Cresswell Riol

Within the marketplace, food has even been repackaged as a “want” as opposed to a fundamental human need, thereby disregarding human dignity further, as described by O’Boyle: Setting aside need and focusing instead on wants allow mainstream economists to side step the intellectual biases regarding the use of value-laden concepts such as need, to cast consumer behavior in a value-free analytical mold and to represent economics as an exact, value-free science.

Not being able to feed oneself (properly) or requiring assistance as an adult to achieve this is reported as being particularly degrading for people,163 and this has been shown to be in part due to the responsibilisation of food security:164 the neoliberal narrative of hunger has rebranded the structural issue of hunger as a problem of “the hungry” through the process of subjectification.165 Hunger is thereby a character flaw, and such “framing, blaming and shaming” casts “suspicion on the motives, intentions, and moral character of Others and in doing so silences them.”166 Following on from this, research has shown how “neoliberally approved” solutions of small-scale and short-sighted informative and therapeutic solutions in the form of increased health awareness and developing food skills have placed the onus on the individual and taken responsibility away from the state and corporations...As explained by Mayes, there has been a focus on lifestyle health strategies, supporting a shift from socialised to individualised welfare: Lifestyle works as a network that enables the isolation of the bodies and choices of individuals and governs them in relation to the population. If the individual is able to adopt and develop a “healthy lifestyle” they remain inconspicuously nestled within the secured population. However, when the bodies and choices of individuals deviate from norms associated with the health of the population, they become exposed to disciplinary practices of exclusion and marginalization.

Katharine Cresswell Riol

Hermeneutics is “the art and science of interpretation and thus also of meaning.”32 It advocates appreciation of an experience holistically by analysing it both as a whole and as parts, and by understanding the whole in relation to its parts and vice versa. In other words, you read the interview and appreciate it for its complete content, then perceive how it is also composed of different sections. Known as the hermeneutic circle, this...dynamic process appreciates that the whole experience is composed of different parts; analysis in this vein reflects this, involving multiple levels and the scrutiny of different perspectives that relate and cohere into the whole. Hermeneutical phenomenology relies on both interpretation and description of the lived experience. It is the study of lived experience—the “lifeworld”33 or our “being-in-theworld”34—and its meanings: It is a descriptive (phenomenological) methodology because it wants to be attentive to how things appear, it wants to let things speak for themselves; it is an interpretive (hermeneutic) methodology because it claims that there are no such things as uninterpreted phenomena.35 However, personal experiences of the participants are not removed from the social and historical context: they are indivisible. Hermeneutical phenomenology situates the meaning of a human within the world, what Heidegger coined “Dasein”: meaning is related to social, cultural, and historical contexts. There is an “indissoluble unity” between an individual and the experience—the world;36 they constitute the experience, the world, and are constituted by it.37 Similarly, the researcher—with their social, cultural, and historical baggage—is not removed from the context. Humans are sense-making animals. Giving accounts of experiences are ways in which we attempt to make sense of them. How one person accesses the experiences of another depends on what they are told: the researcher is trying to make sense of the participant trying to make sense of their experience. The reader is then an additional level of sense making. The researcher holds a dual role, both similar to and dissimilar to the participant: they are both human beings, making sense of the world through human resources; but the researcher is not the participant and thereby can only access the experience of the participant through their reporting of it, and then process it through their own lens. 

Katharine Cresswell Riol