The framing of food in Canadian university classrooms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are numerous “positivity” movements circulating such as sex positivity and body positivity that affect how sexuality and bodies are discussed, including in educational contexts. These movements have provided alternative discourses that challenge constructions of sexualities and bodies as “dangerous”, aberrant, or “other”. There is potential for “food positivity” to do the same given how food is frequently constructed as “risky”, reflecting anxieties about industrial food production and the impacts of “bad” food on human health, appearance, and the environment. Food practices, and the discourses that support them act as moral signifiers and can be exclusionary, exacerbating marginalization and inequities. Alternatively, food pedagogies can prioritize inclusion, diversity, and sustainable, resilient communities. How might the discourses that circulate in post-secondary food education construct and support positive relationships with food? Two major, and largely silo-ed, fields in Canadian higher education are Nutritional Sciences and Food Studies. Using publicly available syllabi (n=97) from undergraduate courses across Canada, this study investigated how food positivity is being enacted. In Nutritional Sciences, food positivity emphasizes nutritionism ideology whereby the composition and quantity of nutrients can add up to an (undefined) healthy diet. In Food Studies, food positivity is associated with local, equity-promoting, and culturally-sensitive approaches. In both fields, “food negativity” also appears in relation to “obesogenic” foods and systems, revealing an underlying fatphobia. Greater transdisciplinary collaboration with Fat Studies would benefit both fields in enacting a broader and more inclusive food positivity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".