*Please send me a note if you would like to read any of these publications but are unable to access them through your institution’s subscriptions. I would be happy to send you a copy!
Unequal Foodwork: Situating the Sociology of Feeding within Diet and Nutrition Disparities
Priya Fielding-Singh and Merin Oleschuk (equal authorship) (2023)
Sociology Compass
Widespread inequities in diet and nutrition present a pressing public health problem. Sociologists working to illuminate the causes and contours of these inequities often center the role of family foodwork, or the multifaceted domestic labor that supports eating, including planning and preparing meals. Mounting sociological scholarship on foodwork considers how food's meanings are socially patterned to reflect broader social structures, ideologies and institutions that influence their manifestation and families' resources to enact them. Here, we present three core contributions from the sociology of foodwork that can advance essential transdisciplinary conversations around nutrition disparities as well as efforts to tackle these disparities. We lay out how (1) family foodwork is historically rooted in broader structures of capitalist exploitation and women's subordination, and today remains gendered through normative discourses equating “good” feeding with “good” mothering; (2) the moralization of foodwork is buttressed by an ideological context idealizing homecooked meals and lamenting foodwork's decline, and; (3) foodwork—and societal evaluations of it—are shaped and stratified by intersecting gendered, classed, and racial inequalities. After reviewing each contribution and its importance for addressing nutrition inequities, we conclude by advocating for a closer conversation across disciplines and highlighting important future directions for sociologists. Click here to access this article.
Associations Between Cooking Self-Efficacy, Attitude, and Behaviors among People Living Alone: A Cross-Sectional Survey Analysis
Merin Oleschuk, Ha Young Choi, Brenna Ellison, and Melissa Pflugh-Prescott (2023)
Appetite
Cooking-related literacy and attitudes may play important roles in preventing and reducing diet-related chronic diseases and nutrition disparities. People living alone are an under-researched but growing population who face above average food insecurity rates. This study's objectives were to 1) test how cooking self-efficacy and attitude are stratified demographically among a sample of people living alone, focusing on variations across gender, age, and food security, and 2) examine how cooking self-efficacy and attitude are associated with two indicators of cooking behavior – cooking frequency and convenience orientation. We draw from a cross-sectional survey analysis of 493 adults living alone in Illinois, USA with validated measures for cooking self-efficacy, attitude, frequency, convenience orientation, and demographic characteristics. Hierarchical linear regression models were used to examine demographic factors explaining variation in self-efficacy and attitude, with attention to interactions between gender, food insecurity, and age. Poisson and OLS linear regression models were used to examine associations between self-efficacy and attitude and cooking frequency and convenience orientation. We find cooking-related self-efficacy and attitude showed strong but distinct associations with cooking frequency and convenience orientation. Overall, food insecure groups had lower self-efficacy than those who were food secure; however, food insecure women had higher self-efficacy than men in similar positions, apart from older-adult women who held particularly low efficacy. Cooking attitudes varied in small ways, notably with food insecure younger and older women possessing more negative cooking attitudes than middle-aged women. This research highlights the importance of understanding the cooking-related orientations of single-living people, while demonstrating that this group's ability to prevent and manage food insecurity is not uniform. These results can inform targeted interventions around food and nutrition insecurity, cooking attitudes, and self-efficacy among single-living populations. Click here to access this article.
“We Can ‘Break bread’ virtually:” Routinized and Ritualized Aspects of Family Food Provisioning in the United States During Lockdown
Merin Oleschuk and Christopher Maniotes (2023)
Journal of Family Communication
Routines and rituals are ubiquitous across scholarship in family communication yet are overlapping and idiosyncratic concepts, making a clear distinction between them difficult. This paper builds clarification around the concepts by arguing for attending to what we call the routinized and ritualized aspects of family activities. We demonstrate this approach’s utility through a qualitative thematic discourse analysis of 697 Twitter posts discussing the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on family food practices in the United States. We identify three themes that convey the broad impacts of lockdown conditions on family food practices: bolstering, disruption, and reimagining. We then analyze each theme’s salience within daily meals and holiday meals – two food provisioning sites frequently considered routines and rituals, respectively. Theoretically, this paper forwards a conceptualization of routines and rituals that delineates the symbolic and instrumental elements embedded within each; empirically, it demonstrates the multifaced effects of the pandemic on family food life. Click here to access this article.
Perceived Facilitators and Barriers to Implementing Culturally Inclusive Diets into Hospitals and Long-Term Care Facilities
Minakshi Raj, Merin Oleschuk, Karen Chapman-Novakofski, and Stacie Levine (2023)
Journal of the American Medical Directors Association (JAMDA)
Objectives: To identify perceived facilitators and barriers to implementing culturally inclusive foods into hospitals and long-term care (LTC) from the perspectives of registered dietitians and food service directors.
Design: Cross-sectional survey.
Setting and participants: Online nationwide survey of registered dietitians and food service directors working in hospitals or LTC.
Methods: We analyzed and compared participants' perceived barriers to implementing culturally inclusive foods in hospitals and LTC, assessed through a question in which we provided respondents with 13 different barriers and asked them to report the top 3. Then, we conducted a qualitative analysis of perceived facilitators, which respondents described in open-ended comments.
Results: The most common perceived barriers to implementing culturally inclusive foods were cost of ingredients (44%) and staff cultural knowledge and competence (44%). LTC respondents perceived barriers including (1) willingness of staff to adopt new practices, (2) time, (3) staff burnout, and (4) local/facility-level regulatory barriers more frequently than hospital respondents. Administrative buy-in, staff diversity, and patient considerations (eg, feedback and demand) were perceived facilitators to implementing culturally inclusive foods.
Conclusions and implications: Implementing culturally inclusive foods into hospitals and LTC requires administrative buy-in, willingness to change, and resources including staff diversity and cultural knowledge and awareness. Incorporating patient feedback and preferences into decisions related to dietary offerings could further motivate menu modifications. Further examination of organizational and state policies regulating diet, particularly in LTC settings, is necessary to understand both how to implement culturally inclusive foods and further, to inform investigation of health outcomes (physical and mental) associated with increasing culturally inclusive food offerings in these facilities. Click here to access this article.
Who Should Feed Hungry Families during Crisis? Moral Claims about Hunger on Twitter during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Merin Oleschuk (2022)
Agriculture & Human Values
How do crisis conditions affect longstanding societal narratives about hunger? This paper examines how hunger was framed in public discourse during an early period in the COVID-19 crisis to mobilize attention and make moral claims on others to alleviate it. It does so through a discourse analysis of 1023 U.S.-based English-language posts dedicated to hunger on Twitter during four months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis finds that Twitter users chiefly adopted hunger as a political tool to make moral claims on the state rather than individuals, civil society organizations, or corporations; however, hunger was deployed to defend widely diverse political agendas ranging from progressive support for SNAP entitlements to conservative claims reinforcing anti-lockdown and racist “America First” sentiments. Theoretically, the paper contributes to understanding how culture and morality operate in times of crisis. It demonstrates how culture can be deployed in crisis to reinforce longstanding ideological commitments at the same time that it organizes political imaginations in new ways. The result, in this case, is that longstanding cultural narratives about hunger were used to defend dissimilar, and in some ways contradictory, political ends. Practically, the paper demonstrates how moralized calls to alleviate hunger are vulnerable to political manipulation and used to further conflicting political goals, yet may also offer opportunities to leverage support for bolstered state investments in food assistance during times of crisis. Click here to access this article.
How do Producers Imagine Consumers? Connecting Farm and Fork Through a Cultural Repertoire of Consumer Sovereignty
Shyon Baumann, Josée Johnston and Merin Oleschuk (equal authorship) (2022)
Sociologia Ruralis
The phenomena of meat production and consumption are related but often studied separately, funnelled into silos of agro-food and consumer-focussed research. This article aims to reconnect these spheres by asking: How do meat producers understand the role of consumers in the ethical meatscape? We draw from interviews and site visits with 74 actors engaged with the ethical meat system in Canada. We find that consumers loom large in the cultural imaginary of meat producers and are often framed as key drivers of food system change. We make a two-pronged argument that explains the complex, embedded presence of consumers in meat producers’ cultural imaginary. Conceptually, we argue that producers draw from a cultural repertoire of consumer sovereignty that frames consumer choice as a foundational element of capitalist societies. Empirically, we argue that ethical meat producers’ direct relationships with consumers infuse producers’ work with meaning and emotional significance, and this works to reinforce a normative valuation of consumer sovereignty. This research contributes to scholarship interrogating the implications of consumer-driven models of food system change. Click here to access the article.
Expanding the Joys of Cooking: How Class Shapes the Emotional Experience of Family Foodwork
Merin Oleschuk (2021)
Gender, Work and Organization
The emotional experience of foodwork is often considered along a continuum, where pleasure exists in opposition to labour, and where inequalities restrict pleasure. Analyzing qualitative interviews, recall conversations and cooking observations with 34 primary cooks in families, this article explores how diverse parents experience pleasure through family foodwork. Doing so reveals five conditions facilitating pleasure: time, choice, aesthetic freedom, connection and appreciation. It then analyzes how access to these conditions is shaped by class inequalities, while being attentive to intersections with gender and race/ethnicity. This analysis reveals how socio‐economic inequalities fashion negative emotional relationships to foodwork by imposing disproportionate stressors on low‐income home cooks, but do not necessarily predict cooking pleasure. Through examining intersections between the sensory and material aspects of foodwork, this article furthers theoretical understanding into how foodwork reinforces gendered, racialized and classed oppression, while simultaneously identifying how agency and empowerment operate through cooking pleasure for low‐income groups. Click here to access this article.
Capturing Inequality and Action in Prototypes: The Case of Meat-Eating and Vegetarianism
Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann and Merin Oleschuk (equal authorship) (2021)
Poetics
This article advances a sociological perspective on how people use prototypes to understand social categories. Prototypes are mental representations of best-fitting cases within categories that conserve cognitive effort by efficiently representing phenomena. While simple prototypes are well understood, what remains unclear is how more complex aspects of social life are understood in prototypical terms as well as how prototypes relate to boundary work and multiple axes of inequality. To stimulate a sociological perspective on prototypes, we investigate conceptualizations of prototypical meat-eaters and vegetarians. A longstanding cultural schema relating meat-eating to masculinity and plant-focused diets to femininity has been shown to powerfully guide everyday thinking about meat; yet, multiple axes of identity are also implicated in meat consumption or abstention, raising the possibility that people will hold more complex ideas about these categories. Based on 131 semi-structured interviews, our analysis reveals a range of understandings about the social locations of meat eaters and vegetarians. We find this evidenced in the presence of four intersectional prototypes: 1) the multicultural meat-eating muscle man; 2) the meaty fat man; 3) the skinny rich vegetarian; and 4) the religious vegetarian. In interrogating these four prototypical figures, we show how prototype analysis can help explain how people think in ways that both perpetuate and deviate from gender schemas, advance the study of perceptions of intersectional identities, and illuminate the link between culture and action. In this case, prototypes reinforce but also complicate normative gendered performance and also suggest limits for adopting plant-based diets. Click here to access the article.
“In Today’s Market, Your Food Chooses You”: News Media Constructions of Responsibility for Health through Home Cooking
Merin Oleschuk (2020)
Social Problems 67(1): 1-19
This article examines North American national news media’s 2015–16 presentation of family meals. Analyzing 326 articles, I identify the ubiquity of a narrative of deterioration, or the presumption that families are replacing meals made from whole, unprocessed ingredients consumed communally around a table, with processed and pre-prepared foods eaten alone or “on the go”. In analyzing the construction of responsibility for this deterioration, I find that the sample predominately frames the production of healthy family meals as constrained by a food environment saturated with inexpensive, highly processed food, and dictated by the competing demands of paid work and inflated normative standards. Yet, when differentiating frames that define the social problem from those that offer solutions, I find that individualization prevails in the frames that target solutions. One important exception is media reporting on low-income families, which are framed as facing exceptional structural constraint. Analyzing these frames, I argue that neoliberal ideology that over-emphasizes individual agency and minimizes structural constraint operates in more subtle ways than previous literature suggests—showing some awareness of the difficulty of people’s lives, but prescribing solutions that leave individuals responsible for the outcomes. These findings offer implications for understanding dominant cultural values surrounding health and the family meal, as well as the allocation of responsibility for social problems within neoliberalism more broadly. Click here to access this article.
Gender, Cultural Schemas and Learning to Cook
Merin Oleschuk (2019)
Gender & Society 33(4): 607-628
While public health researchers stress the importance of home-cooked meals, feminist scholars investigate inequalities in family cooking, including why women still cook much more than men. Key to understanding these inequalities is attention to how people learn to cook, a relatively understudied topic by social scientists. To address this gap, this study employs the concept of cultural schemas. Drawing from qualitative interviews and observations of 34 primary cooks in families, I identify the ubiquity of a “cooking by our mother’s side” schema. This schema privileges culinary knowledge acquired during childhood through the social reproductive work of mothers. I argue, first, that this schema reproduces gendered inequalities over generations by reinforcing women as primary transmitters of cooking knowledge. Second, it presents an overly uniform picture of food learning that obscures diversity, especially by overemphasizing the importance of childhood and masking the learning that occurs later in life. Identifying and analyzing this schema offers opportunities to reconsider predominant approaches to food learning to challenge gendered inequalities in domestic foodwork. Click here to access this article.
Maintaining Meat: Cultural Repertoires and the Meat Paradox in a Diverse Socio-Cultural Context
Merin Oleschuk, Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann (equal authorship) (2019)
Sociological Forum 34(2): 337-360
Despite rising concerns about the meat industry and animal slaughter, meat consumption in Europe and North America remains relatively high, what has been called the “meat paradox.” In this article, we examine a diverse sample of Canadian meat eaters and vegetarians to build on earlier work on the psychological strategies people employ to justify eating meat. We analyze the explanations people give for meat eating within the context of what sociologists term cultural repertoires—the taken-for-granted, unarticulated scripts that inform actions. We distinguish between two types of repertoires: identity repertoires that have a basis in personal, embodied group identities and regularly draw from vivid first-person experiences; and liberty repertoires that are more abstractly conceptualized and signal peoples’ sense of their rights in social space. We find that these repertoires function in distinct ways, both in regard to how participants situated themselves within them, and in their capacity to facilitate active engagement with the ethical implications of conduct. Through these repertoires, we show how the meanings attributed to meat consumption are crucial for understanding its persistence in the face of strong reasons to change, while also advancing literature on cultural repertoires by highlighting their variability. Click here to access this article.
Body Talk and Boundary Work among Arab Canadian Immigrant Women
Merin Oleschuk and Helen Vallianatos (2019)
Qualitative Sociology 42(4): 587-614
This paper places Latour’s (2004) concept of “body talk” alongside literature on symbolic boundaries to consider how the symbolic judgements and evaluations that comprise body talk frame the impact of structural pressures on the body. Drawing from individual and focus group interviews with 36 first-generation Arab Canadian immigrant women, this study shows that the female body, and practices of feeding and exercising it, are sites where structural inequalities embedded in the immigration process are materially experienced, resisted, and managed. In constructing boundaries between Arab women’s bodies in Canada and the Arab world alongside those of so-called “Canadian” women, we argue that women communicate their immigration and settlement struggles and recoup dignity otherwise compromised in the migration process—ultimately allowing them to frame their struggles as products of their moral integrity as immigrant wives and mothers. Through these findings, this paper demonstrates the role of body talk in framing the impact of structural pressures on the body, while simultaneously highlighting the centrality of boundary work to that framing. Click here to access this article.
Foodies of Colour: Authenticity and Exoticism in Omnivorous Food Culture
Merin Oleschuk (2017)
Cultural Sociology 11(2): 217-233
Omnivorous cultural theory highlights the persistence of inequalities within gourmet food culture despite its increasing democratization, arguing that foods remain symbols of distinction through their framing as ‘authentic’ and ‘exotic’. Where these two frames have been shown to encompass problematic racial connotations, questions arise over how racial inequalities manifest in foodie discourse. Drawing from interviews with foodies of color living in Toronto, Canada, this article examines how these inequalities are reproduced, adjusted and resisted by people of color. It asks: how do foodies of color interpret and deploy dominant foodie frames of authenticity and exoticism? Analysis reveals each frame’s potential both to encourage cross-cultural understanding and essentialize or exacerbate ethno-cultural difference. Participants’ ambivalent relationship with foodie discourse (i.e. deploying it alongside critiquing it) highlights how cultural capital works alongside ethno-racial inequalities, and reveals the racial tensions remaining within foodies’ attempts to reconcile democracy and distinction. Click here to access this article.
The Online Domestic Goddess: An Analysis of Food Blog Femininities
Alexandra Rodney, Sarah Cappeliez, Merin Oleschuk, and Josée Johnston (2017)
Food, Culture & Society 20(4): 685-707
Scholars have explored how female food celebrities represent a realm of fantasy and desire, embodying attractive “domestic goddesses” who showcase the wonder and seduction of home-cooked meals. These studies have largely focused on television personalities and have overlooked the food blogosophere, a highly popular, digital realm of food media dominated by women. The blogosphere has its own prominent food personalities and occupies a central role as a source of information and inspiration for home cooks. This paper investigates how idealized food femininities manifest on popular food blogs by examining 426 blog posts written by twenty-two award-winning, female food bloggers. These bloggers forward a vision of idealized feminine domesticity that is glamorously seductive and rooted in the “real” life of everyday home cooks. This article illuminates food blogs’ paradoxical combination of idealization and mundanity. It argues that the online domestic goddess exemplifies women’s need to balance multiple, seemingly contradictory ideals: she must embody domestic success, while avoiding associations of perfectionism, excessive control, or laziness. This study of female bloggers nuances scholarly understanding of the domestic goddess fantasy by revealing the deep tensions in women’s food blogs, particularly the challenge of crafting a credible and appealing feminine voice in a postfeminist context. Click here to access this article.
Leadership in Community-Based Participatory Research: Individual to Collective
Maria Mayan, Sanchia Lo, Merin Oleschuk, Ana Laura Pauchulo, and Daley Laing (2016)
Engaged Scholar Journal 2(2): 11-24
Multi-sector collaborative partnerships hold much promise in tackling seemingly intractable and complex social issues. However, they often encounter many challenges in achieving their goals. Leadership can play an important role in reducing the impact of factors that threaten a multi-sector partnership’s success. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnerships are collaborative and, in many cases, multisectored. While there is a developing literature and practice on multi-sector, collaborative partnerships, leadership in CBPR is relatively unexplored, especially at various partnership stages (i.e., formation, implementation, maintenance, and accomplishment of goal). Through the method of focused ethnography, we explored the research question “How is leadership exercised during the formation stage of a CBPR partnership?” Eighteen partners (government, community, and university sectors) were interviewed about the leadership during the formation stage of their partnership, and data were qualitatively content-analyzed. Partners explained that leadership was exercised during the formation stage through (1) individual characteristics, (2) actions, and (3) as a collective. Our findings illustrate that CBPR leadership shares many of the characteristics of traditional leadership and adapts them to support the collaborative process of CBPR, leading to a collective form of leadership. These findings have implications for the study and practice of CBPR leadership. Click here to access this article.
Engendering Transnational Foodways: A Case Study of Southern Sudanese women in Brooks, Alberta
Merin Oleschuk (2012)
Anthropologica 54(1): 119-131
This paper explores the experiences of Southern Sudanese refugee women in Brooks, Alberta, illustrating how foodways (Long, 2004) impact and reflect women’s conceptions of themselves as gendered, multinational citizens. When women seek out and appropriate diverse culinary traditions to create belonging within multiple circumstances they enact agency; women do not passively accept their fractured connections to their homeland but instead actively work to rebuild relationships within the diversity that defines their experiences in ways that garner them power, prestige, and resources to improve their lives. These movements show how gender and power are entwined in the creation of transnational belonging. Click here to access this article.
Book Chapters
Omnivorousness, Distinction, or Both?
Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann and Merin Oleschuk (2019)
In Fred Wherry and Ian Woodward (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Consumption (pp. 361-380). Oxford: Oxford University Press
This chapter provides an overview of the evolution and debate surrounding the legacy of Bourdieu’s ideas about culture and class inequality. It charts the development of the sociological concepts of distinction and omnivorousness, making note of important points of consensus, while considering gaps and puzzles that continue to trouble the field. The chapter argues that cultural consumption remains a central framework for understanding the perpetuation and cultural rationalization of inequality. Over three decades of research in the sociology of culture highlights the contemporary infusion of elements of democratic inclusion into cultural omnivorousness, yet also how it operates ideologically to obfuscate the deep, disturbing divisions that still exist between rich and poor on a national and global scale. During a period in which wealth disparities are on the rise, the result is more likely an obfuscation of inequality, rather than meaningful social change to reduce it. Click here to access this publication.
Calibrating Motherhood
Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston and Merin Oleschuk (2018)
In Vicki Harman, Benedetta Cappellini and Charlotte Faircloth (Eds.), Feeding Children Inside and Outside the Home (pp. 174-190). New York: Routledge
Mothers’ foodwork is a site of significant social scrutiny. In a context of heightened concern over children’s eating practices, mothers are often deemed personally responsible for ensuring collective well-being through the work of feeding children. Those who are seen to “fail” in this endeavor – e.g., by feeding children processed foods – often encounter severe social stigma. While previous research has shown how mothers attempt to distance themselves from the gendered and classed figure of the “bad mom”, we suggest that this is not the only scrutinized figure regulating mothers’ foodwork. Drawing upon qualitative interview and focus group research with mothers in Toronto, we show how mothers work to distance themselves not only from the negative extreme of the uninformed or uncaring “bad mom”, but also the positive extreme of the overly-controlling or anxious “obsessed mom.” While mothers are judged harshly for their perceived lack of knowledge, care, and resources in their foodwork, we show that a perceived excess of these very traits is also a source of stigma. We demonstrate how mothers work to stake out territory between “inattentive” and “overbearing” through ongoing practices of calibration: the process of performing socially desirable food femininities by actively distancing oneself from polarized extremes (Cairns and Johnston 2015a). The chapter contributes to feminist scholarship on the gendered and classed evaluations of maternal foodwork and sheds light on the endless (and near impossible) work of performing the “good mother”. Click here to access this publication.
A Kind Diet: Cultivating Consumer Politics, Status, and Femininity through Ethical Eating
Josée Johnston, Kate Cairns and Merin Oleschuk (2017)
In Kathleen Lebesco and Peter Naccarato (Eds.), Handbook of Food and Popular Culture (pp. 286-300). London: Bloomsbury.
The popularity of Alicia Silverstone’s vegan cookbook, The Kind Diet (2009), and mothering book, The Kind Mama (2014) — and their explicit articulation of core “kind” eating principles — makes them a compelling case to probe the contested discourse of ethical eating, and the scholarly debates that surround it. In this chapter we outline key themes and debates in ethical-eating literature, both historically and in contemporary scholarship. Then, we use the case of the kind diet to explore these themes more deeply. Specifically, we connect the idea of kind eating to a search for: 1) individual solutions to social problems; 2) high-status cultural practices; and 3) displays of femininity. Click here to access this publication.
Other Writing
Gender Equity Considerations for Tenure and Promotion during COVID‐19
Merin Oleschuk
Commentary written for the Committing Sociology section of the Canadian Review of Sociology.
How Much Do We Really Learn to Cook by Our Mother’s Side?
Merin Oleschuk
Invited submission for Gender & Society Blog
The Author’s Attic with Merin Oleschuk
Merin Oleschuk
Invited feature for a video blog series interviewing authors about their publication in Social Problems.
Calibrating Extremes: The Balancing Act of Maternal Foodwork
Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston and Merin Oleschuk
Invited submission for Gender & Society Blog.
Undergraduate Guide for Qualitative Interviewing in Sociology
Merin Oleschuk
Research guide written for SOC417 at University of Toronto Mississauga & now used for other classes supported by UTM’s Peel Social Lab
Let’s Rethink the Pressure of Cooking Family Meals During the Holidays
Merin Oleschuk, Cairns, Kate and Josée Johnston
Huffington Post Canada
Local Food Supply Chains in Alberta: Case Studies from the Saskatoon, Potato and Lamb Sectors
Brenda Frick, Gunta Vitins, Rochelle Eisen, Merin Oleschuk, and Becky Lipton
Policy report commissioned by the Government of Alberta, Department of Agriculture and Rural Development