Critical Approaches to Superfoods (Bloomsbury Academic) (original) (raw)
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Critical Approaches to Superfoods
Are superfoods just a marketing device, another label meant to attract the eye? Or do superfoods tell us a deeper story about how food and health relate in a global marketplace full of anonymous commodities? In the past decade, superfoods have taken US and European grocery stores by storm. Novel commodities like quinoa and moringa, along with familiar products such as almonds and raw milk, are now called superfoods, promising to promote health and increase our energy. While consumers may find the magic of superfoods attractive, the international development sector now envisions superfoods acting as cures to political and economic problems like poverty and malnutrition. Critical Approaches to Superfoods examines the politics and culture of superfoods. It demonstrates how studying superfoods can reveal shifting concepts of nutritional authority, the complexities of intellectual property and bioprospecting, the role marketing agencies play in the agro-industrial complex, and more. The ...
What Makes a Superfoods “Super”? The Discursive Construction of Utopian Edibles
Superfoods have emerged as an increasingly significant category of health food products and related popular discourse about food, health, and values. They are celebrated for their purported extraordinary nutritional and/or medicinal values, " natural " qualities, associations with " exotic " or " pristine " places of origin, and histories of traditional or indigenous use; in short, they are represented as utopian edibles providing not only a nutritional panacea but also an antidote to overly-technological and industrial modern food production practices. The term appears prominently in marketing, on product packaging, and in the media, where tentative scientific conclusions and studies funded by economically-interested parties tend to be presented unproblematically as facts (Weitkamp and Eidsvaag 2014). However, the term " superfood " defies precise definition, and both products and discourse and poorly understood by the public and regulatory bodies, leading to confusion as to what a food with such a label promises. Based on textual and visual analysis of superfoods books and product packaging, and focus group interviews with superfoods consumers, this paper presents a distillation of the discursive construction of " superfoods " as utopian foodstuffs. It demonstrates that the concept of superfoods is a composite of ideas about food, health, and values, and their associated politics, deeply embedded in Western thought and practice, and illustrates how superfoods have emerged and developed at the intersection of discourses of functional nutritionism (Scrinis 2013), nutritional primitivism (Knight 2015), and critical consumption (Yates 2011). Yet these discourses are not uncontested; because superfoods are positioned as existing between established social categories such as food and medicine, nature and culture, primitive and modern, they are both alluring and confusing to consumers and thus provide a distinctive lens through which to examine the tensions that pull at contemporary food culture. Understanding the real hopes, fears, anxieties, and moral dilemmas expressed through superfoods enables us to locate points of possibility to broaden discussions about " good " , " healthy " , and " fair " food and food systems, and how to achieve these goals, in ways that move beyond discursive dualisms and recognise the complexity of values that constitute contemporary foodscapes.
In the past decade, quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd) has transformed from a local " Indian food, " produced and consumed almost exclusively in the Andean highlands , into a global consumer " super food " lauded for its amino acid, vitamin, and mineral content. While popular press articles have criticized quinoa commercializa-tion for provoking a price surge that left small farmers unable to afford eating this nutritious staple, this paper critically examines evidence supporting this argument and investigates the complex and contradictory nutritional politics of the quinoa boom. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Peruvian high lands, this paper argues that quinoa consumption simultaneously symbolizes a " traditional " past while heralding an economically prosperous future for farmers and the nation of Peru. It demonstrates that changing relations to quinoa consumption are the result of complex individual and family-level negotiations about ideas of bodily health, tradition, and modernity. The article uses the quinoa boom as a case study to point to broader trends and challenges with commercializing traditional nutritional staples. Given the surging demand for super foods, novel foods with exceptional nutritional profiles that are often linked to traditional peoples, this research is prescient and should inform future efforts seeking to leverage demand for super foods for rural development.
Communicating Superfoods: A Case Study of Maca Packaging
Food and Communication: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery 2015
In recent years there has been an explosion onto the health food scene of exotic 'superfoods': food products celebrated for their nutritional and medicinal values, derived from indigenous traditions and inserted onto the shelves of wealthy Western marketplaces. These products are presented as something between medicine and foodstuff. Placing these novel food products on the shelves of health food shops – and, increasingly, supermarkets and chemists – around the world has required that the concept of superfood be constructed and communicated to new consumers. This paper takes a closer look at the packaging of one particular superfood product, the Peruvian root maca, as well as draws upon fieldwork in the central Andes in 2014, as a case study of one point at which the superfoods concept is constructed and communicated by drawing upon contemporary discourses about the relationships between food, health, and values. The large quantity of information presented on superfood packaging serves not only to produce and reproduce the concept of superfoods, but also to communicate geographical knowledges about products sold far from their places and cultures of origin. The package in question is presented with a variety of knowledge claims, which should be read critically as representations that serve particular interests rather than as unproblematic attempts to 'defetishize' the commodity. Points of disjuncture between these knowledge claims open up spaces for contestation by other actors involved in the production and consumption of these food products.
Food as Drug: How science, experts, and ideas of health help create the ‘super’ power of ‘superfood’
This is my Undergraduate degree dissertation. The dissertation examines the concept of 'superfood', and tries to discover what the 'super' in the terms means. It anthropologically examines the concepts of health, science, nutrition and expertise, and concludes that superfoods are consumed, or thought about, in the same way biomedical, pharmaceutical drugs are consumed, as according to the theories of Joseph Dumit in his book, 'Drugs for Life'.
2019
This article argues that the marketing claims on food labels are a governance space worthy of critical examination. We use a case study of superfood acai berry products to illustrate how marketing claims on food labels encapsulate dominant neoliberal constructions of global food systems. These marketing claims implicitly promise that by making careful choices consumers can resist and redress the ravages of unbridled global capitalism. Food labels suggest that consumers can use market signals to simultaneously govern our own selves and the market to ensure sustainable, fair, and healthy consumption. In response, this article develops, justifies and applies a socio-legal approach to researching food chain governance which uses the food label as its unit of analysis and traces from the micro level of what the everyday consumer is exposed to on a food label to the broader governance processes that the food label both symbolizes and effects. Wedemonstrate our approach through a “label an...
Gastronomica, 2015
Since the post–World War II “discovery” of global malnutrition and the concomitant rise of the development apparatus, various “miracle foods” have been proposed by international development organizations as solutions to chronic undernourishment in developing countries. This article draws on media analysis, development literature, and interviews to explore the “miracle food narrative” (MFN) in three cases: high-lysine corn, Golden Rice, and quinoa, which as the incumbent miracle food is the focus of the paper. The essay contends that miracle food narratives depoliticize hunger through a “curative metaphor.” This trope bolsters a paternal logic that blames malnutrition on the undernourished, and blurs problems of access and dispossession, locating “the solution” in Western philanthropy or economic development. The essay argues that quinoa’s interpellation as a global miracle food is directly related to the rise of “multicultural” and “sustainable” development paradigms, and corresponding changes in the roles of “culture/tradition” and “environment” in development discourse. While quinoa’s insertion in the MFN departs in some ways from the fable of the Western scientist designing the hunger antidote by representationally displacing authority in science with authority in “traditional ways,” this recasting of the actors leaves the broader narrative and underlying curative metaphor in place. As malnutrition alleviation programs integrate cultural difference, critical food scholars must pay close attention to the ways in which tradition and culture are invoked. To conclude, I draw attention to the fraught interaction of the politics of indigeneity and the politics of global malnutrition that arises with the shifting roles of science and tradition in quinoa’s adaptation of the miracle food narrative, as well as scale disjunctures between simple miracle food stories and complicated realities, a dynamic that underscores the need for agrifood and food policy scholars to pay close attention to complex interactions of scale. Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, Vol. 15 No. 4, Winter 2015; (pp. 70-85) DOI: 10.1525/gfc.2015.15.4.70 [Please email me for a copy if you don't have proper permissions or a subscription to Gastronomica]
The contradictions of a superfood consumerism in a postfeminist, neoliberal world
Food, Culture and Society. Taylor and Francis Ltd., 2019
The contradictions of a superfood consumerism in a postfeminist, neoliberal world This article examines the rise in the consumption of superfoods as a normative food trend amongst affluent groups in the global North that has embedded itself in Western food culture (Statista, 2918; Gamboa et al, 2017; Groeniger et al, 2017). I argue that superfoods are a marker of idealized identity that is mobilized using neoliberal, postfeminist, and food justice discourses. I examine the visual and textual framings of these products as they are implicitly and explicitly taken up on social media. In particular, I examine the material and ideological outcomes of tensions between the binaries of plenty and constraint, 'clean' and 'dirty' foods, and individual identity and conformity as they are expressed in the visual and textual discourse surrounding foods like goji berries, chia seeds, maca powder, and hemp. Also examined are the effects of a kind of body entrepreneurism that is encouraged by these discourses, which further pathologies non-conforming bodies and produces, on the part of the consumer, corporal anxiety and a pained relationship with food. Superfood, postfeminist, neoliberalism, food ethics, body, identity