Food Claims - Ending the Vicious Circle

When nutritional information is used to market food (picture here the dizzying aisle of yogurts, fat- and sugar-free, full of antioxidants and probiotics), we are  given the illusion of choice.  In reality, our choices are undermined by the influence of the promises on the packaging. Yet, quality foods to nourish the body are, at the same time, commodities for sale, and food often becomes classified within a hierarchy of supposedly good-for-you ingredients.

Too few critiques react against the battery of health claims that mass advertising and promotional discourses impose on food. That health benefits - real or imagined - are being defined by food retailers (the same retailers who are guilty of loading up their products with sugars and trans fats in the name of shelf life and cost-savings) raises major concerns about the integrity of food, no matter how healthy it is in its raw state. The competitive globalized food industry is a vicious co-dependent circle that justifies intense third world production as the primary way to make food more economical . Yet, simultaneously submit to similar intensifying advertising campaigns to regain market advantage in lieu of  more equitable worker wages. The socio-political conditions under which the food is produced has become even further removed from the calculation of its original value; and in the supermarkets the focus centers on the promising novelty of a particular item, rather than on questions of its provenance.

Illustration by Nina Charest

One need not look further than something as everyday as a cup of tea for a case study. The North American beverage market has recently featured green tea as the latest "food that heals" in the fight against cancer. In its promotional catch phrases, it is acclaimed as having vague virtue-giving, "purifying" and weight-loss benefits. In addition to the deployment of many new green tea beverage items, it has also, curiously, become a supplementary ingredient in consumer products as diverse as cosmetics, diet pills, cereals, chocolate, soft drinks, candy and ice cream.

Its notable appearance is, in effect, a promotional vehicle within the modern healthy food "theatre" (Goodman 2004); a spectacular cinema of using enticing claims to sell food. These claims, ranging from ideological to plain outlandish, are typically bolstered by massive promotional campaigns that play directly into the Western health-obsessed food market (Ostry 2007).  It is not uncommon for product marketing to "filter" health research findings that  offer claims which are out of context or exaggerated; none of which can realistically deliver the publicized advantages such as in Lipton's Iced Green Tea slogan, "Green Brings the Good In" or in Tetley's Green tea, "Develop a Taste for Purity" . The phenomenon develops added dimensions when the product includes logos and promotional slogans using concepts of purity or nature for credibility. For iced green tea beverage packaging, a colourful display implies that consuming the drink is synonymous with living a "natural" or more satisfying "green" lifestyle.

This is not to say the food may not actually offer the suggested benefits under specific conditions, concentrations and qualities. But the marketing of green tea iced drinks typically obscures the product's caloric and nutritional content in order to stress the benefits of the tea components instead. As in the case of today's mainstream cafés selling of luminescent green frapuccinosomethings, tea drinks are manufactured pre-sweetened and produced with generally inexpensive raw ingredients; but having undergone refinement by the domestic Western retailer, their high prices are justified for a Western clientele. Such practices ensure that capital surplus value accrues mainly to the retailers at the expense of the producers, a process that reproduces the early colonial project to "possess the foreign" (Jamieson 2001:280).

So, the cycle will continue. Even early retailing schemes for tea endeavoured to exploit notions of purity and health in order to motivate increased consumption.  The great wealth resulting from trade expansion further "demanded commodities that signified the success of 'discovery'" (Chatterjee 2001: 22). By the nineteenth century, the tea trade had become progressively more dependent on the retailing sector to foster increased consumption. The new tea industry structure sought to exploit the "taste" vulnerability explored by Bourdieu - one where the aspiration of lifestyle and status is mutually reinforced by discourses propagating the goals of health, virtue and respectable behaviour. In accordance with this historical legacy of cornering the individual with moral food discernment, the current marketing strategy for food seeks to undermine a clear assessment of the health merits of food. The acclaim for a food item such as green tea goes largely unacknowledged as being influenced by pressures from the current global trade environment and the internationalization of food policies. In order to  address this growing problem an entirely new community of practices regarding our food systems would be required; one that not many people currently seem to have the appetite for.

References

Chatterjee, Piya. 2005 (2nd). A Time For Tea: Women, Labor, And Post/Colonial Politics On An Indian Plantation. Durham: Duke University Press.

Goodman, Michael K. 2004. "Reading Fair Trade: Political Ecological Imaginary And The Moral Economy Of Fair Trade Foods", Political Geography, 23: 891-915.

Jamieson, Ross W. "The Essence Of Commodification: Caffeine Dependencies In The Early Modern World", Journal Of Social History. 2001: 269-294.

Janer, Zilkia. 2007. "(IN)EDIBLE NATURE: New World Food And Coloniality", Cultural Studies, 21(2 /3): 385 -405.

Ostry, A. 2006. Nutrition Policy in Canada, 1870-1939. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

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