommendations, designing interventions and creating services targeting the family meal.
... The framing was then circulated to the public that has the potential to become an insight into shared social values at a broad level which ultimately influences public opinion, government decisions and policies, and community collective actions. 28 The results of the analysis also found how online media framed their story about the discourse on the tobacco advertising ban and how they chose issues and highlighted certain aspects, determined which facts were taken and displayed or omitted certain parts, and how the story would be directed. News story that supported, rejected, or was directed to be neutral towards the discourse on tobacco advertising ban was a framing of reality by formulating problems, causes of problems, providing moral judgments, and offering different solutions. ...
Background and purpose: One industry that allocates quite a lot of budgets for advertising is the tobacco industries, which is still allowed with restrictions. Along with efforts to protect the public from negative exposure to tobacco products, tobacco control activists are discussing a total ban on tobacco advertisement in various media. The campaign to voice a total ban on tobacco advertisement has also reported in online media coverage. The purpose of this study is to determine the frame of online media coverage of the tobacco advertisement ban discourse. Methods: This research analyzed online media news stories in January – April 2022 period about the discourse on the tobacco advertising ban using framing analysis method with a qualitative approach. This study analyzes the frame of online media news stories related to the discourse of a total ban on tobacco advertisement. Results: This research found that there were two tones of news story in online media about the discourse of tobacco advertising ban, namely those that supported and those that rejected. News story with a supportive tone usually took source person from the civil society groups that support tobacco control, while news story with a rejection tone usually placed the tobacco industries as a disadvantaged party which in the end also harmed the workers and tobacco farmers. Conclusion: The discourse of tobacco advertisement ban was framed in different way by online media. There are at least two different tones in media coverage of the discourse, namely those that support the tobacco advertisement ban and those who reject the tobacco advertisement ban, although more news was found to be supportive.
... Importantly, Benford and Snow (2000) assert that the way a problem is articulated restricts what solutions are considered possible and limits the strategies that are proposed. In fact, recent work has demonstrated that fruitful critical analysis can arise when examining the incongruency between prognostic and diagnostic frames (Oleschuk 2020;Huddart Kennedy et al. 2018). Huddart Kennedy et al. (2018) make a generative contribution to framing theory by drawing on Perrin's (2006, p. 2) concept of democratic imagination, which suggests that "what you decide to do (or not do) is based largely on what you can imagine doing: what is possible, important, right, and feasible." ...
... Instead, it supports the dominance of corporate power, trusting the private sector to handle a public health crisis. This frame also suggests that even when diagnostic frames are robust and describe a series of topics to articulate the problem, we can find incongruencies between prognostic and diagnostic frames (Oleschuk 2020;Huddart Kennedy et al. 2018). ...
The human labor and animal inputs required to manufacture meat products are kept physically and symbolically distanced from the consumer. Recently however, meatpacking plants received significant news media attention when they emerged as hotpots for COVID-19 — threatening workers’ health, requiring plants to slow production, and forcing farmers to euthanize livestock. In light of these disruptions, this research asks: how did news media frame the impact of COVID-19 on the meat industry, and to what extent is a process of defetishization observed? Examining a sample of 230 news articles from coverage of US meatpacking plants and COVID-19 in 2020, I find that news media largely attributes the cause for the spread of COVID-19 in meatpacking plants to the history of exploitative working conditions and business practices of the meat industry. By contrast, the solutions offered to address these problems aim at alleviating the immediate obstacles posed by the pandemic and returning to, rather than challenging, the status quo. These short-run solutions for complex issues demonstrate the constraints in imagining alternatives to a problem rooted in capitalism. Furthermore, my analysis shows that animals are only made visible in the production process when their bodies become a waste product.
... To this end, sociologists' second core contribution is in situating family foodwork within an ideological context that (1) idealizes home-cooked meals and (2) laments the decline of family foodwork. Here, sociologists have worked to reveal how normative ideals around foodwork that valorize home-cooked, shared family meals have long circulated in the public sphere (Davis & Marshall, 2016;Oleschuk, 2020b;Ristovski-Slijepcevic et al., 2010). ...
... Central to the dominant representation of foodwork today in countries throughout the Global North such as the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia is the presumption that family foodwork is dwindling (Bowen et al., 2014;Koch, 2015;Murcott, 1997). Concerns around foodwork manifest in fears over "consumer deskilling," or the erosion of practical cooking skills over generations, and over "declining family meals," or reductions in the quality and quantity of time families spend preparing and sharing meals at a dinner table (Murcott, 2012;Oleschuk, 2020b). To some extent, concerns about declining family meals are rooted in empirical realities. ...
... Why do contemporary discourses about declining family meals gloss over these important social and cultural transformations and instead situate them within families' "poor" choices? Sociological research emphasizes that broader anxieties about family meals fixate on everyday feeding practices due to the contemporary emphasis on individual, rather than collective, responsibility for health and social reform under neoliberalism (Oleschuk, 2020b). ...
Widespread inequities in diet and nutrition present a pressing public health problem. Sociologists working to illuminate the causes and contours of these inequities often center the role of family foodwork, or the multifaceted domestic labor that supports eating, including planning and preparing meals. Mounting sociological scholarship on foodwork considers how food's meanings are socially patterned to reflect broader social structures, ideologies and institutions that influence their manifestation and families' resources to enact them. Here, we present three core contributions from the sociology of foodwork that can advance essential transdisciplinary conversations around nutrition disparities as well as efforts to tackle these disparities. We lay out how (1) family foodwork is historically rooted in broader structures of capitalist exploitation and women's subordination, and today remains gendered through normative discourses equating “good” feeding with “good” mothering; (2) the moralization of foodwork is buttressed by an ideological context idealizing homecooked meals and lamenting foodwork's decline, and; (3) foodwork—and societal evaluations of it—are shaped and stratified by intersecting gendered, classed, and racial inequalities. After reviewing each contribution and its importance for addressing nutrition inequities, we conclude by advocating for a closer conversation across disciplines and highlighting important future directions for sociologists.
... We coded the text of the pages of each sentiment coalition for particular framings of processed food (see supplemental material, Appendix 2). A first set of frames was defined deductively based on academic papers about food technology issues (Aschemann-Witzel et al., 2019;Marks et al., 2007;Nisbet & Huge, 2007;Nisbet & Lewenstein, 2002;Oleschuk, 2020). These frames were: "environmental harm", "environmental opportunity", "health opportunity", "health threat", "home cooking", "many possibilities", and "safety concerns". ...
... Health threat (adapted from Nisbet & Lewenstein, 2002) Processed food poses a health threat "If you eat a lot of highly processed foods, you risk getting too much sodium, added sugars and unhealthy fats." Home cooking (adapted from Oleschuk, 2020) Home cooking is preferable "Cook more meals at home"; "one major change in dietary patterns in the last 70 years has been the decline of home cooked meals, and the increase in ultraprocessed foods. Tip the balance! ...
The framing of processed foods by groups of positive, negative or balanced online actors expresses the public mood about processed food and at the same time influences public views and policy. In this paper, we studied the framing of processed food by online sentiment coalitions – groups of online actors that are united by their positive, negative, or balanced stance towards processed food. We innovatively integrated digital methods with textual and visual analyses of 164 webpages and 344 online visualizations published by a total of 89 actors, such as academics, food technologists, journalists, governmental actors, NGOs, industry actors, nutrition specialists. The analysis shows that the online “dream” coalition of processed food framed it in a way to convey the human aspects of food processing: processed food is understood as a way to improve human lives, and photographs of industrially processed food produced by humans show it is not as industrialized as often thought of. The online “nightmare” coalition of processed food framed it primarily as posing health threats and accompanied this with photographs of unhealthy but colourful foods. The balanced coalition gave a balanced description of the benefits and drawbacks of processed food and accompanied this frame with photographs emphasizing the difficulty in making food choices. Extending the knowledge about the ways sentiments about processed food are communicated online is essential as it provides important insights into people’s understanding of the notion of “processed food” and the meaning that is given to it by various online interpretive communities.
... Dwyer ym., 2015;Mure ym., 2014;O'Connell & Brannen, 2016), normien (mm. Oleschuk, 2020) ja tunteiden (mm. Wilk, 2010;Wright, 2015) sekä etenkin sukupuoleen liittyvien näkökulmien (mm. ...
The article examines ecologically sustainable and informal food education as a part of foodwork in families with children. We approach informal food education as situations, in which one or several family members pursue to change the family’s activities. Data consists of cooking videos and stimulated recall interviews collected from three Finnish families. The analysed data is delineated to situations, in which the pursuit connected to ecological sustainability generates tensions (i.e. disagreements and conflicts) between family members. The nature of the compromises that were reached based of these tensions were analyzed with the help of the definition of shared food sense (joint understanding, collective application, re-definition of coaction). Results illustrated the primacy of the aims of foodwork (feeding the family and building togetherness) in relation to those of informal food education (here: increasing the use of vegetables and vegetable-based foods). Thus, the aims of foodwork can hinder aspirations to change towards ecologically sustainable food practices. We suggest the definition of collective food sense as a tool for aspirations to change practices in communities, and as an aid in analyzing the compromises that are arrived at as a result of these endeavours. Further research is needed to investigate the significance of collectivity when aiming for change in the context of daily foodwork.
Key words: informal food education, shared food sense, foodwork, families with children, vegetable-based food
... While the family meal may be viewed as an isolated occasion, it is an occasion steeped in value, tradition, and symbolism (DeVault, 1991;Murcott, 1997;Wilk, 2010). There are many expectations surrounding the family meal from societal discourse, past life experiences and health recommendations (Oleschuk, 2020;Wilk, 2010;Woolhouse, Day, & Rickett, 2019). The family meal is largely constructed in the media as a positive social practice, and practices that deviate from the normative expectations constructed in the media are often vilified (Oleschuk, 2020;Wilk, 2010). ...
... There are many expectations surrounding the family meal from societal discourse, past life experiences and health recommendations (Oleschuk, 2020;Wilk, 2010;Woolhouse, Day, & Rickett, 2019). The family meal is largely constructed in the media as a positive social practice, and practices that deviate from the normative expectations constructed in the media are often vilified (Oleschuk, 2020;Wilk, 2010). The dominant messages about family meals, the role they play in protecting children, and the responsibility of parents to ensure they are conducting them in a meaningful way, not only creates tensions for parents, but does not account for the many different household types and experiences that exist in contemporary society (Wilk, 2010). ...
... The associations between family meals and health outcomes places additional pressures on parents to ensure not only that the family meal happens regularly, but that it is also healthful, positive, and instructional. This is particularly evident in the context of neoliberalism, where family meals are moralised as the 'right thing to do' for children's health, but yet there are minimal structural efforts in place to help families achieve them (Oleschuk, 2020). Parents have described experiencing feelings of anguish at being unable to live up to their past experiences of family meals, or the expectations of delivering this normative representation of family meals placed on them in contemporary society (Wilk, 2010). ...
The family meal has been recognised as an integral part of family life. With the positive health outcomes associated with the family meal, it has been proposed as a strategy for encouraging health-promoting behaviours. However, a detailed understanding of the physical and mental work required to execute the family meal is lacking. The aim of this research was to conduct a grounded theory study to understand the components required to successfully execute the family meal. Two temporal data sets (1993-4/2020) in which diverse participants were sampled were used for this study. Methods used to conduct qualitative interviews with parents in the 1990s were mirrored in the conduct of qualitative interviews with parents in 2020. The interview data was analysed drawing on grounded theory methodology and methods. The entire sample included 54 parents from 28 families. A conceptual framework, 'The Family Meal Framework', was developed from the analyses. The five main components of The Framework are the cognitions (invisible work considering the needs of the family), actions (physical tasks required for the family meal), outcomes (the event of the family meal), the beliefs and feelings (expectations and attitudes toward the family meal), and the person(s) responsible (who undertakes the work). This framework provides a novel theory describing the reactive, cyclical nature of the work required to execute the family meal. This new understanding provides discrete opportunities for intervention in family meal research, practice, policy and promotion.
... These scholars reveal how the structural turn within "obesity" literature still relies upon individualized interventions at the level of personal consumption (Guthman 2011c;Kirkland 2011;Oleschuk 2020). Situating health as a discourse of power, scholars point to the morally and politically charged construction of "obesity" (LeBesco 2009), even in the midst of structural accounts -suggesting the stickiness of fat individuation and moralization (Metzl and Kirkland 2010). ...
... As Kirkland (2011) shows, the obesogenic environmental account, while claiming to shift responsibility away from individual choices onto institutions, nonetheless ultimately positions fat bodies as the site of transformation. Consequently, while food and environmental justice scholarship points to structural drivers of fatness, focus nonetheless remains on individual-level consumption-based solutions for health (Oleschuk 2020). These scholars further underscore how a focus on fat precludes us from understanding the more varied and expansive threats to human wellbeing within food and environmental systems (Guthman 2011c;Kirkland 2011;Mollow 2017;Saguy 2012). ...
Fat studies has produced tremendous theoretical contributions that upend hegemonic discourses posing fatness as a social problem. In spite of some key contributions, food and environmental justice literatures both have been slow to fully integrate fat studies perspectives into the study of food and environments. This paper seeks a more systematic integration of fat insights within both literatures, offering several points of departure based on existing thematic convergences. This discussion serves to establish a research agenda for scholars of critical food studies and environmental justice for transforming the existing sluggishness into a systematic treatment of the role of anti-fat discourses and structures in food and environmental systems.
... However, positioning parents as solely responsible for their children's food practices incorrectly places the consequences of systemic inequalities on the backs of caregivers. In doing so, this representation of parenting obscures the multiple structural inequities that shape the conditions within which parents make daily choices [61,68]. These are especially inherent to gender positions, socio-economic and parental status. ...
There exists a normative representation of family meals in contemporary Western societies which is promoted as imperative through public health programs, larger discourses and by some studies in the nutritional and public health research fields. Family meals, also called domestic commensality, are represented as convivial events and are associated with positive health and wellbeing outcomes but there is minimal evidence to show they are beneficial for family members and it is not known which aspect of the family meal could be responsible for these alleged benefits. This normative family meal image is based on a representation of the family as a peaceful unit exempt from external constraints. This narrative literature review of qualitative studies of family meals seeks to put forward the underlying premises of this representation and compare it with reports about actual practices. The results emphasize that eating together is still practiced and remains valued by family members, which is in contrast to discourses lamenting the decline of the family meal. However, the valorisation and recurrence of family meals depends on class, gender and cultural positions. There is a gap between the norm of healthy or convivial and achievable family meals, which can reinforce the so-called “mental load” and “emotion work” of those in charge of feeding the family and heighten inequalities within the household. In fact, there are many challenges to family meals which originate from external constraints or are inherent aspects of family life. The results from this review suggest that we should focus on family meals by taking into account the food work surrounding it and focussing on the interactional aspects of family meals. Ethnographic methods allow the researcher to observe the diversities and complexities of commensality as well as family dynamics and, in doing so, could provide more realistic representations of eating within the family.
