To Örebro University

Swedish food production faces a changed situation and new challenges. Pandemics, social unrest, war in the immediate area and climate change have not only motivated Swedish politicians to (re)emphasize crisis preparedness and the will to defend, but also, entailed challenges for Swedish food production and food consumption. Added values such as sustainability, animal welfare and health, which have been explicitly brought forward in the marketing and packaging design of Swedish food (Andersson, 2019, 2020), have been shown not to have the same value for Swedish consumers when inflation rises and prices increase. In the choice between cheaper imported food and the more expensive domestic one, the former has increasingly been in demand. In this presentation I will discuss communicative activities linked to two consumer campaigns launched in 2022 and 2023, #Säkramaten [#Securethefood], by Swedish Meat, and From Sweden. For Sweden [From Sweden. For Sweden] by The Federation of Swedish Farmers, LRF. The main aim of the paper is to discuss the construction, representation and reproduction of domestic food production and food consumption, as expressed in the campaigns. What representations are constructed and how? Which discourses, ideas and values are realized and reproduced, and how?The data consists of social media content (Instagram, and Facebook) and the content on campaign websites. The study draws on principles of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Machin & Mayr, 2012), and van Leeuwen’s notion of recontextualization of social practices (van Leeuwen, 2008). More specifically, the analysis investigates how values and ideas linked to sustainability, health, and crisis preparedness are realized multimodally through choice of design, texts, and images. Of particular interest is the commercial contribution to "the creation, contestation and maintenance of national identity" (Ranta & Ichijo, 2022). The presentation will show a marketing discourse that engages with the world situation of ongoing war, pandemics, and climate change to steer sales. Discourses related to environmental and social sustainability, health, animal welfare, resilience, and crisis preparedness, are drawn upon and given a nationalist frame. By doing so, the campaigns promote and express ideas of who and what the nation is and needs, and what are the national interests.

Andersson, H. (2019). Recontextualizing Swedish nationalism for commercial purposes: a multimodal analysis of a milk marketing event. Critical Discourse Studies, 16(5), 583-603. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2019.1637761

Andersson, H. (2020). Nature, nationalism and neoliberalism on food packaging: The case of Sweden. Discourse, context & media, 34, 100329. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2019.100329

Machin, D., & Mayr, A. (2012). How to do critical discourse analysis : a multimodal introduction. Sage.

Ranta, R., & Ichijo, A. (2022). Food, National Identity and Nationalism : From Everyday to Global Politics (2nd ed.). Springer International Publishing AG.

van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and practice : new tools for critical discourse analysis. Oxford University Press. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0719/2007023090.html