| dc.description.abstract | As consumers of food, we are faced with many choices every day. We are encouraged to make healthy choices, but ‘healthy’ in today’s supermarket can mean many things: heart healthy, light, lite, cholesterol reducing, gluten or dairy free, organic, locally made or biodynamic. The discourses around food are now expansive, confusing and contradictory. Using a lens of Freirean praxis, this thesis explores the dispraxia of modern food and the praxis of the Weston A. Price foundation (WAPF) and wider Nourishing Food Movement, (NFM), which offers an alternative. The movement calls for a return to more traditional ways of selecting, preparing and eating food. For example, it emphasises soaking grains, preparing meals from scratch, and using less processed saturated fat and non-pasteurised milk. The thesis also challenges and debunks the discourse of modern food by exploring the controversy around the consumption of animal fat and raw milk. The praxis of the WAPF and NFM is explored more deeply through qualitative case studies investigating internet blogs. The blogs serve as a dynamic and interactive example of libratory education, in comparison with messages and recipes provided by the dominant, corporate, food industry. The interplay of multiple discourses and subject positions around gender and class in food blogging are examined in a reflexive blog-based discussion, highlighting the layered complexity which must be navigated and reconciled by individuals when making food choices. Overall, this thesis argues that the praxis of the WAPF acts to help empower consumers to make more genuine choices by providing techniques and information with which they can navigate the modern food context. | |
