9. RESULTADOS Y DISCUSIÓN
9.4 Fase II Mapeo de actores
Gifting food was a third ritual in which the students regularly engaged. Compared to ritualised sharing, gifting food was marked by the explicit effort of making or buying somebody food that was presented to them as a gift. The most overt food gift in the school was the cake. Making a cake for friends was a well-practised ritual in the school amongst
all age groups, for birthdays, to cheer friends up, or “just because”. Many young people
expressed how they enjoyed going to the effort of baking something special for their friend.
“It was someone’s birthday and Tess had made her a really nice cake and all her friends gathered round and they all came in and shared the cake and it was really nice, it was a really nice thing to do, everyone was commenting on how nice the cake was and everything and that was good.” (T12)
The ritual of gifting cake to friends was a way of symbolising friendship
boundaries. In one instance, a girl from another group in the classroom had brought in a very attractive looking chocolate cake. Once she started sharing with her group, she called over two girls from across the classroom, who were in their usual group. In this instance the girls clearly demarcated their friendships through calling explicitly two other girls from a different group over. The gifting, and subsequent sharing of the cake, served to include and exclude particular students.
The cake gifting ritual symbolised emotional connections to others, in which young people could use minimal financial resources to mediate their feelings and friendship to others. Gifting cake was also a way of representing one’s own skills and care for one’s friends publicly. The pride associated with the baked goods was an important aspect of the ritual.
“I think it’s just quite nice that you’re taking like just these basic ingredients and you can make something really special and you usually put in a bit more effort and
thought, like it takes you five minutes to go buy something from the supermarket, but it will take you like an hour and half to bake a cake or cupcakes, so yeah.” (S16)
Furthermore, teachers frequently observed these practices and noted that this ritual
“reveals their friendships to each other” and “shows them that they care” (T07). Some teachers also benefited from this ritual and were invited to share a piece of cake.
Other food gifts were a little less overt and had to be carefully observed in order to notice them. These rituals could be distinguished from sharing through the concerted effort of gifting something to a friend in a ceremonial way. One other difference was that often the gifted product was not consumed immediately, but stored in the school bag for later. Food gifts that were not baked goods were generally chocolate products and drinks. In one
example, Rosie had been away on holiday and had brought back “Dunkin donuts” from the
airport, taking them on her domestic flight and into school for her best friend Sara, who she knows loves these donuts. She came in with a bright, slightly damaged box and got all the attention. Sara was so excited that Rosie had gone to all this effort to bring her donuts. This public gesture symbolised the close friendship between the two to everyone else, and in this instance created a boundary between their friendship and the others in their group.
In food gifting rituals a balance was important; some students did not feel comfortable receiving food, as they were not always financially able to reciprocate. Although students often said that they did not expect anything in return there was an
unspoken expectation that at some stage something would be reciprocated. This appeared to be more pronounced in gifting than in sharing rituals.
“It depends, if they buy something, and they’re like ‘oh here have some of mine’ I don’t mind that because you’re eating some they’re eating some but if someone goes up to you and goes like “ok I’m going to buy you a meal”, it’s like I don’t want
it, cause that’s happened to me a few times, and it’s just like “I don’t want you to spend money on me because, like first of all you don’t need to, second I can’t afford anything at all and I feel like I need to pay them back ….” (S08)
Discussion
The findings suggest that young people create their own food rituals in their
everyday school life to establish, maintain, and strengthen their relationships. The lunch
walk, ritualised sharing, and gifting food were three rituals young people created in their peer groups.
The findings showed how young people actively used food to manage their relationships. For instance, gifting cake mediated care to friends, showed trust in the relationship, and allowed to reciprocate; the lunch walk encouraged social interaction and was a means by which young people could integrate into a new group; and ritualised sharing involved negotiating friendship boundaries. Young people practised all three types of rituals to create a sense of belonging to a group, or conversely to exclude others.
Previous literature supports the findings that young people are active participants in a gift economy, use ritualistic gestures to establish or strengthen friendships, mute and mark ethnic boundaries, and reaffirm and delineate social solidarity (Katriel, 1987; Neely et al., 2014; Nukaga, 2008). School food rituals, in which young people feel in control over their own actions and choices, may be an important mechanism by which they learn the value of rituals and gain tools for managing their relationships. The findings show that the meaning of young people’s food practices goes beyond food intake, and can be seen from a holistic perspective. Incorporating such a lens into health promotion could offer studies that focus on the social aspects of young people’s food intake, a broader lens for understanding their food practices, and increase the respect for the role of food rituals in young people’s lives.
Sharing food was a popular ritual amongst the participants. Students used food to negotiate their relationships and non-verbally mediate their feelings towards others. In health promotion, ritualised food sharing has only been examined in terms of physical, not social health. Food sharing has traditionally been investigated as a strategy to limit or maximise food intake (Taylor, 2011), although some have noted friendships and sociality as the main rationale for food sharing (Hill, Casswell, Maskill, Jones, & Wyllie, 1998). The focus on food sharing as a ritualised practice amongst young people, thereby contributing towards their social health, is new. In light of these findings it would be interesting to explore how certain health promotion activities impact on sharing rituals, for instance how school food policies and the consequent availability of healthy food impacts on sharing
rituals. How may food sharing still be encouraged through the availability of “shareable”
foods while complying with certain nutrition standards? The most popular foods for sharing amongst larger groups were purchased foods, such as chocolate or chips. Considering the importance of food rituals for young people, it could be worthwhile investigating which foods could be offered in schools that meet criteria to promote both, physical and social health simultaneously.
The most overt difference compared to previous literature on food rituals was the emphasis placed on food. In the current study the food played a more passive role than what has been previously reported (Katriel, 1987; Nukaga, 2008). Although the food was crucial for the ritual to occur, and the type of food was certainly not insignificant, the students appeared to focus their conversations less on the food consumed than studies with younger children have shown. It appeared that the act of sharing, walking, or gifting was of primary importance, above and beyond the actual food involved.
Young people’s rituals were influenced by their school surroundings. The possibility of leaving school and the proximity of food outlets was conducive for young people to create their lunch walk ritual. The current findings showed how young people
worked within their constraints to create rituals that helped them manage their social
relationships, which was enabled through their physical, temporal, and social environments. The participants had the whole break (temporal) to spend their time where they wished (physical), with whom they wanted (social). The atrium and library for instance provided spaces for groups to meet, as well as the classrooms throughout the school. Furthermore,
Year 12 and 13 students could go beyond the school physical boundaries, and “escape”
briefly from school life. This stands in contrast to schools in which dining halls require regimented seating and consuming of school lunches, and eating becomes a rushed, utility- based activity, rather than an enjoyable social practice with friends (S. N. Moore et al., 2010). Granting young people time and space in their breaks to create their own food rituals is one step towards autonomy in school life, where young people can learn to negotiate different options and make choices for themselves.
While the physical and social environment frequently feature in health-promoting schools (HPS) approaches, little attention has been awarded to these aspects in terms of food practices. The results clearly showed how the social environment was important in enabling young people’s food rituals. Thus, the food social environment may warrant future investigation. For instance, rather than merely measuring the obesogenic (obesity-
promoting) environment of a school (M. A. Carter & Swinburn, 2004), it may be useful to holistically capture the school food environment for its health promoting capacity. Beyond measuring the healthiness of the available food, the school food environment, including physical (objects, places), social (activities, feelings, actors), and temporal (events, time periods) dimensions, could more holistically represent the quality of young people’s lunch breaks as relevant for their physical, mental, and social health. Examples could include assessing the spaces available to young people for eating together, the array of activities and choices they have available, and the time students have to their leisure during their school days to eat and interact. Such an approach would also be coherent with an HPS approach
through incorporating aspects of the whole school ethos and environment (St Leger, 2004). Furthermore, it would complement the current measures of the physical and social
environments in HPS models (E. Y. Lee, Shin, Choi, & Cho, 2014), and add the temporal dimension that would assess how much time young people have to themselves during the school day. This may provide new ways of promoting the physical, social, and temporal aspects of young people’s whole food environments.
As the results have shown food practices feature frequently in the everyday management of social relationships. To date, the social dimension in nutrition promotion has emphasised the social influences on food consumption (Wouters et al., 2010), rather than the potential benefits for social and mental health. While physical health is crucial,
good mental and social health is equally important for young people’s health. Umberson
and Montez (2010) argue that positive social relationships during youth are important for health throughout life through improving psychosocial, physiological, and behavioural functioning. Furthermore, young people themselves value their social relationships as important assets in their lives (Hendry & Reid, 2000). As a discipline that is concerned with a positive, holistic conceptualisation of health and aims to address health issues people themselves deem important in their lives, health promotion may benefit from incorporating a holistic view when working with young people and food practices.
There are some limitations to this research. The findings are relevant to an urban, middle to high socio-economically situated girls high school in New Zealand, and may translate differently into other school settings. Although the methodology can entail differing interpretations, based on the authors’ representation of the data, the in-depth engagement with participants, continual observations over a prolonged period of time in
their natural setting, and an open-ended aim that left space for young people’s voices were
strengths of this study. Ethnography is an asset to health promotion research as it allows building a complete picture of people’s lives and capturing their practices in context. It has
been proposed that focusing on health practices rather than health behaviour in health promotion may more authentically capture “the emergent and contingent properties of people’s activities in particular situations” (Cohn, 2014, p. 157).
This paper highlights the important role of everyday food rituals for young people’s social relationships. A focus on social relationships in settings such as schools could broaden the scope of nutrition promotion beyond an exclusive focus on nutrients and physical health to promote health across physical, mental, and social dimensions.