Item – Theses Canada

​
OCLC number
1030147373
Link(s) to full text
LAC copy
Author
Amend, Elyse,
Title
Consuming quantification and recipes for resistance digesting Canada's food guide
Degree
Ph. D. -- McGill University, 2018
Publisher
[Montreal] : McGill University Libraries, [2018]
Description
1 online resource
Notes
Thesis supervisor: Darin Barney (Supervisor).
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
"Mainstream nutrition advice found in public health campaigns, educational settings, news articles, and countless other sources circulates quantitative discourses of food and eating with roots in early 20th century nutrition science. This top-down approach that "translates" nutrition for laypeople and provides tools to measure eating and its effects on the body, however, has been critiqued as abstract and difficult to apply in practice. A result of a "nutritionally confused environment" (Scrinis, 2008) is that the disempowered eater is positioned as lacking knowledge and in need of "expert" intervention to learn how to "eat right" and become "healthy."This dissertation project studies how knowledge, expertise and power operate through nutrition guidance and policy in Canada. It investigates this by interrogating the institutional history of the state-mandated Canada's Food Guide, with specific focus on the processes and decisions surrounding its most recent version, released in 2007. It also turns attention to how the guide and its dietary advice are mobilized pedagogically as an expert source in elementary and high school classrooms. This research applies a biopolitical frame to question how nutrition truth discourses and their technologies of surveillance function to produce "healthy Canadian" subjects. It also mobilizes Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) theory of discourse to explore how dominant discourses, or what some feminist nutrition scholars refer to as "hegemonic nutrition" (Hayes-Conroy, 2013), disseminate "common sense" ideas about eating that marginalize and exclude complex economic, political, ethical, and sociocultural issues tied to food. A main goal of this project is to contribute ideas about how dietary education and communication can move beyond scientific and quantifiable norms to address the complexities of nutrition and our relationships to food and eating to improve existing policies and approaches."--
Other link(s)
digitool.Library.McGill.CA
escholarship.mcgill.ca
escholarship.mcgill.ca