The Confused Canadian Eater: Quantification, Personal Responsibility, and Canada’s Food Guide

Abstract

Canada’s Food Guide is promoted as an educational tool that translates nutrition for laypeople and provides tools to measure eating and its effects on the body. However, the discourses it circulates have been critiqued as abstract and difficult to apply in everyday practice, and linked to a nutritionally confused environment where the disempowered eater is positioned as lacking knowledge about nutrition and in need of expert intervention to learn how to eat right and become a responsible, healthy subject. By mobilizing a biopolitical frame, this article takes a closer look at the work Canada’s Food Guide does in constructing particular ideas about nutrition, and at the issues of confusion and personal responsibilization that emerge through its quantitative healthy eating discourse. This work turns to literature on scientific and quantitative languages that drive nutrition guidance in texts like Canada’s Food Guide, namely, the concepts of “discourses of quantification” and “nutritionism,” which prioritize scientific knowledge about food while excluding complex economic, political, and sociocultural issues tied to how we eat. In light of Health Canada’s ongoing revision of the food guide, this work seeks to add to discussions about how ideas of healthy eating may be renegotiated with the goal of enriching the way future Canadian public health initiatives and nutrition policies are constructed.