Healthy Living: Metaphors We Eat By?
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Present Tense A Journal of Rhetoric in Society Healthy Living: Metaphors We Eat By? Philippa Spoel Laurentian University Roma Harris University of Western Ontario Flis Henwood University of Brighton Present Tense, Vol. 2, Issue 2, 2012. www.presenttensejournal.org | [email protected] Healthy Living: Metaphors We Eat By? Philippa Spoel, Roma Harris, and Flis Henwood participants as rhetorical actors who draw on and reconfigure the resources of publicly circulating discourse, we explore how their uses of these conventional metaphors function in multiple and possibly strategic ways in their interpretations of healthy eating. Our analysis suggests that the situated uptakes4 of these metaphors in the participants’ responses not only reproduced but also amplified and ambiguated normative rhetorics of healthy eating. Metaphor, according to Michael Billig and Katie MacMillan’s Aristotelian definition, “involves talking about one thing in terms of attributes Contemporary public health promotion normally associated with another” exhorts us to care for ourselves by (460). Metaphor pervades everyday following a healthy lifestyle including, language and thought and affects how crucially, eating healthily.1 Injunctions we understand and experience reality to eat a balanced diet, avoid junk food, (Lakoff and Johnson).5 As a key mode of and consume appropriate fuel for our rhetorical invention and symbolic action, bodies proliferate across institutional, metaphor constitutes ways of seeing popular, and commercialized health the world and influences attitudes, discourse.2 But how do people interpret knowledge, values, and actions (Ivie; and reconstitute this mainstream advice Gronnvoll and Landau; Foss 299-302). in relation to their everyday lives? Otto Santa Ana argues that “metaphor How do they engage rhetorically with shapes everyday discourse, and by this the imperatives of dominant health means it shapes how people discern promotion discourse?3 and enact the everyday” (26). Because everyday discourse (re)constructs We address these questions through a social values and ways of being, the brief analysis of recurring metaphors in metaphors that circulate within common older adults’ responses to open-ended language at once reveal, enact, and interview questions about healthy naturalize social orders (21). Attending eating. These are the metaphors of to the most ubiquitous—and hence healthy eating as balanced eating, food least noticeable—metaphors within as fuel, and food as junk. Conceiving rhetorics of health and medicine can, 1 Philippa Spoel, Roma Harris, and Flis Henwood as Judy Segal notes, shed light on the or eating a “good balance” of foods, values that these terms “smuggle into” likewise emphasizes the metaphor’s healthcare policy and practice (115); positive valence. The association of good however, the polysemous, dynamic, and balance reinforces the naturalized and contextualized “social usage” of assumption that balanced eating is good metaphor (Condit et al. 303) means because it is healthy, and healthy is— that idiomatic metaphors may not unquestionably—good; however, the use simply reproduce dominant ideology: of good to modify balance and balanced the complex, shifting, and ambiguous also begs the question whether balanced meanings of commonplace metaphors eating is intrinsically good or whether in use shows how these applications may it is possible to have a bad balance. This also destabilize naturalized meanings question, though not overtly addressed and values. by participants, potentially destabilizes the commonplace equation that healthy In 2010, we interviewed 55 adults aged eating equals balanced eating equals 45-70 in three Ontario communities good eating. and one UK community about what healthy eating and active living meant Beyond its function as an abstract, to them. This project explored how motivational ideal in the participants’ citizens negotiated dominant discourses responses, many characterized the of healthy living in relation to their own metaphor of balance more concretely lives including, as we examine here, to mean eating the right proportions how they drew on and reconfigured of the right kinds of foods, which commonplace metaphors related to together compose the desirable whole healthy eating. To help ensure that of healthy eating. This meaning evokes participants already possessed some conventional public health guidelines interest in the topic of healthy living, we that instruct citizens to daily eat a certain recruited through recreational physical amount from a range of food groups, activity organizations. We selected and these instructions are often imaged older adults because of our interest in through a color-coded, pie-chart styled how self-care imperatives are especially plate.8 According to one participant, “I pronounced for aging citizens.6 interpret (healthy eating) as balanced eating: in other words, fruits, vegetables, Healthy Eating as Balanced Eating healthy proteins . I don’t think that there is a restriction of any one group; The metaphor of balance appeared although, if there was, it would probably prominently in the participants’ views of be in the fat group and the sugar groups, how to fulfill the imperative of healthy but I still think that it is healthy to eat eating, functioning as a motivational from all different food groups.” ideal for their efforts to be good health(y) citizens.7 Often, the term balanced Others said healthy eating “means operates as a substitute or equivalent having a balanced diet with a variety of term for healthy. As one participant meat[s], fish, fruit[s and], vegetables but explained, “I try to eat a balanced, healthy with allowable fat content probably,” diet as much as I can.” The yoking of the or, less precisely, healthy eating “[is] terms balance and balanced with the balanced; so, you know, your proteins, term good, as in “a good balanced meal” your carbs, your this, your that, you 2 Healthy Living know, [you] get a good balance in those.” balance between healthy foods (located This interpretation enacts the quasi- on one side of the scale) and unhealthy logical technique of dividing the whole foods (located on the other side of into parts, the ideal whole of balanced the scale). Instead of reproducing the eating comprising the sum of its parts health promotion sense of balance in (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 234); which all parts of the whole are healthy, however, the participants’ tentative (i.e., this use of the metaphor legitimates “probably,” “possibly,” and “I . think”) eating some unhealthy foods because and imprecise (i.e., “your this, your that”) they are counterbalanced by healthy language suggests uncertainty about ones. As one participant explained, “I the parts that make up the whole, which know when I am eating things that are destabilizes the coherence of balanced calorie thick—and I suppose I do—, I’d eating as a motivating term. want to balance out with something healthy when I do it”; another said she Conversely, the inclusion of fruits and wanted to “get the balance . [that] vegetables as two essential, but not can allow you sometimes to indulge in exhaustive, parts of a balanced diet was less healthy eating.” Another participant stated more definitively. The repeated actively resisted following the rule book naming of these two food groups by too closely, constructing this approach the participants (i.e., “healthy diet, a to eating as excessive and hence good balance of fruit and vegetables”; imbalanced: “my balanced diet, lots of fruit and vegetables”; and “Healthy eating: It I don’t necessarily wanna follow means having a really good balance of everything in the book. I can go a lot of fruits, a lot of vegetables”) may overboard into something too much have resulted because these two food that, you know, I would rather balance. groups are consistently present across Like, balance, I think is the key if I can sort public health guidelines compared of take a little bit of this and a little bit of with the more diverse, and contested, that and sort of find something that’s categorization of other required groups.9 comfortable to me. Like, I’m not gonna Contrasting with the quantitative division give up chocolate chip cookies. of the whole into (more or less) all its parts, the naming of fruits and vegetables Though not directly opposed to the as the two most important food groups mainstream (healthy) whole-part constructs a more qualitative—and more meaning, this alternative sense of manageable—meaning for balanced balance amplifies the metaphor’s eating. potential functions for how lay people negotiate dominant health advice by The conventional configuration of the offering a logical framework that makes balance metaphor as a [pie-chart] whole the balancing of healthy and unhealthy comprising appropriate food groups foods a sensible, justifiable approach to was the primary sense used by the everyday eating. participants, but some also invoked the sense of balance as a scale for regulating Food as Fuel the even distribution of weights and counterweights. In this interpretation, The commonplace metaphor food as balanced eating means achieving a fuel also occurred quite frequently in 3 Philippa Spoel, Roma Harris, and Flis Henwood the participants’ explanations.10 Like the energy requirements” or that eating was balance metaphor, the fuel metaphor was a way “to rebuild what I’ve taken out of associated mainly with the concept of my body in my workout.” healthy (and, hence, good) eating though less clearly