QUÉ BELLO ES VENDER SINOPSIS

In this chapter we examine interviews with families that were undertaken to examine family eating habits. The nature and selection of these families are given in the Appendix. Here we might briefly say that all were two-parent families with children of a variety of ages. In each family, however, there was at least one child between five and twelve years old.

The interviews were conducted in the families’ homes, principally with the adults who have mainly been identified here as ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’ or ‘cou-ples’. We should recognise, however, that these subjects occupied other positions, such as ‘wives’, ‘husbands’, ‘citizens’, ‘consumers’ and so on. Each of these posi-tions is discursively constructed by different knowledges and practices and different ethical possibilities. So, for example, we saw in earlier chapters the way that discourses on motherhood provided a range of knowledges and practices around food choice which defined what it is to be a mother in Australia. Nettleton (1991: 103–106) also shows us that, with regard to the dental health of children, women can be discursively positioned as ‘natural’ mothers (those who are natu-rally endowed with intuition regarding the proper care of children’s teeth),

‘ignorant’ mothers (those with children who have carious teeth), and ‘responsible’

mothers (those who actively take charge of their children’s teeth). In the same way, discourses on nutrition provide positions around food in relation not only to parental responsibilities, but also to consumer concerns and citizen obligations.

If Foucault is right in asserting that subjectivities are produced by discourses then it should be easy to identify subject positions through the knowledges and practices of respondents; for example, what subjects say about themselves and their practices when discussing family food habits. An analysis of these conversa-tions should not require an interpretation of the subject posiconversa-tions. In other words, complicated and ideological analysis, directed at finding out what is ‘really’ going on, should not be necessary. Subject positions should be easily available – ‘on the surface’ as it were – of the discourses which construct them. This is because nutri-tion as a discourse defines and delimits what individuals can be in the context of food, health and family life.

These interviews will be framed by the ‘technologies of the subject’ developed by Foucault. Technologies here are taken to mean ‘matrices of popular reason’:

they provide ways for individuals to rationalise and justify their beliefs, under-standings and practices. For Foucault there are four main types of technologies:

1 Technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform and manipulate things.

2 Technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification.

3 Technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivisation of the sub-ject.

4 Technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being so as to trans-form themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity,wisdom, perfection or immortality.

(Foucault, 1988a: 18) Foucault believed that his own work focused mainly on technologies of power and technologies of the self. We will attempt, then, to examine these technologies as they occur in the interviews where subject positions are produced, on the one hand, through a government of nutrition (institutions, procedures, tactics, calcula-tions, knowledges and techniques) and, on the other, through an ethics of nutrition which involves a problematisation or decipherment of the self by the self.

Family food and meal arrangements

In the last chapter, we saw how family life was produced and realised in discourse.

We saw how expert understandings of the roles of parents ‘infuse and shape the personal investments of individuals, the ways they formed, regulated and evaluated their lives, their actions and their goals’ (Rose, 1990: 129). The role of food in the family provides an opportunity to further examine the construction of family life.

During the interviews couples were asked to describe the way meals in the family were arranged.¹

Extract 1

Cassie: I think it’s good for a family to sit down and eat together. I mean there’s ((pauses)) people are so busy these days they don’t sort of have time to sit down and chat about the day’s activities or work or whatever. And I mean you know with little kids you’re not going to get a great deal of conversation out of them, but it’s nice to be able to sit together as a fam-ily. I mean I did it as a child, if I can remember, no well, my parents had split up, so when my mum was there I do remember sitting down and having a meal together and I think it’s just something you do. It’s awfully lonely eating by yourself.

Extract 2

I: Is it something you value, sharing eating?

Maria: Yes, at night, definitely.

I: Why is that?

Maria: Because we talk about what we’ve done during the day. We turn the TV off and we don’t have, you know, other distractions so we actually have to talk to each other. Talk about what we’re going to do on the weekend, how things are going to fit in, or what they’ve done at school, those sorts of things.

Extract 3

Jack: Oh I think ((pauses)) yeah definitely we should all ((pauses)) I like to all sit down together you know, because that’s a chance you get to talk to each other and probably see what’s happened that day, or else you don’t know what happens that day if you don’t all sit down together and talk about it.

I: Was that part of your upbringing as a child? Did your family [

Jack: [Yeah,

we did that, but it’s not something ((pauses)) I don’t do it because ((pauses)).

I do a lot of things different to what my parents did. I don’t do it because my parents did it, but it’s just one of those things that I think are necessary. So I don’t like turning the television on when we’re having a meal, try and keep it off. Might have a quick look at the news, but after that, that’s it.

Extract 4

Alec: The thing is I don’t think we would [eat alone as adults], even if we were millionaires and had servants and everything, we would still eat with the children and we would not eat alone. There are times when we look at each other and say ‘If only they were somewhere else or they were fed first’, but we eat together as a family.

Extract 5

Stella: [Eating together is important] because that’s usually when we discuss things that have happened during the day with each other, and we’ve always made sure the kids have had their say as to what’s happened in their day ((pauses)). What’s happened in their day is just as important to us as what’s happened in my day, so the kids have been brought up with that, so that’s always been there and they just expect it now, that they get their say in what goes on in the house.

Extract 6

Patrick: No we don’t normally sit around the table. It’s only if we sit down to a hot dinner or something like that, a hot tea and if we have a roast we usually sit there, but normally we’re in here [sitting room]. Now it

wouldn’t have happened in my time when I was a kid because dad would have slapped the TV off and said, ‘Righto get into the kitchen, that’s it’ and I think this is ((pauses)). You know you go to a lot of fam-ily homes now, the kids can do what they want and whatever. And they’ve lost that family combination sort of thing, you know, when everyone had to sit at the table to be part of a family and it’s not the case, not now.

Meals together were, for these families, regarded as an important part of family life. On these occasions they ‘sit together as a family’ (Extract 1) or ‘eat together as a family’ (Extract 4). When shared meals do not happen, families have ‘lost the family combination’ (Extract 6). Mealtimes are part of the way a family is defined: the family itself is realised as these events. But as Alec says (Extract 4) family meals are often difficult to organise with children. One of the reasons for this difficulty is that children need to be taught and disciplined to ‘eat as a fam-ily’.

Extract 7

Derek: What we’re trying to do is to train the children to eat with us and more as a discipline than anything else, but also to sort of get involved in their conversation and their conversation with us, so that we share it more as a family group. The fact that we eat at the same time is I guess coinci-dental. It’s more to get the family to share some of the social norms, if you will. Families should eat together.

Extract 8

Hilary: Yeah, I think that’s really important. That you have one meal together and Angus and I like to, you know, we like to sort of talk over the meal and so often we find that we spend ((pauses)). The kids eat quickly, they don’t eat a lot, and we’ll all sit down and have dinner together and the kids might be finished within 15 or 20 minutes and they’ll be allowed to go off. Whereas we would stay there for a bit longer but as long as they [children] say, ‘Can we go now please?’, then that’s fine. But there is an important ritual there, that you have a meal together and we all talk together.

Thus to eat ‘properly’ as a family, children have to be disciplined; they have to be taught, not only to eat at the table but also, as Hilary indicates (Extract 8), to have good manners (‘as long as they say, “Can we go now please?”’, then that’s fine’).

These examples show us how family life is constructed around food. Parents have to train children and, from Alec’s comment (‘There are times when we look at each other and say, “If only they were somewhere else or they were fed first”’) parents also have to train themselves to eat as a family should. It is thus a time for parents to discipline themselves in their parental responsibilities.

One of the main reasons given for families to share mealtimes was to talk together. Parents wanted to catch up on events and experiences that had happened during the day or discuss plans for the future. The meal table therefore becomes the ‘talk table’. In their detailed study of family mealtimes, Ochs and Taylor (1992) showed how the evening meal is often the first time of the day when fam-ily members interact as a whole for a sustained period of time. In studying the mealtimes of seven American middle-class families, these authors found repeated patterns in ‘table talk’ where conversations were mainly introduced by parents – principally the mother – to question children. The questions were designed to elicit information about the day’s events by way of ‘stories’ (events that had a cen-tral problem) or ‘reports’ (accounts of an activity). Ochs and Taylor believe that

‘table talk’ can be a double-bind for parents in that it can be seen as an inquisition:

‘Parents do want – and sometimes feel they need, for good reasons, to know about their children’s lives ... and they do become frustrated when children become ret-icent’ (Ochs and Taylor, 1992: 332). According to these authors, parents ask questions in order to situate children in a verbal ‘field of vision’ where

the lives of the protagonists [children] are laid out for the inspection of the interlocutors [parents] ... in order [for parents] to verbally penetrate and reg-ulate ‘even the smallest detail of everyday life’ ... of their children as well as one another.

(Ochs and Taylor, 1992: 330) We should, however, note that as well as surveying and monitoring children in this way, parents are also inspecting themselves. They are effectively undertaking the role of the ‘good’ parent: one who is supposed to show interest and concern about their children’s activities. In ‘table talk’, therefore, we can see two constructions going on: parents are constructing themselves in the ethics of parenthood and children are constructed as subjects who have to be trained, disciplined and watched over. The mealtime, as we have already said, is an activity where the modern family itself is constructed. We may note that this model of the family meal is relatively recent. Less than a hundred years ago commentators on family life recommended that children eat separately from adults, preferably in a nursery.

This was so that children were not prematurely tempted by adult dietary practices and other aspects of adult life which could be corrupting for both the body and the mind (Kociumbas, 1982). Modern families, on the other hand, are encouraged to eat together and, as we have seen, expert advice is available to help make meal-times easier and happier. Aries (1973) sees this change as part of the growing autonomy required in order to construct the ‘private’ family; one in which ser-vants and intruders are kept at a distance or excluded altogether from family life.

Thus the ‘private’ domain which the family now occupies is one in which the task of bringing up children is left to the cooperation of parents who seek and gain sat-isfaction and fulfilment through the practices of expert knowledges that construct

‘proper’ parenting.

The construction of meals

In all of the twelve families in this study, women were the principal food providers. They mainly planned, shopped for, prepared and cooked food. In most families, however, men helped in this process by either undertaking food prepara-tion (most commonly weekend breakfasts and lunches), by taking care of children while food preparation was in progress or by helping with shopping. But how does the cook decide what to cook? Couples were asked to describe how food decisions were made.

Extract 9

I: We’ve kind of talked about this before but I’m interested in how the cook decides what to cook.

Wendy: What I feel like. Well basically I do try to keep it nutritious, but I’m try-ing to shift away from beginntry-ing planntry-ing the meal with meat to beginning planning with the vegetables and that’s difficult because the children don’t like vegetables. But [husband] and [eldest son] do, so that’s all right. So this has made a difference between how can I make hamburger or chicken interesting to how can I make the vegetables interesting and what can I do with this other stuff. I have lots of cook-books and I go through and say, ‘Oh that would be neat and that would be great’ and if I remember then I get the ingredients and try it.

Extract 10

Alison: I guess basically I’m just aiming to provide what I regard as a well-bal-anced diet, with a reasonable amount of variety in it. So that would include foods on a daily basis from each of the five food groups.

Extract 11

Maria: I mean, we like ((pauses)). Well I try to eat healthy, you know in a healthy way. But I also really like going out and having a bit of fun and I think there’s a happy medium. I don’t think you need to be super strict on those sorts of things. I think it’s just nice to know that you’re eating reasonably healthy, or living a reasonably healthy lifestyle, but having a bit of fun at the same time, I mean, we could all be knocked over by a bus tomorrow, couldn’t we.

The choice of family food was considered on the basis of what was ‘nutritious’

and ‘healthy’. This entailed a number of strategies: an emphasis on vegetables rather than meat or, in Alison’s case, an explicit recognition of a ‘technology’ of nutrition, the five food groups. The effect of nutrition in producing subject posi-tions is very evident here in its construction of the way meals are produced in family life. Indeed, we should notice that when Alison talks of ‘variety’ she means nutritional variety: the five food groups. We should also notice that cookbooks

are sometimes needed in order to provide the variety which is important to

‘healthy’ family food. As Wendy says, ‘I have lots of cookbooks and I go through and say, “Oh that would be neat and that would be great”’. Maria mentions how she feels the need to balance fun with healthy foods (‘not super strict’); so, for her, healthy foods are not necessarily fun. But as Maria says, it is ‘nice to know that you’re eating reasonably healthy, or living a reasonably healthy lifestyle’.

Discourses on nutrition, then, construct modern subjects who can choose foods according to certain principles. These principles are, on the one hand, scientific, rational and nutri-centric and, on the other, ethical. The ethical possibilities around the provision of nutritious foods are likely to be made more evident in women who, through discourses on motherhood, have been given the responsibil-ity of providing food – and ‘good’ food at that – to the family.

Maria’s point about ‘going out and having a bit of fun’ raises a further problem within the government of food choice. Maria is referring here to those occasions when food is purchased outside the home, often known as ‘fast’ or ‘take-away’

food. ‘Fast foods’ provide a dilemma for families because, while they are a wel-come break from cooking and are popular, they carry certain problems. As Angus says here:

Extract 12

Angus: I think there’s also a bit of the feeling that if you need to resort to take-away food on a Monday night, the rest of the week’s a probably well ((pauses)). If you’ve got to show a bit of discipline and cook a healthy meal it’s more likely to be on a Monday night, whereas Friday night you sort of say ‘Oh well I’ve been responsible [during the week], now we’ll have some take-away food’.

According to Angus, having to ‘resort’ to take-away foods at the start of the week is somehow not right. It is, perhaps, an indication of poor food or family manage-ment at the beginning of the week when it is important to make an effort and

‘show a bit of discipline and cook a healthy meal’ at home. The pre-eminence of home-cooked meals in the family menu has been emphasised in other studies on family eating habits, see Santich (1995b) and Charles and Kerr (1988).

Two ethical dilemmas are evident here for parents. The first concerns the fact that ‘take-away’ foods are commonly regarded as nutritionally suspect; they are popularly discounted as ‘unhealthy’. The second is that home cooking should take precedence because it shows that parents care. And that care is made explicit, as Patrick says below, by the provision of wholesome (nutritious) meals.

Extract 13

Patrick: Well times have changed in attitude, family attitudes, you know, like a lot of parents don’t care, they’d rather go and buy take-away than sit down and have a wholesome meal at home ‘cause it’s easier for them.

For Angus (Extract 12) ‘take-away foods’ are easier to justify on Fridays, after

For Angus (Extract 12) ‘take-away foods’ are easier to justify on Fridays, after