DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.11| HAGEMANN, WAGNER: LUNCHABLES_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 73 other means of producing and disseminating research results.‘Knowledge’ plays a particularly important role. Above all, we think of specific skills, practices, and knowledge that we would tentatively describe as survival strategies in the area of everyday crisis. We were able to observe and learn from our mothers and other people how they tried, despite their very limited financial resources, to meet specific standards, but above all to live up to a role expectation of a‘good mother’, which is closely associated with food-related actions and a context of domestic care work as well as with concepts of‘emotionality’ and‘love’. These practices and their formation were often motivated by a feeling of shame stemming from cultural norms of what makes a‘good mother’. Our project is also about giving visibility to such knowledge and similar survival strategies, valorising and recontextualizing them with a sense of empowerment, for example, by making collected life hacks and techniques accessible to others in a way that identifies, explains, and acknowledges those developing them and the circumstances in which they were developed. One important part of our work is the conception of interventions. We understand them as actions and processes with which‘knowledge’ is intentionally transformed and which always have a practical, publicly visible dimension. They are accompanied by research and further discussion, framed by larger agendas and programmes, floating freely between various different sets of theories. To prepare such formats, it is important to analyse the phenomena that influence the perception of relevant contexts. These include concrete experiences of people involved as well as popular cultural artefacts and class and nutritional knowledge in mediatised form, for example, as product designs, advertising, and distribution structures. For this purpose, in addition to conversations with each other, with other people concerned and experts from different fields, we explore nutrition-related material of all kinds, whether it is specific foodstuffs, historical and present-day TV commercials, the fast-food packaging, research literature, cookbooks, photos of family celebrations, or menus. To somewhat expound on one of our theoretical questions here, the difficult reconstruction of class relations subtly embedded in media contexts, we have chosen a ready-made food for schoolchildren that has remained popular in the US to this day, but had only a brief product life in Germany: Lunchables. Lunchables is a prepackaged meal offered by the US company Oscar Mayer, today a part of the Kraft Heinz Group. Allegedly out of a crisis of Bologna sausage sales, four designers developed a new possibility for more attractive marketing of this and similar meat products in 1985, while simultaneously providing American mothers with a time saving alternative to home-cooked meals to feed themselves and their families with work and schoolbreak meals. 1 The product was launched in 1988 and, three and a half decades later, still has by far the largest market share in the preportioned-lunch segment(with a purported 84 per cent in children’s “combination l unches” in 2018 2 ). It will officially be part of the School Lunch Program in the US for the first time in the school year 2023/24, allowing schools to offer Lunchables to students in their cafeterias. 3 If you are not familiar with the product, you may have a look at its composition and appearance (for example online) before reading on. Through its advertising strategies, this market actor with a wide presence in the US structurally intervenes in the relationship between mothers, who were identified as the ones primarily responsible 1 See https://www.sfgate.com/shopping/article/history-of-Lunchables-15369850.php(accessed 28 July 2023). 2 See https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/lunchables-30-years-invented-history/576025/(accessed 28 July 2023). 3 See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/14/lunchables-school-lunch-programs and https://edition.cnn. com/2023/03/13/business/lunchables-in-schools/index.html(accessed 28 July 2023).
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Lunchables. About the Connection of Food and Class
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