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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The image of vegetables : speeches, representation and consumption habits in France

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Since the establishment of the PNNS (National Health Nutrition Program) in 2001 in France, everyone knows that we must eat vegetables daily, and from a very young age, to enjoy a balanced diet. In the country whose "gastronomic meal" was certified in 2010 by the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the food culture has, for twenty years, seen its tradition based on on taste and commensality, disrupted by an increasingly functional approach to nutrition, focused on nutrition and health.The French eater is, in this context, beset by contradictory discourses on food, but which tend for the most part to make him responsible and potentially to make him feel guilty. Impregnated with a food culture of pleasure and freedom, it undergoes a real upheaval of the values ​​related to food.One could then think that the practices have changed and that the consumption of vegetables, today highlighted by the public health policies, has strongly increased. Paradoxically, this is not the case. The latest CREDOC study even shows that "in 2016 (...) we have never had so many large consumers of fruits and vegetables, whether in children or adults. "(2017). In addition, "reaching the benchmark of five fruits and vegetables a day is primarily done by consuming more fresh fruit" (Ibid.).However, while the latest studies show a general decline in vegetable consumption, the certified classes of society are the only ones that maintain a higher consumption, mainly of fresh vegetables. The question then is whether the vegetable would not be on the way to becoming a new distinctive food, concentrating the dominant values ​​of our super-modern society (Augé, 1994) taken over by the "upper middle" categories, such as freshness, lightness, naturalness, etc. If we can bet a diffusion of practices today minority from the top of the social ladder down, following the theories of social innovation observed throughout history, it seems relevant to be interested the brakes and levers, beyond the material conditions, the consumption of vegetables among these eaters.To understand, interpret and analyze the consumption of vegetables in France, it is a question here of studying the imaginary that they deploy among the most consuming eaters, because if "all social fact must be studied from the material and from the mental point of view "(Corbeau, Poulain, 2002), the parameters of rational choice are far from sufficient, in the case of food in general, and vegetables in particular, to understand their low consumption. In this context, the consumption of vegetables is understood as a source of distinction and social integration.From the field survey on 20 eaters, limited in number but extended by the multiple survey protocols deployed, from socioprofessional categories graduates, it is to understand the relationship between sensory experience and even polysensory, sensitive (multimodal) attached to vegetables and concomitant representations.From the tasting experience to the "image of taste" (Boutaud, 2005) of vegetables, through the context and the modalities of their consumption, the idea is to grasp, on the ground and in a very concrete way, the way in which the numerous media discourses on vegetables, constitutive of social imaginaries on the subject, are received, perceived, appropriate and more or less integrated into the practices of the eaters, themselves located at the crossroads of a bundle of favorable factors or not in the image of vegetables, at different scales, consciously or unconsciously.