Wim van Daele

• Medin, Anine Christine; Vik, Frøydis Nordgård; Helle, Christine; Helland, Sissel Heidi; Wills, Andrew Keith & Osorio, Natalie Garzon [Show all 22 contributors for this article] (2024). Scaling up evidence-based digital early life nutrition interventions in a county setting: an implementation trial – protocol for Phase 2 of the Nutrition Now project. Frontiers in Public Health. ISSN 2296-2565. 11. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1326787. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Background: Few effective health interventions transition from smaller efficacy or effectiveness studies to real-world implementation at scale, representing a gap between evidence and practice. Recognising this, we have developed Nutrition Now – a tailored digital resource building on four efficacious dietary interventions, aiming to improve nutrition in the important first 1,000 days of life. Nutrition Now targets and guides expectant parents and parents of 0–2 year olds, serves as a reliable source of evidence-based information for midwives and public health nurses at maternal and child healthcare (MCH) centres, and offers pedagogical tools for early childhood education and care (ECEC) staff. The aim of this study is to implement Nutrition Now at scale and evaluate the impact of different sets of multifaceted implementation strategies on implementation outcomes. Methods: A quasi-experimental design with three study arms will be used, providing either low, medium or high implementation support, when rolled out in 50 municipalities in 2 counties in Norway. Nutrition Now will be implemented in MCH and ECEC settings and made available to expectant parents and parents of 0–2 year olds through social media and MCH. The implementation support builds on strategies described in the Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change (ERIC) implementation framework and is informed by dialogues with stakeholders. Impact of the different degree of implementation support will be assessed by examining reach, adoption, fidelity, and sustainability using usage data generated from the Nutrition Now resource, publicly available municipal data and qualitative interviews with MCH and ECEC staff. Discussion: Nutrition Now Phase 2 will break new ground by scaling up successively delivered and complementary dietary interventions in the first 1,000 days of life in a real-life context. The project also seeks to identify what level of implementation support is most effective when implementing digital, scalable, evidence-based early-life nutrition interventions in community settings. The project will inform implementation research and provide knowledge about effective implementation strategies to be used in a national scale-up of Nutrition Now. Trial registration: The study is registered prospectively (submitted 14/06/2022, registration date: 19/06/2022) in the International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number registry (ISRCTN): reg. Number: ISRCTN10694967, https://doi.org/10.1186/ISRCTN10694967.

• Groufh-Jacobsen, Synne; Larsson, Christel; Van Daele, Wim; Margerison, Claire; Mulkerrins, Isabelle & Aasland, Lale Marie [Show all 7 contributors for this article] (2023). Food literacy and diet quality in young vegans, lacto-ovo vegetarians, pescatarians, flexitarians and omnivores. Public Health Nutrition (PHN). ISSN 1368-9800. p. 1–11. doi: 10.1017/S1368980023002124. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Objective: To investigate whether food literacy competencies and diet quality vary between 16-to-24-year-olds vegans, lacto-ovo vegetarians, pescatarians, flexitarians and omnivores and to assess whether food literacy is associated with diet quality. Design: Cross-sectional study. Food literacy (general nutrition knowledge, critical nutrition literacy and food skills) and diet quality were measured using an electronic questionnaire. Setting: Southern Norway, September 2021 – March 2022. Participants: Healthy 16–24-year-olds (n 165). Results: Overall, the mean general nutrition knowledge score was moderate (48·0 out of 67·0); the lowest mean score was found in omnivores and the highest in flexitarians (45·6 v. 51·5) (P = 0·034). The mean score of critical nutrition literacy was also moderate (3·7 out of 5·0); vegans showed higher scores compared to other dietary practices (P = 0·018). No difference was observed in food skills between the different dietary practices. The overall median diet quality score was 46·0 out of 80·0, lowest in omnivores and highest in vegans (42·0 v. 56·0) (P =< 0·001). In multivariate regression analyses, general nutrition knowledge, food skills and vegan dietary practice were significantly associated with higher diet quality. Conclusions: We found moderate levels of food literacy across all dietary practices. The food literacy competencies, general nutrition knowledge and food skills were associated with higher diet quality in our sample. Omnivores showed both the lowest general nutrition knowledge level and lowest diet quality scores. In contrast, both flexitarians and vegans scored highest on general nutrition knowledge and diet quality scores, despite being one of the less restrictive and one of the strictest plant-based dietary practices, respectively.

• van Daele, Wim (2022). Entangled Assemblages: The Mutual Becoming of Food and More-than-Human Being. Foundations of Science. ISSN 1233-1821. doi: 10.1007/s10699-022-09858-w. Full text in Research Archive
• Van Daele, Wim (2017). Food as the Holographic Condensation of Life in Sri Lankan Rituals. Ethnos. ISSN 0014-1844. 83(4), p. 645–664. doi: 10.1080/00141844.2017.1314309. Full text in Research Archive
• Van Daele, Wim (2016). Vibrantly entangled in Sri Lanka: food as the polyrhythmic and polyphonic assemblage of life. Foundations of Science. ISSN 1233-1821. 23(1), p. 85–102. doi: 10.1007/s10699-016-9509-4. Full text in Research Archive
• Van Daele, Wim (2016). Desiring foods: Cultivating non-attachment to nourishment in Buddhist Sri Lanka. Appetite. ISSN 0195-6663. 105, p. 212–217. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2016.04.021. Full text in Research Archive
• Van Daele, Wim (2014). Oscillating Between Village and Globe: Articulating Food in Sri Lankan Activism. In Counihan, Carole & Siniscalchi, Valeria (Ed.), Food activism: agency, democracy and economy. Bloomsbury Academic. ISSN 978-0-85785-833-7. doi: 10.5040/9781350042155.ch-014.
• Van Daele, Wim (2013). 'Cooking' life: an anthropologist blends in with everyday sustenance and relationality in Sri Lanka. Food and Foodways. ISSN 0740-9710. 21(1), p. 66–85. doi: 10.1080/07409710.2013.764788.
• Van Daele, Wim (2013). The political economy of desire in ritual and activism in Sri Lanka. In Carbonnier, Gilles (Eds.), Religion and Development. Palgrave Macmillan. ISSN 978-1-137-32937-0. p. 159–173. doi: 10.1057/9781137329387_12.
• Van Daele, Wim (2013). Igniting food assemblages in Sri Lanka: Ritual cooking to regenerate the world and interrelations. Contributions to Indian sociology. ISSN 0069-9667. 47(1), p. 33–60. doi: 10.1177/006996671204700102.

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• Øverby, Nina Cecilie; Hillesund, Elisabet Rudjord; Helland, Sissel Heidi; Helle, Christine; Wills, Andrew Keith & Lamu, Admassu Nadew [Show all 23 contributors for this article] (2023). Evaluating the effectiveness and implementation of evidence-based early-life nutrition interventions in a community setting a hybrid type 1 non-randomized trial – the Nutrition Now project protocol. Frontiers in Endocrinology. ISSN 1664-2392. 13. doi: 10.3389/fendo.2022.1071489. Full text in Research Archive
• van Daele, Wim (2022). The Ambivalence of Kinship, Desire, and Ghosts: A Comment on Luke Heslop. Comment on "From Haunted Houses to Housed Hauntings Ghosts, Oracles, and Kinship Ambivalence in a Sri Lankan Merchant Family" by Luke Heslop. Current Anthropology. ISSN 0011-3204. 63(4), p. 424–425.
• van Daele, Wim (2021). Decentering Gut Microbiota in Sri Lanka Through an Anthropology with Microbiology.
• Van Daele, Wim (2021). Anthropological aspects of food and health.
• van Daele, Wim (2021). The biosocial entanglements of food, epigenomes, microbiomes, and environments in more-than-human becomings and health.
• van Daele, Wim (2021). Towards material-semiotic biographies of more-than-human life: Diffracting life histories of human persons and gut microbiota. .
• van Daele, Wim (2020). From socio-cultural organization to microbial and molecular regulation of life, and back: Towards an interdisciplinary integration through biosocial pathways and entanglements. .
• van Daele, Wim (2020). Geïntegreerde voedselsystemen als basis voor een goede gezondheid in Sri Lanka, DR Congo, Ecuador en Bhutan.
• van Daele, Wim (2020). Book Review: Research as Development: Biomedical Research, Ethics, and Collaboration in Sri Lanka by Salla Sariola and Bob Simpson. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. ISSN 0745-5194. 34(1), p. e13–e15. doi: 10.1111/maq.12543.
• Van Daele, Wim & Øverby, Nina Cecilie (2020). Fredspris i covids tid. Dagsavisen. ISSN 1503-2892.
• van Daele, Wim (2019). Eating Well: Food Systems as a Pillar for Glocal Health and Well-Being.
• van Daele, Wim (2019). From Societies to Molecules and Microbes, and Back: A Plea for Interdisciplinary Cooperation.
• van Daele, Wim (2019). From Societies to Molecules and Microbes, and Back: Tracing Food-Related Networks of Causation in Metabolic Disorders.
• Van Daele, Wim (2015). The Collaborative Life of Condensing Food in Sri Lankan Ritual Action.
• van Daele, Wim (2014). The Elephant as a Holographic Condensation of Social Change in Sri Lanka.
• Van Daele, Wim (2014). Food's Central Role in the Achievement of a Good Death in Sri Lanka. Show summary

  Death involves a disintegration of personhood into its constitutive elements and forms the threshold to an afterlife. Both in Ayurvedic and Buddhist thought, as prevalent among the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka, persons are very unstable aggregates of a variety of elements, in the conjunction of which arises consciousness. Death arrives when this conjunction of elements and consciousness disintegrates after which the consciousness alters and transforms when it attaches itself to a new formation of elements. The transition from this life to its different afterlife is a very precarious process since the consciousness of the disintegrating person may get stuck in-between death and rebirth. In this worst-case scenario, the person turns into a hungry ghost or preta that is in a lamentable state because of its burning desire and hunger that can never be satisfied owing to its needle-thin throat. Around death, Sinhalese people perform numerous rites to aid the dying person in avoiding to become such a preta and so to achieve a good death and a transition to the afterlife. We will look into several funerary ritual acts to discern how food (in both solid and fluid form) plays a crucial role in securing a more desired transition to the afterlife. Since the ritual efficacy is largely grounded in these food-related procedures as derived from ancient textual traditions, people avoid experimenting with these since they would not want to risk jeopardising the transition of their beloved ones, explaining the striking continuities in these funerary rites and their procedures over history.

• Van Daele, Wim (2014). The Elephant as a Holographic Condensation of Social Change in Sri Lanka. Show summary

  Nearly each conversation in rural Kiribathgama in Sri Lanka mentions elephants: whether they have again raided a paddy field, destroyed a house, or even killed someone. The fear for elephants also constrains the free movement of villagers during the evenings. Hence, elephants are viewed very negatively since they compete with villagers for both space and food. Villagers express in these conversations a sense of escalation and blame a nearby large-scale development project to exacerbate things. Besides that, they agree that decreased respect for elephants due to social change detrimentally affects these animals well-being and their relation to human beings. Yet, villagers attribute these different explanations for the human-elephant conflict to a deeper common root cause: greed. Both elephants and human beings are seen as smart and greedy, both in everyday parlance and in mythology. Both have a history of a Fall into a degenerate state owing to their excessive desires that subjects both to the suffering from their ‘burning stomachs’ and greed. This greed explains the tough competition that has emerged between the species and the more direct explanations that villagers give for this. As such, the elephant becomes connected with these heterogeneous components that it condenses into its being as a hologram or three-dimensional miniature of these issues, several of which pertain to processes of social change.

• Van Daele, Wim (2014). Food in the Mix: Vibrating Assemblages of Nourishment in Sri Lanka. Show summary

  In line with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari I have conceptualised food as a vibrant assemblage that is co-constituted in its complex entanglements with aspects of human life and organisation that it holographically condenses. In this presentation, I will introduce and further elaborate this conceptualisation by subjecting it to a rhythmanalysis as inspired by Henri Lefebvre whereby the heterogeneous components, such as crackling fire, bubbling water, chatting people, cutting knives and frying ingredients, possess their specific vibrations that in their conjunction affect and transform each other, eventually making up the overall music of the entire food assemblage. Following the exploration of the vibrations of the music of food as it evolves and actualises in the domestic realm of everyday life, I will account for the alterations that occur when these domestic rhythms inter-act with the differential rhythms of the food assemblage as it actualises in the contexts of cultivation. For instance, when the ripening rice starts signalling the arrival of the harvest by emitting sweet smells, it sets in motion a whole range of events that affects everyday life. Suddenly, multiple rhythms change and converge towards the preparation of the harvest. In this way, the farmers can no longer participate in the remaining ongoing domestic rhythms that subsequently alter since they have to devote their time to guarding their fields against elephant attacks. Thus, by exploring these everyday components of the food assemblage in their vibrations —as rhythms combining temporalities and spatialities—we get a holistic grasp of the music of food in its complex entanglements with human life and organisation in Sri Lanka that it directs.

• Van Daele, Wim (2014). Desiring Foods: Sri Lankan Ways of Becoming. Show summary

  Do foodstuffs desire to be eaten or do human beings desire food? I will argue that both are relevant in the ways of being, or rather becoming, of the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. Their practical epistemology of living is informed by Ayurvedic and Theravada Buddhist approaches where desire is distributed in the universe and is spurring the becoming of its entities in samsara, the repetitive cycle of death and rebirth. In this way, foods are highly ambiguous since they are seductive, thereby igniting the fire of desire of human beings and inciting a clinging on to life away from the path to non-attachment and nirvana. This ambiguity is most clearly expressed in Buddhist texts that will be discussed in their resonance with the daily food practices as observed throughout anthropological fieldwork of altogether 2 years.

• Van Daele, Wim (2014). Food in the Vibrant Mix: Towards a Rhythmanalysis of Nourishing Assemblages in Sri Lanka. Show summary

  Food in the vibrant mix: towards a rhythmanalysis of nourishing assemblages in Sri Lanka. Food is co-constituted in its complex entanglements with numerous aspects of life. Based on my fieldwork in a Sinhalese farming village in the North-Western province of Sri Lanka, I have in line with Deleuze and Guattari conceptualised food as a vibrant assemblage that holographically condenses these heterogeneous aspects with which it is entangled. The crackling fire, bubbling water, chatting women, sounds of knives and frying onions; all are vibrating heterogeneous components that together shape Sri Lankan food and its music in the kitchen. In this presentation I will subject several of these domestic events centred around food to a rhythmanalysis as inspired by Lefebvre. I will thereafter explore the domestic alterations in the vibrations of the music of food in relation to food’s other actualisations in the contexts of cultivation. For instance, when the ripening rice starts signalling the arrival of the harvest by emitting sweet smells it sets in motion a whole range of events that affects everyday life. Suddenly, multiple rhythms change and converge towards the preparation of the harvest. Moreover, the farmers can no longer participate in the remaining ongoing domestic rhythms since they have to guard their fields against elephant attacks. Thus, by exploring these everyday components of the food assemblage in their vibrations—as rhythms combining temporalities and spatialities—we get a holistic grasp of the music of food in its complex entanglements with human life and organisation in Sri Lanka that it directs.

• Van Daele, Wim (2012). Food in the rhythmic mix of everyday life.
• Van Daele, Wim (2012). The vibrant entanglement of food, desire, insecurity, and human beings in the 'cooking' of life in Sri Lanka: my PhD.
• Van Daele, Wim (2012). The vibrant entanglement of food, desire, insecurity, and human beings in the 'cooking' of life in Sri Lanka.
• Van Daele, Wim (2011). Insecurity and desire as mediated by food in ritual and social activism in Sri Lanka.
• Van Daele, Wim (2010). Moving in-between the village and the globe: the interconnecting positioning of a Sri Lankan social movement.
• Van Daele, Wim (2010). The dynamics of precarious life-sustenance and fragile relationality in food throughout the spheres of the everyday, ritual, and activism in Sri Lanka.
• Van Daele, Wim (2009). Experiencing the taste of existence: food as an integrative bio-social co-(re)production constituted by two dynamics, precarious life-sustenance and fragile relationality, cutting across the spheres of the cook pot and cook book.
• Van Daele, Wim (2009). Food as fragile world-making: the life-sustaining practice of the coconut tree in Sri Lanka.

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