Doing Energy or Commensality? Some dissonances between dietary guidelines and social eating practices

• In Event: Metabolic Relations, Subjects, Differences

Abstract

One prominent yet somewhat contested response to Australia’s growing obesity rate is public dietary education, a prime example being the 2013 Australian Dietary Guidelines. When analysed as a kind of bio-pedagogy, the Guidelines’ strategy for intervention becomes curious (Wright and Harwood 2009). According to the Guidelines (NHMRC 2013, p. 1), ‘excess energy intake’ is now a key public health problem in Australia. If we are to take this at face value, what then should be done with energy? How can it be better handled by eaters? Eating will be improved, as the Guidelines advise, through calculation and control (Mol 2012). For example, one can use a virtual ‘daily energy requirements calculator’ to receive the ‘necessary’ amount of energy one requires. Yet in spite of the efforts made by the National Health and Medical Research Council, approximately four percent of Australians adhere to the recommendations (Food Australia 2016). In this paper, I am interested in how energy becomes enacted in social eating practices, or not. I ask the question: how can energy be enacted through calculative technologies and methods when rituals and rules of commensality may oppose it? By drawing on the STS term ‘enactment’ I engage with ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Uruguayan Social and Sporting Club. As well as having deeply affective capacities, the ways and outcomes of doing commensality starkly contrast a criterion for ‘doing energy’. By integrating commensality and enactment, this paper hopes to contribute to STS scholarship by problematising bio-pedagogical methods adopted in public dietary education.

Author

• Elsher Lawson-Boyd, University of Sydney