In Today's Market, Your Food Chooses You

News Media Constructions of Responsibility for Health through Home Cooking

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2245246
AutoresMerin Oleschuk (0000-0002-7536-0292, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen67
Número1
Páginas1-19
Fecha de publicación2020-02-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSocial Problems (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0037-7791 • E-ISSN: 1533-8533
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/socpro/spz006
OpenAlexW2924793145
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas15
Referencias citadas59

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 eaten alone or 'on the go'. In analyzing the construction of responsibility for this deterioration, I find that the sample predominately frames the production of healthy family meals as constrained by a food environment saturated with inexpensive, highly processed food, and dictated by the competing demands of paid work and inflated normative standards. Yet, when differentiating frames that define the social problem from those that offer solutions, I find that individualization prevails in the frames that target solutions. One important exception is media reporting on low-income families, which are framed as facing exceptional structural constraint. Analyzing these frames, I argue that neoliberal ideology that over-emphasizes individual agency and minimizes structural constraint operates in more subtle ways than previous literature suggests-showing some awareness of the difficulty of people's lives, but prescribing solutions that leave individuals responsible for the outcomes. These findings offer implications for understanding dominant cultural values surrounding health and the family meal, as well as the allocation of responsibility for social problems within neoliberalism more broadly

Agency (philosophy) · Constraint (computer-aided design) · Ideology · Narrative · Normative · Political science · Politics · Presumption · Public relations · Social responsibility · Social science · Sociology · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Obesity and Health Practices · Social and Cultural Dynamics