DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.11| HAGEMANN, WAGNER: LUNCHABLES_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 73other means of producing and disseminating researchresults.‘Knowledge’ plays a particularly importantrole. Above all, we think of specific skills, practices,and knowledge that we would tentatively describe assurvival strategies in the area of everyday crisis. Wewere able to observe and learn from our mothers andother people how they tried, despite their very limited financial resources, to meet specific standards, butabove all to live up to a role expectation of a‘goodmother’, which is closely associated with food-relatedactions and a context of domestic care work as wellas with concepts of‘emotionality’ and‘love’. Thesepractices and their formation were often motivatedby a feeling of shame stemming from cultural norms ofwhat makes a‘good mother’. Our project is also aboutgiving visibility to such knowledge and similar survivalstrategies, valorising and recontextualizing them witha sense of empowerment, for example, by making collected life hacks and techniques accessible to othersin a way that identifies, explains, and acknowledges those developing them and the circumstances inwhich they were developed.One important part of our work is the conception ofinterventions. We understand them as actions andprocesses with which‘knowledge’ is intentionallytransformed 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 variousdifferent sets of theories. To prepare such formats, itis important to analyse the phenomena that influencethe perception of relevant contexts. These includeconcrete experiences of people involved as well aspopular cultural artefacts and class and nutritionalknowledge in mediatised form, for example, as product designs, advertising, and distribution structures.For this purpose, in addition to conversations witheach other, with other people concerned and expertsfrom different fields, we explore nutrition-related material of all kinds, whether it is specific foodstuffs, historical and present-day TV commercials, the fast-foodpackaging, research literature, cookbooks, photos offamily celebrations, or menus. To somewhat expoundon one of our theoretical questions here, the difficultreconstruction of class relations subtly embedded inmedia contexts, we have chosen a ready-made foodfor schoolchildren that has remained popular in theUS to this day, but had only a brief product life in Germany: Lunchables.Lunchables is a prepackaged meal offered by theUS company Oscar Mayer, today a part of the KraftHeinz Group. Allegedly out of a crisis of Bolognasausage sales, four designers developed a newpossibility for more attractive marketing of thisand similar meat products in 1985, while simultaneously providing American mothers with a timesaving alternative to home-cooked meals to feedthemselves and their families with work and schoolbreak meals.1The product was launched in 1988and, three and a half decades later, still has by farthe largest market share in the preportioned-lunchsegment(with a purported 84 per cent in children’s“combination l unches” in 20182). It will officiallybe part of the School Lunch Program in the US forthe first time in the school year 2023/24, allowingschools to offer Lunchables to students in their cafeterias.3If you are not familiar with the product, youmay 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, whowere identified as the ones primarily responsible1See https://www.sfgate.com/shopping/article/history-of-Lunchables-15369850.php(accessed 28 July 2023).2See https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/lunchables-30-years-invented-history/576025/(accessed 28 July 2023).3See 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).