Teaching the visual culture of food influencing and clean eating: critical approaches to learning in action

Abstract

The article presents critical analysis of clean eating’s visual culture and classroom discussions, to explore the informal learning that arises from constructions of white femininity and food curation, promoted by clean eating influencers’ social media channels, cookery books, and television appearances. Guided by bell hooks’ Teaching Critical Thinking, the article discusses how the learning that takes place outside the formal structures of education can be brought into the classroom as material for “learning in action,” and the methods used to encourage an understanding of thinking as an action. The visual messages of social worth that are communicated through the careful crafting of normatively desirable subjects, in conjunction with the curation of food, appear to be tools that educate audiences in the ways of social ideals and acceptance of standardized racial and classed identities. To explore these positions, Collins’s intersectionality as social theory is applied to provide insights into how technologies of whiteness, aesthetics, color palettes, lighting design choices, and strategic compositions of food that appear across different influencers’ platforms support the creation of stylized gendered subjectivities, as beneficiaries of intersecting privilege, in an apparently seamless practice of fresh, youthful, and knowledgeable whiteness.