Critical Approaches to Superfoods

Richard Wilk, Emma McDonell, Richard Wilk, Emma McDonell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350123892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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 multidisciplinary contributors draw their examples from settings as diverse as South India, Peru, and California to engage with foodstuffs that include quinoa, almonds, fish meal, Rooibos Tea, kale and açaí.

1

Tracking Superfoods: An Introduction

Emma McDonell and Richard Wilk

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the “superfood” label took off in US and European retail markets. Once unfamiliar foods like quinoa, turmeric, and açaí suddenly burst onto supermarket shelves and restaurant menus. Even familiar products like cranberries, almonds, and ginger were reimagined as superfoods, suggesting that they have exceptional nutritional powers and curative properties.

The numbers tracking superfoods¹ are impressive. Between 2011 and 2015, global food and drink product launches using the terms “superfood,” “superfruit,” or “supergrain” increased by 202 percent. In 2015 alone, new superfood launches increased by 36 percent (Mintel Press Team 2016). The market has been projected to double from $19.1 billion in 2017 to $40 billion in 2022 (Technavio 2020). Booming demand for superfoods has even led some countries to reorient their export strategies. Peru’s Ministry of Exterior Commerce, for instance, launched the “Superfoods Peru” campaign in 2017 in an effort to attract investment in Peru’s agricultural exports by marketing the country as the “land of superfoods” at food product expos around the world. While the rise of the superfood in consumer markets was initially concentrated in the United States, it now extends across the world. According to industry studies, while North America is largest market for superfoods, the Asia Pacific region is the fastest growing (Technavio 2020; see Montefrio, this volume).

Existing academic work tends to depict superfoods as a sham or fabrication—merely a marketing device that fools consumers into spending money on products based on unproven claims. Curll et al. (2016) see superfoods as a case of “food fraud.” Many news items in recent years have framed superfoods as ineffective at best and swindles at worst.² Consumers here are imagined as dupes, susceptible to unproven claims and lofty promises. The proliferation of superfoods can also be taken as a symptom of weak government regulation and the neoliberal abrogation of public safety in favor of profit-seeking corporations and individual choice.

In this book, we shift focus away from the question of efficacy to ask about what kinds of work superfoods do in the world, and how they acquire, increase, and lose power. Whether or not a food truly cures bodily ailments or unlocks untapped stores of energy, the story of the superfood and popular belief in them have important and dramatic effects on society, politics, and the economy. The chapters collectively move beyond the false binary of real or imagined, fraud or miracle, to better understand the forces that drive superfoods in and out of the marketplace, and the consequences of superfoods for both producers and consumers.

But what exactly is a superfood? As a number of scholars emphasize, the superfood is a marketing strategy used to introduce new products to consumer markets like açaí and quinoa and to rebrand familiar products like almonds and cranberries, giving them new value. More than just a marketing device, the superfood is also a folk category people use to classify foods, revealing their conceptions of the relationship between food and bodies. Some superfoods are imagined as working wonders on the individual body while others are believed to work miracles on the social body (or both) (see chapters by Guthman, LeBlanc, and McDonell). Some superfoods derive their power from supernatural authority or connections to distant Others (see chapter by Bétrisey and Boisvert), and many gain legitimacy from nutritional science (see chapters by Ives and Spackman). Other superfoods are curative, acting as tonics to give extra strength, immunity, or energy to fully functional bodies (see Reisman, this volume).

Some scholars have defined superfoods around their “wholeness,” their minimal processing, and “natural” nutritional richness (Loyer 2016a). Yet we increasingly see superfoods in processed, extracted, dried, and powdered forms (see LeBlanc, this volume), transformed into food additives or “shots.” In the case of açaí, the farther astray from its “natural” or “whole” form, the more symbolic power it conjures (see Brondizio, this volume). The creation of açaí extract allowed its expansion in global markets, as it entered a dizzying array of energy drinks, energy shots, power bars, bowls, and supplemental powders. Some things maintain a dual quality depending on the context, like ginseng, which is a soothing tea in Europe, but a super-powered medicine in Korea. Similarly, matcha green tea is an essential part of highly ritualized Japanese tea ceremonies while it entered US markets as a superfood now found in lattes and health cookies (Dreher 2018). Superfoods can break out of the boundaries of food entirely, like quinoa shampoo, while still drawing their power from their superfood source.

Most superfoods have powers far beyond those of common staples and everyday foodstuffs. These qualities are often magical in the sense that they depend upon metaphor, the supernatural, and well-established principles of sympathetic and contagious magic, common tools in marketing foods and drinks (Wilk 2012). The magical power of superfoods often derives from their origins and putative producers (a kind of contagious magic), from their shape or appearance (e.g., sea cucumber and ginseng), or through the powerful agency of intermediaries (brands like Natura and Goop, and technologies that denature, purify, and symbolically construct these products).³

Another way to understand superfoods’ power is through the kind of structuralism associated with Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach. Structuralism calls attention to the way that culture is fundamentally patterned by categories, taxonomies, and important boundaries. Douglas argues that certain animals are often taboo if they do not fit into cultural taxonomies of animals, for example, fish that have no scales like catfish. Structuralism draws attention to the power of liminal, ambiguous, and boundary-crossing substances, for example, hair, fingernails, and feces, which are products of the living human body but are not themselves alive. Many superfoods lie on the boundary between nature and culture, food and medicine (Loyer 2016b), or in the case of the probiotics, between the visible and invisible. But deployed in this way, structuralism rarely includes a mechanism for change, a way to understand how and why structures change.

A more dynamic approach to structural boundaries is Star’s concept of the “boundary object,” something that does not fit into established cultural, legal, and bureaucratic categories, and therefore poses a problem which becomes more and more obtrusive and difficult over time (Star 2010). She argues that eventually the anomalous position of the boundary object leads to a reevaluation and reshuffling of categories, which in turn create new boundary objects since no system can accommodate the many new objects produced by science, technologies, and human creativity. This bears more than a passing similarity to Latour’s idea about the “proliferation of hybrids,” which follows modern attempts to impose order on the social world: a situation of gradually increasing dissonance which eventually erodes the power of authority and creates opportunities for change (Latour 1993).

The conceptual category of the superfood can also be understood with the tools from cognitive linguistics (see Lakoff 1996; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). While classic theories of language envision a world of discrete platonic categories, cognitive linguists argue that cognitive and linguistic categories are fuzzy, without clear boundaries or common shared qualities. Instead they generally have a “prototype” at their center, and around the prototype a set of categories and objects that belong to the set by virtue of one or more characteristics they share with the prototype. The members of the set are bound together by this relationship to the prototype, not by their relationship to each other. Therefore, many things that otherwise appear unrelated can belong in the same category. Açaí and Soylent share no qualities except edibility, but they can both belong in the category of superfood because they have different relationships with a prototypical superfood. Açaí is exotic, expensive, and flavorful, while Soylent is high-tech, offers complete nutrition, has no particular source, and offers environmental benefits. They have little in common, but both share qualities with prototypical superfoods. In addition, different groups and individuals have different prototype superfoods in mind, which account for the vagueness and semantic flexibility of the term in popular practice, a quality exploited by marketers.

While we initially set out to provide a concise definition of the superfood in this introduction, we soon found the superfood to be a moving target. Every definition we came up with seemed to leave out something that people considered a superfood. Defining them around wholeness excluded the açaí extracts that now dominate açaí consumption outside the Amazon (see Brondizio, this volume). Defining them around their reference to “traditional peoples” and distant Others left out the ways the almond industry has worked to reimagine the familiar nut as the most recent material-semiotic fixes to familiar crises in the almond industry (see Reisman, this volume). Thinking about the superfood in relation to upscale consumer markets omits the ways superfoods are often imagined to work miracles beyond the individual body, as is the case in the miracle foods present in the international development and (increasingly) tech sectors.

Thinking about superfoods through prototypes offers a more complex understanding of the category itself that demonstrates dynamics of pliability, fuzziness, and change. Rather than thinking about the superfood as a classic concept defined by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that strictly differentiate between what is inside and what is outside the conceptual boundary, thinking with prototypes helps us understand how so many diverse products have come to be imagined as superfoods that appear to have little in common: yogurt, bee pollen, chocolate, Soylent, and blended superfood powders.

Superfoods and Their Relatives

We consider functional foods, probiotic foods, drug foods, and supplements as allied categories to the superfood, all occupying the fecund space between food and medicine, and overlapping significantly with superfoods in ways that blur boundaries. The term “functional foods” was first invented in Japan to describe products that could help prevent lifestyle-related diseases, and entered US parlance during the deregulatory era that Spackman (this volume) describes. Often considered synonymous with nutraceuticals (a portmanteau of nutritional and pharmaceutical), the term “functional food” is generally used to refer to food products fortified with vitamins, minerals, or other substances through what Spackman calls “the technological wizardry of industrial food.” While products have been fortified since the early twentieth century (e.g., milk enriched with vitamin D, iodized salt), the term usually describes the dizzying array of new products entering markets with unverified and vague health claims like increasing life expectancy, delaying or reversing the aging process, adding male “vitality,” and supporting the immune system. As Spackman shows, the uneven regulatory landscape of the United States, where health claims did not need corroboration, enabled the rise of the functional food paradigm in the United States.

The shift from the functional food to the superfood paradigm is in part a symbolic one: from referencing individual molecules to highlighting “wholeness.” Many of the very same products, once marketed for the specific molecules they contain, were reimagined based on their origins in “whole” foods. As “processed food” became increasingly demonized, the functional food gave way to the superfood, a framing referencing the whole superfood even in the context of a highly processed beverage. At the same time, the rise of the superfood marked a shift in consumer preferences for natural, sustainable, and whole foods that possess powers greater than a sum of their parts.

Dietary supplements are another form of functional food. They are yet another category in the liminal zone between food and medicine, and they often overlap with the super and the functional. Supplements are those things added to “complete” or “enhance” one’s diet. They are often ingested in pill or powdered forms, and while they are complementary to foods, they are not themselves food in that they have no flavor or even a bad taste, and they are meant to fill in nutritional gaps in the diet (see LeBlanc, this volume, on the role of invisibility and palatability in powders). The advent of products like gummi multivitamins and chocolate-flavored chewable calcium supplements in the late 1990s again makes the boundaries of the supplement fuzzy. While daily multivitamins began as remedies for insufficient diets, supplements increasingly promise to optimize and enhance one’s body. Nichter and Thompson analyze supplements as part of broader “self-projects,” saying that “supplement use is part of a larger self-governance project, in which responsible citizens are attentive to changes in the relative state of their health, carefully monitor such changes, and express concern through health related practices” (2006, 180).⁴ Rose argues that in the late twentieth century, “the very idea of health was re-figured—the will to health would not merely seek the avoidance of sickness or premature death, but would encode an optimization of one’s corporeality to embrace a kind of overall ‘well-being’” (2001, 17). Increasingly, supplement stores and aisles include products marketed as “superfood supplements”—highly processed powders or pills with reference to an original superfood, or merely the shadowy category of superfoods.

Herbs and spices with strong flavors are particularly common superfoods, as are those that fit into Mintz’s (1985) category of “drug foods” which have physiological effects, such as hallucinogens, stimulants, and soporifics. Many of our contemporary drug foods like tea, coffee, sugar, and cacao became popular among Europeans because of their putative medicinal superpowers, before being slowly absorbed into everyday life (Walvin 1997). Cannabis is a good example of the process of moving from a powerful drug to a common drug food. The relatively recent emergence of “energy drinks” is an interesting case, often blending caffeine with extracts like taurine and guaranine and making reference to superfoods like açaí and guarana (e.g., Sambazon and Guayaki brand yerba mate energy drinks; see Dohrenwend 2019 on the rise of yerba mate).

In recent years, increased scientific and popular interest in gut microbiota has led to the explosion of foods marketed as “probiotic.” As American consumers are now paying attention to their gut landscapes, seemingly mundane items like sauerkraut, yogurt, and sourdough bread have taken on exceptional power and have earned shelf space. Meanwhile, kombucha—a once-obscure drink mostly known in the HIV/AIDS community—has become available in gas stations across the United States while kimchi enters the American lexicon. Cultivating “good gut bacteria” can require probiotic shots and pills, falling more within the realm of supplements than fermented foods. There is lively contestation about the authenticity and efficacy of some of these products. The meaning of a “healthy gut microbiota” is vague and complex. The scientific evidence is weak, and easily blends with marketing pitches and diet fads that make a host of claims about how a good gut microbiota can encourage running the gamut to include weight loss, clear skin, energy, regular digestion, and better mental health.

Becoming Miraculous

Miracle foods and miracle crops are a special category of superfood, which are supposed to act on undernourished bodies and societies rather than enhancing well-nourished ones. They are almost always seen as solving larger development dilemmas while they increase food security and cure malnutrition, a dynamic analyzed in the following chapters by Bétrisey and Boisvert, Guthman, McDonell, and LeBlanc. In the curative metaphor they invoke, miracle crops depoliticize highly political problems like poverty and obscuring questions about why people are malnourished in the first place (Ferguson 1990; Kimura 2013; McDonell 2015). LeBlanc’s chapter shows that development experts in Chile thought fish flour could work miracles on the social body—in contrast to the highly individualized consumer superfood powders sold in health food markets in the United States. Quinoa is imagined as a potential solution to a host of development problems at different scales: malnutrition in the Andes, global famine relief, poverty, and adaptation to climate change. The contradictions between these problem-solution narratives are obscured when diverse development experts agree upon the “unrealized potential” of quinoa. Guthman’s concept of “solutionism” clearly applies to miracle food stories. The fetishized solution (the miracle food or crop) usually precedes the search for a problem to which it can be applied. This backward logic has been common in the international development community for quite some time (see chapters by LeBlanc and McDonell). Now it is being magnified in Silicon Valley pitch nights and crowd-funded projects where the tech sector has begun to apply their “disruption” logic to the problems they see in global food and agriculture (see Guthman, this volume).

Like super foods, miracle foods have fashion cycles. Every few years the international development community rallies around a particular miracle food or miracle crop: high-lysine corn, Golden Rice, orange-fleshed sweet potatoes (Rao and Huggins 2017), fish flour (see LeBlanc, this volume), and moringa (see Guthman, this volume). In the same way charismatic nutrients gain attention only to fade into the background, the associated foods and crops containing the charismatic nutrient go in and out of fashion (Kimura 2013). Much of the rise of a particular miracle food depends upon the ability of coalitions of institutional actors to construct development potential, a dynamic analyzed by McDonell (this volume).

Some products are even miracle crops in the production context and superfoods in the marketing and consumption contexts. Development agencies see value in quinoa’s agronomic hardiness in marginal environments, its nutritional content, and its purported ability to alleviate poverty among farmers. At the same time, it is a consumer superfood sold in supermarkets and incorporated in processed foods around the world. Moringa is a similar product, now in its second boom as a miracle crop. In the late twentieth century, it was supposed to remedy deforestation and provide fodder for animals. In its second coming, it is powerful because of its projected allure to wealthy consumers in superfood bars and as a protein shot, and because its sale could purportedly solve poverty and gender asymmetries in the producing communities (see Guthman, this volume).

Along with these overlapping categori...