Telenovela como estratégia de educação alimentar e nutricional para frequentadores de restaurantes populares de Belo Horizonte-MG

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the soap opera "The middle way" as a strategy of dietary and nutritional education and its relationship with the learning process and producing of new modes of subjectivation in the frequenters of a community restaurant in Belo Horizonte. It is a descriptive study with qualitative approach. It was developed with 15 frequenters of a community restaurant located in the Barreiro Sanitary District, in Belo Horizonte - MG, the participants were of both gender, adults and elderly. The research included two steps: (1) watching the soap opera "The middle way" with duration of 46 minutes, by the participants, and (2) individual interview conducted by the researcher, utilizing an instrument previously structured, applied to the participants after the soap opera. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and afterwards, analyzed through the technique of Categorical Content Analysis proposed by Bardin. The soap opera is a tool that provides a dramatized narrative with characters that are part of the daily reality. The soap opera was chosen as an aesthetic experience, once it is characterized for influencing and affecting the subjects by the intensity of feelings and emotions that it is able to produce. After the analysis of the content of the semi-structured interviews, it emerged three categories: (1) "The soap opera and the life experiences from the frequenters of restaurant"; (2) "The soap opera: scenes, characters and message"; (3) "New perceptions and tendencies related to the feeding and lifestyle". It can be affirmed that the experimentation with the soap opera was able to engender (1) The processes of involuntary memory and superposition of sensations that allowed the reconstructing and recreating of previous experiences and the knowledge already instituted; (2) The processes of identification with the characters and the subtractive perception facing to the transformation of the scenes that allowed the affirmation of singularity and the differences; (3) The effective processes that promoted an openness to the experimentation and reinvention of new ways to seeing and thinking about feeding and health. By allowing such processes, the soap opera favored the inventive learning, the production of new forms of subjectivity and the invention of themselves. It is a learning process that occurs from the idea of meeting signs, under the effect of a violence that puts the thoughts in motion. The mundane signs, affectionate, sensitive and artistic issued from the soap opera, when interpreted and transformed by the participants, did arises reflections, desire to produce changes, both in themselves as in the other, potencies to invent new meanings to life and feeding. On the other hand, it was also possible to identify homogeneous speeches and repetition of knowledge, which was previously assimilated from the dominant conceptions about food and about lifestyle, movements that seem to reveal experiences of recognition.