Deficient Populations, Deficient Policies? The Politics of Knowledge Repertoires on ‘Healthy Food’ in Obesity Prevention Practices in the Netherlands

• In Event: The Politics of Deficit Construction

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork on obesity prevention in the Netherlands, this paper explores the politics of deficit construction in health promotion practices – specifically, in relation to knowledge repertoires concerned with ‘healthy food’. Professionals identify a ‘lack of knowledge’ among families with an unhealthy weight. It follows that prevention efforts include advice on healthy living. But it appears difficult to make such advice meaningful on the ground. In practice, people grapple with a lot of, often contradictory, messages embedded in cooking traditions, printed on labels and spread through popular media. These include insights from different scientific disciplines, which often do not cohere and may inform contradictory advice. In this paper I explore why despite apparent limitations and the program’s stated commitment not to judge but ‘connect to the lifeworld of citizens’, the genre of ‘education through information’ predominantly persists in policy-in-practice, enacting obesity as a problem of badly informed choices and its affected populations as deficient. Next to pointing to the ‘deficit’ inherent in this co-construction of solutions and problems, I analyze the material semiotic relations that support it. Rather than being the result of faulty assumptions of policy makers on healthy eating, I show the genre is embedded in, on the one hand, the kind of knowledge offered (for instance on energy and nutrient content or food preparation); and on the other, in the advisory organs, research protocols, professional training, and broader intervention infrastructure that health promotion is part of. The paper thus highlights the socio-material embedding of deficit constructions.

Author

• Else Vogel, Linköping University