Exploring Food Cultures through Art: Meeting People Where They Are at

Engaging people in critical conversations about food practices is often challenging. In this paper, we explore how an exhibition was used as an educative site to explore food insecurity and food cultures and to promote food ethics and healthy eating. Surveys and interviews from the opening night of an exhibition were collected and Bourdieu’s habitus was used to theoretically inform analysis. The diversity of artworks displayed were found to provoke critical reflection about food cultures among participants. Findings revealed the exhibition was a non-intrusive space for meeting people ‘where they were at’ in understandings of food and food practice. Artworks were found to evoke reflections on food as a cultural phenomenon and as a deeply personal component of everyday worlds. The tensions in making food choices and food as agentic in participants lives were highlighted. Findings suggest that exhibitions may support critical engagement with food practice when audiences are given opportunities to discuss their thoughts and ideas.

This frame is applied in recognition of the consumption of food as a complex socially and culturally located practice (Bourdieu, 1984a) and in recognition that art, too, occurs within a social, political, artistic, and cultural context (Kuttner, 2015). Bourdieu incorporates analysis of social context in understanding social phenomenon, through questions that consider simultaneously how the social environment and the resources an agent can access, influence individual agency.
To consider how visual arts may contribute to moving communities towards reflecting on their food practices, we ask How do people interpret arts about food that have an educative focus? To explore this question, we focus on the experiences and interpretations of participants at an art exhibition, the 'Imagining Food Exhibition'.

The Exhibition
Imagining Food: Art, Aesthetics and Design was an exhibition focused on food 'as more than a means of sustaining life, but as a motif that colours the patterns of life' (University of Tasmania, 2017). Works of various forms including painting, sculpture, photography, furniture, craft, installation and mixed media were exhibited for public display in a University's visual arts gallery. Whilst the brief of the exhibition was not to educate or inform audiences about food related issues, this was a strong driver in making decisions about presenting the works for the exhibition curators (Bywaters, personal communication, 2017).
The Imagining Food Exhibition visually presented aspects of the food industry (including the culling of calves in the dairy industry) that are often hidden from view in society. The artists' intent to act as provocateur, reflects a pedagogical approach of discomfort which seeks to challenge viewers to think deeply about what is represented in the artwork (Leibowitz et al., 2010;Zembylas & Boler, 2003).
When people feel uncomfortable, they may be encouraged to reflect on their own perspectives and beliefs (Zembylas & Boler, 2003). Faraji (2016) in his doctoral studies found that when people experience something unexpected, it is more likely to be remembered. Zembylas and Boler (2003) suggest pedagogies that engage people emotionally, particularly in surprising and unexpected ways, can de-centre previously held beliefs (Crossick, Kaszynska, & Gilmore, 2015) and result in more effective learning (although this is most often temporary) (Walmsley, 2013).
'The controversial nature of the subject matter' encouraged participants to think about the artist's interpretation and consider their own positioning in relation to it. For some participants, '…the more confronting pieces [were] the best'. Others noted that they '[like] any art that can provoke and jar me. I like it, but I don't like it. But, I like that it can bring me into a space where I am unsettled. That for me is a marker of quality in terms of how I can interact with it'. It was in these moments of discomfort that participants often made a personal connection to an art piece. 49 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/elsr Education, Language and Sociology Research Vol. 2, No. 3, 2021

Method
Participants were recruited on the opening night of the exhibition and asked to participate in a written questionnaire and/or an interview. Questions were developed in reference to the key aims of the research project and to the literature (Crosskick & Kaszynska, 2016;Kuttner, 2015). The questionnaire was offered to people as they entered the exhibition, and a secure collection box was used for participants to deposit completed questionnaires on their way out.
In the development of an interview schedule, we drew upon phenomenological techniques in framing questions (Maggs-Rapport, 2000;Thompson & Coskuner-Balli, 2007 Interviews were conducted during the exhibition in a quiet location and lasted between 10-30 minutes.
Forty people submitted a questionnaire and seven people participated in the interviews. Participants were predominantly tertiary educated or current university students, were English-speaking, and Caucasian. Based on survey data, over 40% of participants lived in low socio-economic suburbs, 30% were from high socio-economic suburbs, and those remaining chose not to say (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011).

Writing as Method
In working with the questionnaire and interview transcripts, we employed writing to analyse and interpret the data. Writing as method is well known in qualitative research and is used across a number of discipline areas (i.e., education, sustainability scholarship) (Colyar, 2009;Green, 2015). Scholars contend that writing is an ongoing process throughout a research project and integral in forming interpretations of data (Moules et al., 2015). Colyar positions writing as a 'learning tool' in processes of research and as a generative act. She claims that 'writing is product and process ' (2009, p Green similarly advocates that qualitative research '…is emergent, exploratory, recursive, an "act of discovery", of invention' (2015, p. 6). He posits writing as an indiscriminate component of doing research. He terms this conceptualisation of writing, as 'research-as-writing ' (2015, p. 5). Shown in the extract from the author's shared research journaling below, we used writing as a process for eliciting meaning. Through being open to our own processes of influence, we realised that in many cases, the stories in the data had only been brought to the surface for participants because of the engagement in the research project.
Why is it that participants needed a moment to think before answering these questions? Why don't we talk more about the relationships we have with food, when food is so central to who we are? Maybe it is because of this centrality that relations with food are often overlooked? How does food shape lives and how are lives shaped by it? The exhibition sought to capture our complex and multifaceted relationships with food. Participants seemed to recognise these relationships and express mixed feelings about their engagements with food. How does food become an act of identity?
We found that writing as method enabled an exploratory approach with opportunities for curiosity and intimacy in interacting with participants' voice.

Findings
Art perception is recognised as a subjective and often individualised activity ( Bobby's Silent Witness was influenced by how their personal food practices were supported, or by how much they knew of the dairy industry. 'Any art perception involves a conscious or unconscious deciphering operation' (Bourdieu, 1984b, p. 1), which includes drawing on previous experiences and ways of knowing the world in combination with the present context. It is this coming together of perceptions and experiences in processes of meaning-making that occur for every individual, that means the interpretation one viewer makes of an art piece, is in many ways, unique to that individual.

Figure 1. Amelia Rowe, Bobby's silent witness, 2017. Photo by: Damien Walker
This was revealed in the ways that participants engaged in discussion about the art pieces that reflected the intended themes (as detailed by the artists on the artwork descriptor). However, many participants used these interpretations as a point of entry to create their own understandings-assembling their ideas around the artist's intended representation, complexified with personal questioning and connection (Crowther, 1993). For example, one participant reflected on her own food practice around meat consumption after having viewed the Bobby calf. The interviews appeared useful in helping participants work through and discuss their ideas about the artworks, with some interviewees expressing appreciation for the opportunity to process their thoughts about the artworks via the interview.
There were similarities in the ways that participants interpreted the artworks, reflecting abstract concepts such as universality. Another theme throughout the data was the ways that the artworks encouraged participants to reflect on personal ideas and practices of food consumption. The findings suggest that the artwork prompted participants to reflect on food as a constant mediator and connector in their personal social and cultural worlds.

Participant's Understanding of Food as Cultural
Artworks in the exhibition prompted participants to think about society and culture more broadly.
While food was the theme of the exhibition, one participant in an interview spoke about issues of consumption after viewing an artwork of a skeleton with a knife and fork crossed over the front ( Figure   2): It made me think about how we strive to be individuals and we strive to be unique through our body image, our skin colour and our race. But when you strip away all the things that make us individual, we are all the same bound by the food of our culture. And so it made me question our whole notion of 52 consumption and what we consume to make us who we are as an individual. (Sophie, early 20s, University Student)

Figure 2. Renee Austin, A lifestyle, not a disease, 2017. Photo by: Damien Walker
Similar to the comment above, another participant in an interview interpreted a different artwork according to the theme of consumption. This artwork was a chicken burger, but rather than a fillet of chicken in the bun, the artwork was a burger bun filled with hundreds of small chickens.
[I liked] a piece in the gallery based around the idea of food porn as its very relevant to today because you can't scroll through social media without finding a…cheeseburger. So the idea of showing that through art, and the whole idea of consumption around food and the idea of kind of the publicizing of food as a product I think is quite interesting. (Casey, early 20s, University Student) The interpretations of the participants shown here reflect the intended interpretations of the artists.
Sophie and Casey were current university students who reflected a habitus firmly located in education and as noted by Bourdieu (1984b, p. 3), 'educated people are at home with scholarly culture'. Their interpretations were sophisticated in the sense that they made connections from the artwork to larger social phenomenon, such as consumption practices and social media. While a similar theme was extracted by Sophie and Casey in the art pieces, they engaged in different artworks and drew on their personal interests and experiences (i.e., social media) to make sense of the ideas. This suggests that the way social issues are interpreted is influenced by social positioning and by the social worlds that people inhabit, which extends beyond simplified ideas of educational experience in determining ideas/value/interpretations (Bourdieu, 1984a;Bourdieu, 1990

Participant's Understanding of Food as Personal
While participants engaged with a diverse array of artworks, when asked which art piece they liked and why, a similarity in responses was revealed. Participants suggested that artworks were most notable when they could relate to them in some way, or make personal connections with them. One participant connected with an artwork of an empty and dishevelled fridge (Figure 3)

Photo by: Darren Grattidge
Trent, a mid-20s university student, was drawn only to one art piece because of his work affiliation stating, 'I work at a restaurant. I am a waiter. This was the only one I connected with'. The image of the chef represented a familiar social field for Trent and when prompted to discuss this in more detail, we reflected on the responsibility's chefs have in producing and making quality food for people. The ways that people are constructed in discourses including imagery influences how it is that 'people' relate to them. Conrad (2012, p. 1) terms this 'the resonance ability of the frames presented'. Literature suggests that if people cannot identify or connect with a discourse or artefact, then there is less likelihood of engagement with it (Conrad, 2012). Therefore, reflecting the identities of the intended audience may be 54 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/elsr Vol. 2, No. 3, 2021 useful in engaging people in artwork, however, the comments from both Sally and Trent did not demonstrate any abstracting of the concepts under exploration. Instead, these representations acted to affirm identities rather than to promote critical engagement with the underlying themes of the art pieces or in food practice.

Agency and Choice in Food Practices
Some artworks portrayed concepts of agency in food practice and elicited responses from participants about what and why they eat certain foods. For example, Patricia, who was in her mid-40s, said 'I am a Literature suggests that relations with food are complex and any sustainable change in food practices must work within socio-cultural conditions-beyond accounting for economic resources or time, but engage with personal histories, tastes and cultural capital to support transitions to new food practices (Bourdieu, 1984a;McKenzie & Watts, 2019). The comments from some participants about their food practices suggested they were free from cultural and economic capital restraints, such as those that found comfort in their choice to eat a vegan diet. Overwhelmingly, veganism is a diet that exists in middle class cultures that Greenebaum (2016) argues reflects a privileged position of a food consumer.
In contrast, Halle and other younger participants felt restricted in navigating their food practices due to their cultural (i.e., 'foods of our culture define who we are') and economic ('poor uni student') conditions. These findings reveal how participants engaged with artworks for varied reasons and drew conclusions about what the artworks were communicating might mean for them, in ways that were reflective of, and at the same time, symptomatic of, their habitus.

Food as Agentic
Many participants reflected on the ways that food was a powerful agent in their lives. Participants wrestled with this idea in interviews and in qualitative survey comments, and often described the 'power' of food in binary terms as well as abstract generalizations. This stumbling for language was interpreted as a struggle for participants, in making sense of how insentient objects (food consumables) could hold power over them (Harvey, McKeekin, & Warde, 2004).
Some artworks specifically represented health implications of certain food practices and the power of food to shape states of being. Bianca, a mid-30s university graduate, suggested that 'Food is powerful -Building health, ruining health?' Participants ascribed a form of agency to food in articulations of their relationship with it. Food, which is material, tangible, touchable and object, was noted as something that was out of participants' realm of control. Sam, a mid-30s university graduate noted, 'Food is everything to us as humans, it shapes our world, our reality and our life and death'.
Participants were prompted through their engagement with the artworks to think about their own food practices and relationships with food. It is well established that tastes and food preferences are socially located (Bourdieu, 1984a;Maguire, 2016). A person's choice of food is influenced by what is practically available to choose from (given socio-economic conditions) and available in their imaginaries (given socio-cultural and historical conditions) of what 'healthy' (or whatever aspiration is guiding food choice) can be. In this way, food operates as an interconnected but complex and interdependent means of grounding into a social and cultural context (Swartz, 2012;Taylor, 2010).
While participants saw food as a necessity for living, at the same time, they recognised the significant social and cultural contributions food makes to their relations with others in the world and their place within it (Harvey, McKeekin, & Warde, 2004). Mellor, Blake and Crane (2010) through their analysis of dinner parties of middle class couples, demonstrate how food practices, such as the dinner party and what is served, are important to maintaining class privilege. In this sense, changing food habits and practices, not only require a rewiring of ingrained social and cultural practice, it also impacts on social connections and the everyday structuring of worlds. Participants' responses suggested they were also aware of the way their food choices reflected who they were in the world and food was recognised as a way to communicate identity and comments such as 'you are what you eat' were shared by many of the participants during interviews. The art exhibition provided an entry point into these conversations with participants and encouraged an open and non-threatening space to engage with these ideas.
At the same time, food was seen as agentic in creating and/or destroying health, both to the human body and to environments more broadly. This was expressed by Tom when he said: Food is powerful in that way and I don't think we think about that.  Vol. 2, No. 3, 2021 were individualised-where people could apply the themes to their own social contexts, yet importantly, the artworks spoke across many of the social worlds of the audience attending the opening night, which enabled audiences to find artworks that engaged them to think about their ideas and understandings of food practices (Kester, 2004). Schaefer, Biltekoff, Thomas and Rashedi (2016) observe that people's decisions about what to eat are a product of the intersection of their experiences and priorities and what they understand to be true about health and food. The exhibition provided a diversity of art pieces that engaged attendees in highly personal ways that encouraged thinking about food and their relations with it.

Discussion
As we explored the responses to survey questions left by visitors to the art exhibition, we were seeking to understand participants' perceptions of food. We were searching for stories about how food was perceived and to create a picture of how food was represented in everyday lives. How does food shape their lives and how are they shaped by it? We recognised that participants arrived at the exhibit with perceptions and that their experience of the exhibition, and in turn their experience of undertaking a survey or interview with us offered potential to create and effect their perceptions.
While we were interested in how participants experienced the exhibition and the thoughts that were prompted by these experiences, we wonder about the potentiality of these thoughts in lieu of the research. Would these same thoughts have surfaced for participants if not afforded the opportunity to participate in an interview or complete a survey? Would people have 'reflected' and 'dwelled' on the artworks in the same way if we had not prompted them to do so? The socially constructed and co-constituted mechanics of qualitative research unavoidably result in an altering of realities of participants (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). Participants who attended the exhibition to 'look at' the artwork were encouraged to step outside of themselves for a moment and 'look inward' to reflect on how the artwork had impacted them. For instance, questions such as 'How did this make you feel…' required participants to move through an act of feeling and communicate these feelings, both for themselves, that is having a self-made understanding, but also for someone external (the researcher). Comments such as 'Gee, let me think about that for a second' were common before responding to the provocations and comments throughout the interviews included '…It really made me think.' We defer back to Colyar's (2009) ideas, who suggests that it is only when she has finished her first draft that she will understand her own argument and know what to say. In this study, participants were undertaking a similar process, working out for themselves and for someone else, what thoughts and feelings had been provoked through attending the exhibition. This finding has implications for how art-based education can facilitate understanding and how food advocates select and apply education about food that has the objective of changing food practices.
Creating opportunities for audiences to reflect and interpret what the works meant to them, was a means of constructing and consolidating thoughts and feelings. In this sense, we agree with Gell (1998, 57 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/elsr Education, Language andSociology Research Vol. 2, No. 3, 2021 p. 6) when he notes that art objects are 'a part of language' and by virtue, require relationality for meaning-making to occur. We argue that the very act of researching in this study provided a platform for people to reflect more deeply and to find their thoughts, then give voice to them. The opportunity to engage in a dialogue about what they were viewing was fundamental to promoting reflective awareness and to enabling more complex ideas to surface (Olson, 1992). Using language to engage people in provocations for educative purposes, such as food and its role in society, extends upon the 'viewing' experience.

Conclusion
The exhibition provided rich, creative, aesthetically pleasing and challenging artwork, which audiences used to reflect on their connections with food and food practice. We revealed how food was interweaved through the everyday worlds of people and how food practices were influenced by social location-by habitus. Most participants were able to identify a single artwork that held meaning for them, which acted as an entry point to reflecting on their relationship with food and understandings of it. We suggest that the diversity of the exhibition enhanced the potentiality of the artwork to represent, intersect and provoke thinking about food culture by providing multiple entry points for participants to connect with the representations and themes that resonated with them.
We began this journey with an exploration of how art could be used as a means of educating communities in conversations about food cultures. We acknowledge that a limitation of this study relates to the limited number of participants, and that those who attended the opening night of Imagining Food: Art, Aesthetics and Design were already in some way interested in the exhibition and perhaps, were expecting to be thoughtfully provoked. Yet, in this modest study, we revealed how habitus influenced the interpretations of the artworks made by participants-even within a group of seemingly 'similar' individuals.
However, we do wonder if the interpretations participants made of the artwork would have been as reflective, if not for the opportunity to engage in a process of self-reflection through the research?
Participating in a research project, where reflective questions were asked, was a successful means of engaging some people to think deeply and critically about what they were viewing and turn a critical eye onto themselves. Overall, we found that asking inquisitive questions encouraged people to reflect on their understandings.
With this in mind, we surmise that exhibitions can be used to create spaces for self-reflection about societal and personal food practices. We found that deliberative communication and provocation deepens engagement and opens new pathways for meaning-making, and one which food activists and educators and exhibition/gallery curators aiming to cultivate critical thinking about the self and world may find generative.
In sum, we suggest that there are generative possibilities for food activists and educators to work alongside artists in innovative ways to create artworks that provoke and stimulate reflection on food 58