Transcript Presentation

Health and Society
Ideological mechanisms working behind
healthy eating advice in socialism
Blanka Tivadar, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Introduction
• Health is influenced by socio-economic status = truism
in the sociology of health and illness
• WHO, Social Determinants of Health: The Solid Facts,
2nd edition, 2003:
– "Even in the most affluent countries, people who are less well
off have substantially shorter life expectancies and more
illnesses than the rich."
• National health policies, doctor-patient encounters,
popular media:
– Healthy eating, regular exercise, no cigarette smoking, and
moderate or no alcohol consumption are (almost) sure paths to
good health
•  The focus on the individual risk factors replaces focus on the
structural factors.
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Method
• Qualitative analysis of healthy eating/cooking advice
• Slovenian women's monthly, Naša žena ("Our
Woman") from 1949 to 1990
– 1949: Yugoslavia after the expulsion from Cominform in 1948,
started to construct its own unique path to socialism.
– 1990: a plebiscite on independence for Slovenia, 88,2 % of the
people voted for an independent republic
• also a vote for a capitalism
• Naša žena: 1941, the first offical socialist women's
magazine, the oldest women's magazine still published
today
• Analysis: two volumes/decade: 1949/1950, 1959/1960,
1969/1970, 1979/1980, and 1989/1990.
• Recipes, food columns and practical suggestions for
cooking  500 pages of material.
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Research questions
• Research questions:
– 1) what Naša žena considered healthy eating,
– 2) whose responsibility healthy eating was, and
– 3) why its readers ought to cook and eat healthily.
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1949/50
• A healthy diet = diversified diet
• = Being nourished on a combination of "proteins,
fats, starch, sugar, salt, water and vitamins." +
• "... and we must take care that a sufficient amount
of food comes on our table."
• Being replete was a good thing:
– ”.. a soupless dinner is hardly a full meal“ +
– thickening a soup with a mixture of flour and water or by
boiling it with noodles or other types of soup pasta.
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1959/60
• Balance gave space to proteins and vitamins:
– Milk as an absolutely necessary source of gaining
physical power; a symbolic building block of
socialism
• No food or its components were truly painted
evil yet, not even manufactured convenience
food (not a word on additives, hidden fats or
high energy value)
– The only problem: vitamin insufficiency 
housewife can make up for it easily by serving a
green salad and fruit as a side dish.
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1969/70
• Two views of the food/health relationship
began to coexist:
– Variety as a key to a good diet, and if getting ill (but
not on account of eating too much of anything) an
individual had to watch their diet.
– Less frequent but already explicit view: dissuading
from the use of certain foodstuffs.
• Fat + sugar  overweight  modern-age diseases
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1979/80
• Demonizing food rich in fat and sugar and
glorifying vegetables and fruit
• + weight control became an ethical obligation.
– Articles describing particular foods: an information
on energy values in calories
– “This dainty will be even better – but also a bigger
sin against slimness – if we substitute milk with
cream."
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1989/90
• Advocating organically grown food
• They are poisoning us!
– Environmental pollution was seen as a result of
heavy industry, which was a powerful symbol of
socialist economy  ecological sensibility as a form
of criticism of socialism
• + critical of the food processing industry
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1989/90
• A new outlook on the human body (A body is wise) +
nostalgia for the past
• “… once the winter months are over our body literally starts
hankering after fresh produce, as if it knew that it needed a
new stock of vitamins and minerals. And it may well be that
it does know, that the instinctive craving for what it needs
is a remnant from a long way back when humankind lived
more instinctively and less rationally.”
•  The better future, promised by Naša žena to the postwar
housewife – if she would help attain the sociopolitical goals
– was moved into a distant past.
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How did arguments for healthy eating
change in the course of time?
• 40’s: How to cook socialism: explicit
– Healthy eating  gives a person energy to work  building a new
and better socialist society
• "To take care of every family member's health means, to a large
extent, to take care of what and how they eat. Only if properly
fed can people be healthy, and only healthy people can work
well and be creative. Therefore every housewife shoulders a
large responsibility, the responsibility for the health, strength and
progression of the nation."
• 50’s to 70’s: How to cook socialism: implicit
– Hard work as a sure way to better future
– + stopped explicitly connecting healthy eating and civic duty
• 80’s: How to build a nation state (and get ready to live in a risk
society)
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The Good Citizen's Handbook
• Cooking tips and recipes = The Good Citizen's
Handbook = directions and instructions to women for
adjusting their home-management activities to the
needs of a particular social order.
• However, the housewife was never allowed to cook
her way into an ideal society.
– Once Naša žena would be sending her into the modern
future, but before reaching it, it directed her into a pre-modern
one.
–  The Slovenian housewife was always on the road, even
though she was expected to spend most of her time in her
kitchen.
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