Optimizing food through or without technologies? Nutritionalization in France, from digital health to fasting revival

• In Event: Metabolic Relations, Subjects, Differences

Abstract

This proposal, at the crossroads of STS and socio-anthropology of food, lies in a research program focused on the multiple ideologies that can be harnessed to the quest for optimization. The latter operates as a normative injunction to maximize the use of the self in order to secure health and/or to produce well-being. Furthermore, through its reflexive effects the injunction to optimality opens a space for some critical appropriation.
Food appears as a good way to investigate this optimization process since it constitutes, at the same time, an important center of injunctions – what can be called nutritionalization – and a political issue. One of our research questions is to understand to what extent digital health (apps, smart watches, etc.) plays a role in this injunction/appropriation process. 
Our presentation will aim at clarifying how the users of these technologies can also be engaged in some practices, such as fasting, that are theoretically seen as opposed to the digital vision of nutritional optimization. How does digital health meet any ancient technologies of the self? Thus, food practices can be seen as a form of syncretism when the power of digital health is associated with the potential of our biological nature. We will build on an exhaustive analysis of the “fast and hike” cures online offering in France, as well as a participative research led within a “fast and hike” center, to reveal the fluidity of technologies and the ways in which individuals make some original assemblages.

Authors

• Tristan Fournier, CNRS

• Sébastien Dalgalarrondo, EHESS/CNRS