‘I Just Want It to Be Done, Done, Done!’ Food Tracking Apps, Affects, and Agential Capacities

Abstract

Food-tracking apps constitute a major category of the thousands of food-related apps now available. They are promoted as helping users monitor and measure their food consumption to improve their health or to lose weight. In this article, I present six vignettes drawn from interviews with Australian women about their use and non-use of food-tracking apps. The vignettes provide detailed insights into the experiences of these women and their broader sociocultural and biographical contexts. The analysis is based on feminist materialism theoretical perspectives, seeking to identify the relational connections, affective forces, and agential capacities generated in and through the human-app assemblage. The vignettes reveal that affective forces related to the desire to control and manage the body and conform to norms and ideals about good health and body weight inspire people to try food-tracking apps. However, the agential capacities promised by app developers may not be generated even when people have committed hope and effort in using the app. Frustration, disappointment, the fear of becoming too controlled, and annoyance or guilt evoked by the demands of the app can be barriers to continued and successful use. Sociocultural and biographical contexts and relational connections are also central to the capacities of human-app assemblages. Women's ambivalences about using apps as part of efforts to control their body weight are sited within their struggles to conform to accepted ideals of physical appearance but also their awareness that these struggles may be too limiting of their agency. This analysis, therefore, draws attention to what a body can and cannot do as it comes together with food tracking apps.

Everyday curation? Attending to data, records and record keeping in the practices of self-monitoring

“…This and other forms of tracking intended to work on the body relate to gendered norms of beauty and fitness as well as to health (Esmonde, 2020). Relatedly, there are clinical/psychological concerns about the possible links between food-tracking apps, such as MyFitnessPal, and eating disorders (Lupton, 2018b). Discourses relating to tracking are also infused with assumptions about people's capacity to incorporate tracking which do not chime with gendered, classed or marginalised experiences of daily life or work routines (Ancker et al, 2015;Esmonde and Jette, 2018;Lupton, 2018b).…”

“…The first takes seriously people's emotional engagements with self-monitoring data (Lupton, 2017;Pantzar and Ruckenstein, 2015;Ruckenstein, 2014), countering images of those who self-monitor as impartial, rational actors pursuing health aims (see Lupton, 2016Lupton, , 2017Pantzar and Ruckenstein, 2015). This has included discussion of the enjoyment or pleasure derived from selftracking, associated with for example seeing personal successes or supporting a self-identity as a fit or healthy person, as well as disappointments, worry or frustration when these are not achieved (e.g., Ancker et al, 2015;Gorm and Shklovski, 2019;Lomborg and Frandsen, 2016;Lomborg et al, 2018;Lupton, 2018aLupton, , 2018bLupton, , 2019Urban, 2017;Whitson, 2013).…”

“…In her work on a digitised, algorithmic physical rehabilitation system, Schwennesen (2019) also enrols 'repair work' to describe the way patients tinker with the system to make it work in practice. Other scholars draw attention to the broader work of engaging in self-monitoring, beyond generating data, 2 that remains invisible to its proponents (Ancker et al, 2015;Lupton, 2018bLupton, , 2019.…”

Qualitative Analysis of Social Media Data

“…Humans can feel, touch, see, hear and experience through mediation too and scholars want to know about technological things and their doings. An example can be found in Lupton's (2018) work about food consumption apps, although it should be highlighted that the analyses is based on interview data and the analytical input from the apps themselves is not explicitly presented in the article. These research strategies of combining online and offline methods and analytical frames allow to overcome some of the idiosyncratic limitations of social media data.…”

On the body of the consumer: performance‐seeking with wearables and health and fitness apps

“…A primary concern for the consumer might be the interplay of human and machine agency (Beer ) or the targeting of specific consumer groups, such as adolescents, to buy into new mHealth fitness products and services (Freeman et al . , Lupton ). The message here is that it is up to the individual to negotiate new exercise regimes and diet techniques to achieve a desired appearance and attain and maintain fitness – in ways that may or may not, in reality, be ‘healthy’.…”