Imagens, comidas e subjetividades: reflexões acerca do consumo no campo da Alimentação e Nutrição

Abstract

This work concern to studies consumption and the field of Food and Nutrition, with the intention of researching resonances that discussions about consumption produce in the field in question. To this end, the study addresses a conceptual dimension, which aims to problematize the food consumption category. For the purpose of differentiation, we seek to present the differentiation of the terms "food consumption" (understood as nutrient intake), "food consumption" (emphasizing the cultural and symbolic aspects of food) and "food consumption" (understood here as fads or forms of social distinction and belonging to social groups based on the symbolic value of the products purchased), thus working in a broader perspective, encompassing all the complexity involved in the discussion of consumption. It is observed, from our insertion in the field of food and nutrition, as well as data collection in the Revista de Nutrição and theses and dissertations in the CAPs repository, that in the field of Food and Nutrition, these terms listed above are treated as similar, analyzing “food consumption” with a focus on the results of the corresponding intake or the process of absorption of a particular nutrient. In this perspective, the habit and food consumption are reduced to the biological dimension and making elements of culture unfeasible (KLOTZ-SILVA, 2016, 2017). We produce qualitative research, based on the construction of essays. We work with Foucault's concepts of epistemes and devices as guiding concepts of the research. Thinking about consumption as a complex problem helps us to highlight the different epistemes of the fields of knowledge about consumption, and the different resonances of it, in the field of food and nutrition. The devices that we use and that help us to unveil the field that we intend to research, not as an object of research, but as a way of accessing the field that we intend to unveil, were images, videos, music, memes, products of the Cultural Industry. In the end, we emphasize that consumption is also understood as a logic that organizes and builds subjects. Consumption gives a “social place” to the individual, as it ranks him based on what is consumed. As we live in a consumer society, we are encouraged to adopt a consumerist strategy and lifestyle, which reproduces the logic of social stratification. Consumption produces direct interference in the way commensality is organized, highlighting the centrality that food presented during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Finally, we emphasize that consumption, as a device of neoliberal rationality, colonizes our desires, and merges us as subjects. Food and the relationship with food are constituted as language, and this will be extremely important for the constitution of the individual as a subject.