Information is not knowledge: Cooking and eating as skilled practice in Australian obesity education

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between obesity, knowledge and education in a South Australian community setting. In public health circles and public understandings it is commonly assumed that obesity is the result of lack of knowledge about the right things to eat or how to take care of oneself. It is thought that education will fill this knowledge lacunae and most public health campaigns have education as the main platform of information dissemination to enact behavioural change. Based on long-standing ethnographic work in a community targeted as obesogenic, I explore the limits of mainstream nutrition education, and how constructing people as having deficit knowledge has the unwarranted effect of implying ignorance. Key to the analysis is Ingold’s articulation of different modalities of education, one dominant mode which inducts people into rules and regulations of already pre-formed knowledge, and another which sees education as learning that goes on in the doing of everyday environments.