Welcome everybody to the latest iteration of our nutrition seminar series. 

Our speaker today is Dr. Juliet Bennett. She's a postdoctoral research fellow in the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies and the Charles Perkins Centre. 

So it's nice to get the social science perspective because availability of food is a prime determinant of what you actually end up eating. 

On behalf of my research team, which is led by David Heimer, Alex Broom, and Katherine Kenny, it's been such a privilege to do this postdoctoral research with them. 

Science knows what is a good diet. 

We know this, and yet poor diets are the source of so many early deaths, preventable deaths, so many health problems that prevail and are even accelerating around the world. 

When David wrote his book with Steven Simpson Eat Like the Animals, he posed this question, why when we have the ability to create whatever food environment we want, why have we then created so much unhealthy nutrition and everything else that's come with that inequalities, environmental degradation?

Why have we created such an unhealthy food environment? 

So we ask the question, what influences what we eat? Who is responsible for that?

We tell people, this is your responsibility. You choose what you put in your mouth, but how much is really a choice? 

From a historical perspective and aligning with the approach of Charles Perkins Centre, a complex systems approach helps us build this more integrative understanding of the problems of diet, health and food. 

World Health Organisation also promotes this “systems thinking” approach that we've taken.

And we are really looking at the relationships between actors, these interrelationships between actors and actors, the boundaries of the system and what's beyond the boundaries, who draws the boundaries and with how far does this go and what are the very different perspectives of the food system?

And today, I'm going to focus on the perspectives of consumers, which was our stage one research. 

Our research has started to engage alternative food movements and communities as the second stage. And the third stage, which we do simultaneously, will be about engaging policy makers, researchers, and people working in industry.

And we have focused in many ways on ultra-processed food. And that's because in defining this Carlos Montero in 2009 with a team of scientists observed this wave of western foods, pre-packaged foods, ultra-processed foods made in factories.

With that, a wave of non-communicable diseases, obesity and illnesses that weren't there before. And so that transition happened faster in Brazil than it did maybe in other countries. 

And it was just so clear to them. And that training and classification of foods according to the nature of their processing, and in the purpose of their processing has now spread and its quite a well-known idea.

So the harms of ultra-processed food come from many different places. And of course, not all ultra-processed foods are equally bad or harmful. 

It comes down to a mix of nutrients. It comes down to how much they displace other foods in the diet. It comes down to how their additives and things that are added that we're slowly uncovering, are impacting our microbiome and our immune system.

It comes down to this purpose. Why are they engineered? They're engineered to get us hooked, and to maximise profit. 

So they are stripped of protein, which is expensive. And the taste replicates that umami flavour that makes us want more and want more. 

And as David and Steven's work, um, in nutritional geometry tells us this appetite for protein isn't satisfied.

So we eat more and more. 

Then there's the issue of power and how that's influencing the power of this very profitable industry in influencing the food system and food governance. 

Which is visually apparent in this Oxfam figure. Whereby all of these amazing choices, these different brands, this array of choice is really the power is so consolidated in the hands of not very many corporations, transnational powerful, highly influential.

But what is their intention? 

Is their intention to cause these health harms. Is there intention to feed the world and support health? Is it to provide foods that are affordable, convenient, and tasty? Or is it to maximize profit? 

And that's the way that we've organised the food system according to this corporate food regime that's legitimate, that's a rule of the game.

They're following the rules of the game in maximising profit for shareholders in a highly financialised food system. So the harms are then unintended consequences. They're not intended. 

And who is responsible? You, you put the food in your mouth. But who benefits from these harms is an important question.

Unintended consequences gives an excusing condition for the health inequities and all of the outcomes which harm, that we can foresee and can predict. And so maybe if we look at the interests that these are serving, then we can try to approach these, so.

What do we do about this? 

Well, our first paper was really about developing a common language and synthesising a lot of the literature across our fields that we hadn't entered before, really focusing on the food system. And there's amazing work that's been done within our university on this topic.

And, we asked how are the harms of ultra-processed food allowed to proliferate? 

So we explored the different actors, the networks, the relationships, the social norms, practices, systems, and rules of the game that they operate within. 

And overall, we've conceptualised this networked administration of harm in which no single actor is solely responsible.

Everyone is playing in these silos, playing by their rules and what's normal for them. 

It's normal to earn profit. It's normal for governments to have a short-term focus and operate in silos. It's normal for all of these factors to be at play and these structures of science, social nd the agents and they both enter each other and they both constrain each other. 

Yet the misattribution of responsibility is really central to the problems of the food system and the ways in which corporate political activities such as lobbying and sponsoring sports events and having a seat at the table where decisions are made regarding food policy, obfuscates what is actually seen and understood as being healthy.

So responsibility is about how much power you have to enact change and having that enabling a healthier future. 

What do we do about this? 

Well, we wanted to start with parents everyday experiences.

We chose to look at parents, and the reason we did that was to get an intergenerational perspective, and start with everyday norms and how parents navigate this food system.

Why is healthy eating so hard when it should be supported and made easy?

Today I'm going to focus on what we found by speaking to parents. And specifically in this area, we are looking at what are parents' experiences of the food system and their experiences navigating it. 

We saw these themes and findings repeated over and over again. 

Each quote is representative of stories that we heard over and over and over again. We've just selected one because I had too many slides, but we'll just select a few.

What did you pack in your lunchbox or your child's lunchbox? 

So, unpacking the school lunchbox which was mine on a good day. 

I can't usually afford blueberries and when I look at this, I cringe because I see so much more than just an ordinary box of food. 

Not only the nightmares that go before and after in the planning and the buying and the waste, but I see so much because I'm studying this and I've spoken to parents and there is so much in the school lunchbox.

So much that ends up being wasted. There's the bread, the ham, is that okay? But not vital gummies. I mean, what the heck is in them anyway, but you, it is like this navigation of attention that unfold between a parent or parents and children. I know ultra-processed foods are not good, but seem to make it into a lunch box every day.

For this particular focus, we ask how do parents' everyday encounters with school lunchboxes reflect and shed light on involving food systems issues. 

And the first point is really this feeling of failing. That you are being judged as a parent, how much you love your child, how good you are by what is in the lunchbox and what is eaten by the child.

So Charlotte was actually a mother of 1-year-old twins and she said, I am not going to be happy if someone comments on what I'm giving my child. So I was taken back. 

Everyone talks about these judgments and, judgments from teachers and obviously you want to feed your kid the best food. You probably already have a level of guilt about it. But parents are set up to fail because we know all of these system factors.

We know there are these commercial determinants of health. We know there are socioeconomic determinants of health and what ends up being eaten, but the responsibility is felt on you as a parent for the whole thing in your individual everyday practices. 

So there's this trifecta of challenges, time, budgets, and what children eat.

That came up again and again and were implicated strongly in the lunchbox, uh, which is that anything that goes in that is slightly perishable or healthy, just comes back or slimy. 

So there's food waste. Do I just keep doing this and just put it in the bin?

Or, you know, there were some parents, my child has to eat it.

They're really constrained by what peers are eating. If every child was eating that food at lunch, that would be one thing.

But when your friend's eating a packet of chips, you don't want to eat the carrots. You want the packet of chips. 

And this becomes this whole focus. And when you run out of options, because you can't give food that gets heated, it won't stay cold, you just put processed food. It's the answer. It's cheap, convenient and the kids eat it. 

But I also want to emphasise it's not just about ultra-processed food and the guilt comes from all sorts of aspects of navigating food.

Amara just wonders about the wax and how they distribute and how many pesticides is in one apple.

And you know, the time that you spend cooking for yourself is time you're not spending earning money or doing something else that you want to do.

And so there really are so many factors at play that can be understood through this lens. 

And, this comment really captures this predicament of responsibility where a parent feels this weight and feels like a failure when the parents we spoke to, were very aware of these commercial factors.

How can I learn to be healthy and eat healthy? And how can I teach my child to eat and be healthy?

When I'm up against a multi-billion-dollar organisation that focuses more on getting me to spend my money than keeping me alive. 

And so these factors, these economic rationalities, that economics is more valuable than health are unfolding in this way and yet responsibility lies on parents and experience and felt as their responsibility.

School food environments are a really big part of this story because food school environments are also replicating this kind of devaluing of food. 

They only have this short window to eat, which was came up again and again as being part of the reason that children don't eat all of the contents of their lunchbox. 

School food environments prioritise the learning, which is separated from food. 

And children, of course, would prefer to play than eat. And that's what many participants were talking about, how the structure of school lunches and someone talked about the reverse school lunch, maybe they should play first and then eat.

But parents who had grown up in other cultures and countries describe other institutions where particularly in France and Italy, for example, everybody was fed the same thing on a real plate with real cutlery and able to name what's on their plate.

They sat around a table socialising and valuing food for half an hour or more eating, and then had a whole chunk of half an hour or more of play.

And people talking about in Japan where kids are actually part of the process. They go and get the food, they set up this, change the school room into a dining room. Eat and then clear up. And you think of all those life skills and the ways in which food can be valued through the food environment, through these structures that we put and develop through schools and from beyond throughout society. 

And there are ways in which this reproduces our food culture as well. 

So I eat at my desk a lot of the time, and that's a normal thing because I have more important research to do. This really brings into question what we value.

How do we value food? Is food just a fuel? Is it a tick box? Is it something we just need to get done? 

So we're at a party. Better just give the kids some sausages so that we can get on with socialising. And this is a very Australian thing. 

So I'm going to go back to the canteen because the canteen nuggets or chicken fingers came up again and again as an example of the normalisation of a certain type of food. 

So because she worked in the cane, she had this overarching view, the number one biggest seller is the bloody chicken nuggets.

It's frozen chicken nuggets. I don't think these nuggets have ever seen a chicken, although they have salad and salad sandwiches on the menu. I never ever made one. 

And I think that's an important message to think about that we can institutionalise that canteens have to have this range of food.

But if you've got the option on the menu to have the chicken nuggets, what's the point in having the others other than to make ourselves feel better?

And parents talked about these social norms being so powerful because you care about your child socialising, you care about how they feel amongst their peers, and you don't want them to feel the odd one out.

And sometimes there were stories, there was one in particular of a mom who's like the sausages at the sports carnival and soccer. And then they have lollies and they have this bombardment. And she said, I won't do it. And, and I said, well, how does that go down when you resist?

And she said, actually, parents are relieved. They say, I don't want my kid eating this either. Thank you for resisting. 

So there are stories of resistance, but it's really, really hard. And you also care about the relationship with your child and you know, your child thinks you're a bad parent, if you don't give them the food, that's tasty as well. 

So there's so many different factors that come into play. 

But you know, the marketing and normalisation starts really early with packaging foods that target kids at two years old with bluey. 

Why is there a bluey? Many people talked about these very like ordinary crackers that have bluey on it, that don't even have bluey on the actual cracker, and they're going, why is this marketed?

it's just wheat and additives and salt and sugar. And why is this? 

Why is this being targeted at my child? 

And my child wants it because they love Bluey. 

So that really leads us into this frustration that parents have with marketing and packaging and the lack of trust that's developing with regard to our food system.

And sometimes parents would say, well, my parents just trust what's in the supermarket because surely the government would only allow foods that are healthy to be available. 

There's a lot of frustration about what gets passed as healthy and what gets promoted as healthy on the front of the packages. Espousing, all of these amazing things.

Then while you know, the back of packages is very useful and important information, parents are left to navigate that information on their own, and most of it is very hard to decipher. 

Michelle said, I feel like you almost need a degree in all the numbers to be able to understand what's in the food, to then be able to make the choices of what you're doing.

And how is that allowed to happen? 

This is about these commercial forces and the issues that we discussed in that first paper. 

And we were seeing these themes come up again and again, and the awareness of parents of these issues that we were unpacking through our research and through literature and concepts.

The awareness is really remarkable.

So it's tricky. The duopoly of Woolies and Coles, unsurprisingly, came up in many interviews as hampering and being unhelpful for our environments and for farmers. 

Specifically of school lunches, looking at what is being done in different countries, and where is a proper lunch being done well, and how is that having an impact on the population? 

But not following what's being done in the US in terms of what was perceived as being a bad example of unhealthy food.

There were quite a few people who were talking, maybe they should tax what's bad and make and subsidise what's healthy.

Why not? 

And there were people who were talking about how you shouldn't even have Coles and Woolies or 95% of what's in Coles and Woolies should be proper food and 5% other stuff rather than what's currently seen as the other way around. 

Using tax funds to support health rather than aid corporations.

Health star ratings.

We looked at the moral judgments of parents who have felt this individual's responsibility and feel that so deeply, and then the institutions that work against them from the time and lack of time that they have to cook, and the lack of time a child has to eat and how this devaluing of food is reproduced.

Through the school lunchbox practices and how the socialising of what is normal is working against what is healthy. 

And these massive commercial forces and lack of governance, but the possibilities for much more helpful governance. Overall, the message being that food is a battle that individually cannot win on their own.

And people even use that language. They're like, you can't win if the majority are against you. 

So as you look to the future, there is very exciting work being done internationally, and nationally, in the policy space and the possibilities for policies to make a really big difference.

Structures centred around schools as a location is one of the big areas. Regulating marketing, rethinking subsidies and taxes and warning labels that warn against high salt, warn against type fat, or trans fats, warn against ingredients that shouldn't be consumed by children.

At the moment we'll battle against the economic rationalities that corporations don't want these to happen. 

How do we look at making health more of a priority then these economic factors and moving from the assumption that scale and centralisation is the only way for solutions to unfold is a really important part.

So coming back to the questions of what influences what we eat and who is responsible? 

We've really seen how the problems of the food system converge in the school lunchbox experience in each and individual household. Every morning, every night. The waste.

This is a shared nightmare, a shared experience. 

And so with these multiple scale solutions, how do we come together and treat the lunch, treat this problem differently? 

What happens when we look at it as a shared responsibility? And so this lunchbox ends up being a symbol of so much more than a lunchbox.

It's a symbol of even our tendency to individualise what is a collective and social problem. 

So, coming back to the question that we started with and the topic of today's talk, the value of social sciences and food system research, and we can see how our food system has evolved and social sciences helps us answer these questions.

How do we get here? What parameters constrain us and what are social rather than individual problems? 

And I think really, how do we work together as we've been doing through things like this series in the interdisciplinary work of Charles Perkins Centre and moving beyond that as well with working with communities and working with policy makers to bring these voices together in these change to create healthier futures.

Okay. Questions from the floor?

I really liked your idea of looking at food through the lens of how we eat our food and the culture and the ways in which we tell our children. 

Do you think that could be one of the ways of changing habits, like when we were growing up, setting up the table, or when our moms are preparing the food, just watching the pot and stuff like that was a big part of learning for all of us.

Ok so the question is, can we change what we eat by how we look and practice food on a day-to-day basis? 

Treating of food as a commodity, rather than as a right, for example, treating it as fuel rather than what you're describing there as social and fundamental. 

And so how do we do that and enable that is a real structural question because, you know, parents talk about just being so tired because they've worked such long hours and they're just rushing home and then the kids are hungry and it's like this, the systems forces that work against us.

So how do we provide the space and the time for us to be able to sit and set the table and, and enable those practices and those intergenerational habits as well? 

But overarchingly people were just like confounded by it. They're like, why are there five stars on Milo? Or why are there five stars or four stars on an ice cream? 

Not really necessarily knowing, well it's four stars compared to other ice creams. 

They're like, this product is really natural. It has four ingredients, nothing, all natural. 

And then it's got three stars and this other one, uh, like this flavoured yogurt has five stars and it has all of these ingredients that I don't even know what they have.

So it was a real feeling of corporations gaming the system. And I think this layer of distrust that's coming up.

I'll take another question. Yes. 

One thing, I don't hear much about is the notion of a food budget. Just because ultra-processed foods aren't foods that we should only eat, doesn't necessarily mean that they're foods we should not eat.

So I'm just curious to know your thoughts about what a food budget might actually look like, where foods of the ultra-processed variety might quite safely be eaten at sort of 5%, 10% of total energy intake. 

That is a really good question and what it brings up for me is how would that be socialised, because a lot of the participants were talking about moderation, sometimes foods and language around foods and we try not to use bad foods and good foods.

We try not to even use unhealthy and healthy. There are sometimes foods and there's everyday foods, but then there's very different understandings of what is a sometimes food.

Can you have one sometimes food every day if it's a different, sometimes food? 

Can I have three different, sometimes foods today? 

There was also this sense of what is moderation is really difficult and is different for each person. 

There are also very different understandings of health out there and different bodies that have different health requirements as well.

And there are different roles for ultra-processed foods. 

Is the purpose of ultra-processed food to support health? 

Or to support just profit making? A food budget is a really interesting one.

It’s leaving it with the individual to decide how much discretionary food should be part of their diet. I think we also need to deal with the systems that constrain that.

How do you make healthy food something that is pleasurable and joyful and fun, like nice to eat? 

How to make it tasty, how to make it fun, I think was really culturally embedded and people from different cultures having different approaches to it. 

Thanks Juliet. 

There's been lots of talk about provision of school lunches in Australia, by the schools. 

Especially in the dietician circles, but I'm not actually sure where we're at with that kind of rolling out or testing or evaluation. Could you talk a little bit about that, where we're at and do you agree with this?

Tasmania's leading the way on rolling out pilot, that has been expanded and it is very exciting to see that. 

Every year you, I look into where's this at? And it's like, oh, another 50 schools or something.

So I think there's this interstate possibilities and my understanding is the occasional school experiments with it and there are even programs like this. 

Okay, let's let children bring their main lunch, like the sandwich and, we'll, for this period of time, just take care of everything else.

So that gets rid of the packet food. And we'll do fruit platters or vegetable platters with dips. We'll do smoothies. And so really celebrating like fresh foods. 

And that seems like another opportunity or way to do something as well. 

You should definitely show that lunchbox with all the factors going into that because that was quite powerful. 

You showed us the graphs of increase in obesity, that came along with processed foods, but not the graphs that showed the decrease in food poisoning, food law, infectious diseases, malnutrition, et cetera. 

So we've traded one set of risks for another one. And school lunches in Indonesia is a very good example of where you definitely need to balance those risks, because they've had enormous blow back from what's probably a very small number of cases of disease outbreaks.

Food that can't be put in the fridge. I mean, would you send sushi to school for a kid because the rice is outside and that's unsafe.

Everything that's unhealthy is cheap. Everything that's healthy, is expensive. And that needs to be unpacked a little bit because sometimes fresh food is cheaper than the packaged food. 

And sometimes, soft drinks can be expensive but justified.

There was a social worker who was talking about these aspects as well and how they unfold for families. I think there's a willingness, there is a massive cost and it influences what ends up in the lunchbox. 

These are trade-offs that parents are making all the time. And in the end, people just want food, healthy food to be affordable and accessible. And to have the time and the space to be able to cook and eat healthy food. And that is really simple.

That's what governments really need to support.