9 October 2019
“Have you tried our Alkaline #SUPERBOOST blend?” – semi-science and emotion work in new healthism discourse in food blogs and on twitter
Sylvia Jaworska
Abstract:
In recent years we witnessed a boom of self-proclaimed female life-style gurus who came to fame through digital media. Starting with blogging food recipes, within a few years some of them developed multimillion food enterprise. What these gurus have in common is their belief in pursuit of health and happiness through specific eating practices involving mostly some forms of ‘clean’ eating based on unprocessed whole foods and elimination of whole food groups at once such as diary, wheat, gluten and sugar. While some benefits of this new healthism (Crawford 1980) are noticed (raising awareness of fresh food), dieticians, medics and psychologists report negative consequences including physical and mental health issues, specifically a rise in orthorexia (e.g. McCartney 2016). There is also a notable lack of scientific evidence for the health claims proposed by advocates of practices such as ‘clean’ eating.
The purpose of this paper is to explore this new healthism through a discursive lens as a form of social and regulating practice (cf. Butler 1990) constituted through the use of language and other semiotic resources. I am specifically interested in the kind of language patterns used to construct the notion of ‘clean’ or ‘real’ food and how these patterns are drawn on to promote this new healthism (cf. Crawford 1980). The data under consideration comes from corpora of tweets and blog entries produced by some of the UK’s top food and health celebrities that advocate some forms of ‘clean’ eating including Ella Mills (Deliciously Ella), Saskia Gregson-Williams (Naturally Sassy), Madeleine Shaw (Get the Glow) and Natasha Corrett (Honestly Healthy). The accounts are compared with tweets and blogs entries produced by established female food celebrities such as Nigella Lawson. Using a combination of a corpus-based approach with a multimodal discourse analysis, this study shows that the new generation of food celebs make greater use of positive emotion talk, ‘heroic’ self-presentations, hyperbolic evaluation and semi-scientific lexis. Whereas established chefs create the notion of ‘good’ food as a sensory experience of taste and pleasure, and often see food as a social phenomenon (e.g. cooking for family), the new ‘food nobility’ (Leer & Klitgaard Povlsen 2016) constructs ‘good’ food by drawing on the notion of purity and cleanliness, and essentially as a self-project. Increased use of emotion talk can lead to affective responses, while semi-scientific vocabulary creates a sense of credibility. Together, they produce a kind of ‘truth’ that seems certain and compelling in the uncertain world of nutrition. The paper concludes with some remarks regarding the contentious moral virtues implicated in this new healthism discourse (clean vs dirty) and their implications for the understanding and image of (female) body and health.
References
Butler, J. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, Routledge.
Crafword, R. 1980. Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life. International Journal of Health Services, 10(3): 365-388.
Leer, J. & Klitgaard Povlsen. K. 2016. Food and Media. Practices, Distinctions and Heterotopias. London, Routledge.
McCartney, M. 2016. Clean eating and the cult of healthism. BMJ 354: i4095.
Dr Sylvia Jaworska is an Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading. Her main research interests are in Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics and the application of both methods to study representations in media and business communication, on which she published in Applied Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse & Society, Discourse, Context & Media, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Gender and Language. Current interests involve discourses around food specifically constructions of ‘good’ food in digital foodscapes and communication of food health claims on food packaging.