Break Me Apart, Then Build Me Up: The Extractionist Logics Linking Functional and Superfoods

• In Event: Feeding the Anthropocene: The Promises of Agro-Food Tech and the Difference Of Food - III

Abstract

In the 1990s a new food-medicine chimera appeared in Western markets: the “functional” food. Designed around a medicinal logic of extraction of naturally-occurring bioactive compounds and an industrial logic of breakdown and recombination, functional foods promised improved health obtainable only via the mediating action of food science and technology. Market reports through the mid-2000s indicated an almost limitless future for the category. But something happened in the intervening decade: the appearance of superfoods. Like their functional food counterparts, superfoods have similarly found success through mobilization of the trope of food as medicine. Unlike functional foods, however, superfoods appear as whole foods, sidestepping twentieth-century techno-industrial logics. Or do they? Drawing on food studies and STS scholarship examining the ways that scientific and bodily knowledge intersect in food production and consumption, this paper examines commercially-produced beverages from the mid-2000s to the present to explore how the logics developed through functional food production have come to govern conversations about superfoods and to what effect. I show that the development of a multi-faceted assemblage of scientists, researchers, and marketing teams made visible otherwise unseen biologically active components. In the process, I argue, they set in place new extractionist logics – where not only compounds and money are posited as resources, but also everyday consumer knowledge – that would pave the way for the success of superfoods.

Author

• Christy Spackman, SFIS - Arizona State University