"Can we add a little sugar?" : The contradictory discourses around sweet foods in Swedish home economics

• Published in: Pedagogy, Culture & Society
• Main Authors: Bohm, Ingela, Åbacka, Gun, Hörnell, Agneta, Bengs, Carita
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Umeå universitet, Institutionen för kost- och måltidsvetenskap 2023
• Subjects: hem- och konsumentkunskap; diskursanalys; sötsaker; Sociology (excluding Social Work; Social Psychology and Social Anthropology); Sociologi (exklusive socialt arbete; socialpsykologi och socialantropologi); Northern Sweden
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-206582; https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2023.2190754

Sweet foods occupy an ambiguous position in many people’s diets, perhaps especially for children and adolescents. The twin expectation that they both covet and limit their intake can create a dilemma not only in the home, but also in the school subject Home Economics (HE), which among other themes has a focus on food and health. In this study, we explored how Discourses on sweet foods were formed, reproduced, and challenged during 26 lessons in northern Sweden. Overall, sweet foods were constructed as desirable but also as unhealthy, disgusting, and unnecessary. They were used as a form of capital where ownership, distribution, and fairness were important, and students could mark friendships by sharing and gifting. Conversely, they could also use sweet foods to police, ridicule, question, or punish each other. Conflicts could arise around less-than-perfect results and students could withhold sweet foods from each other as a form of social rejection. Vague limits to intake placed responsibility for intake on the students themselves. We suggest that a contextualisation of the social, cultural, and health aspects of sweet foods in HE might help students acquire a more holistic Discourse of sweet foods and mitigate their social weaponisation.