Complexity: a complex concept and a discursive device

A recurring discourse through all the reports was the complexity of the issue of dietary behaviour and its related health outcomes. The concept and language of

‘complexity’ are deployed in a range of conflicting, inconsistent and discursive ways. Combined, this serves to further fracture and obscure causality and responsibility in the diet-health debate. So in order to try to understand how responsibility for dietary behaviour is constructed, it is important to examine the ‘complexity’ of the issue. The difficulty of analysing the notion of

‘complexity’, however, was that the word was sometimes used broadly, synonymous with ‘complicated’ or ‘multi-faceted’, rather than in the specific sense of the diet-health-environment complex system (Finegood et al. 2008).

Stemming from the Foresight Report’s use of a systems map of obesity (Butland 2007), however, there was reference to the complexity of the issue in the government documents (e.g. HWHL pxi, HLA pp18 & 19), denoting an

understanding of ‘complex systems’ and their concomitant characteristics (e.g.

randomness of emergent properties, non-linearity, the necessity for the capacity to match the complexity of each actor’s task, as discussed in section 2.4).

However, appreciation of features of a complex system was not evident in the solutions proposed – implying a lack of adequately considered interventions (Meadows 1999). For example, there appears to be an assumption of linearity in behaviour change e.g. regarding the provision of information on food – that people will make use of the nutritional labels to choose more healthily, and that they will continue to do so consistently. But behaviour change is – particularly when viewed in a complex systems framework, but also empirically – not linear

or deterministic (Resnicow & Vaughan 2006). Additionally, many of the suggested solutions are piecemeal and consist of minor parameters in the system such as labels, rather than more overarching properties of the system (Meadows 1999).

There is also a danger that the enormous complexity of the diet-health

interaction constructs a discourse that masks causes and solutions by creating a sense that the problem is vast, complicated and insurmountable (Finegood et al. 2010). Such a discourse also has the potential to obscure where

responsibility lies for members of the public to eat healthily. Indeed, the use of

‘complexity’ at times appeared to be simply a practical way to conceptualise this problem, and at others, rhetorically convenient for abdicating

responsibility.

Given that the corporate documents were not linked directly to Foresight, there is no reason they should be concerned with ‘complex systems’. Yet the

complexity discourse was adopted by different stakeholders to serve different purposes. When used in the industry reports, the food system-health

complexity discourse served to deflect responsibility from the authors of the reports, or certainly to obfuscate where it lies; also to deflect from diet onto other behaviours, such as physical activity. The Tesco report did not use the actual word ‘complex’ at all; the PepsiCo health report mentioned it once, to say:

The public health debate and particularly the role of food and drink businesses in improving public health is complex and wide-ranging.

(PHU p13).

The FDF document mentioned complexity, both in its introduction and in two of the case studies, e.g. Coca Cola’s view:

Public health challenges like obesity are so complex that all of us – individuals, communities, businesses and Government – must work together. Coca Cola case study (FDF p10)

While such references to complexity were reasonable, their use here implicitly depreciated the relative responsibility of these food companies in the problem of diet-related ill-health by dispersing it, and in effect excused in advance

inaction or any failure of initiatives purported to improve the population’s diet.

The complexity discourse thereby obliquely contributes to a discourse that puts responsibility onto individuals.

‘Complexity’ was also raised while referring to physical activity initiatives – as in the PepsiCo report and the Coca Cola entry in the FDF document: “Coca-Cola also knows that calorie intake is just part of the equation.” (FDF p10), which deflects attention away from their own products’ role in diet-related health issues, and onto the need for members of the public to take responsibility by being active, an increasingly common practice (Herrick 2009).

4.2.1 Complex or simple?

The descriptions above of “public health” or “the nation’s health” as complex encompass a starkly contradictory discourse to the one in which the diet-obesity/health connection was portrayed as quite simple – one of ‘energy imbalance’, a matter of people eating too much and exercising too little (e.g.

HWHL pvii, HLA p19, PepsiCo p3). Echoing the “eat less move more” motto of Change4Life, this simplicity belied the degree to which personal food choices are influenced by environmental, economic and other structural factors i.e. that diet-related health outcomes are emergent properties of the current food system, over which the general public holds little power. Yet hidden within the calorie imbalance shorthand is “a phenomenon so complex, embedded in culture and economics, and intertwined with conflicts between individual

freedom and societal health that solutions are difficult to envision” (Allen 2012).

Although each government acknowledged the complexity of the task facing the population, and the role of the environment in health behaviours, they

continued to refer to energy imbalance (e.g. HLA pp 4, 5, 8, 18, 19, 41). This was not only a reductionist discourse for a public health document but also framed it as a matter for individual responsibility by obscuring the complexity of the contextual antecedents of the energy imbalance. The way the complexity

discourse is constructed resonates with Foucault’s concept of governmentality in that it diffuses power and responsibility throughout the food system, and

“locates regulatory activities at all levels of social institutions” including the self (Lupton 1995; p9).

‘Complexity’ is used not only to deflect attention and responsibility from government and corporations but it also ultimately problematises the discourse of responsibility in the food system. Within this discourse it is possible to

identify key actors and their subject positions that are discursively constructed with expediency throughout the documents and that are each allocated some responsibility: members of the public, the food industry and government. These positions “provide [us] with a way of making sense of [our]selves, [our] motives, experiences and reactions.” (Wetherell 2001). The construction of the

individual’s role in the food system, as portrayed in the documents analysed, is examined in the next section.