Critical Approaches to Superfoods by Richard Wilk & Emma McDonell

Author:Richard Wilk & Emma McDonell [Wilk, Richard & McDonell, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, Agriculture & Food Policy, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781350123878
Google: 64gHEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 54205318
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2020-12-10T07:56:11+00:00

7

What Makes Food Super? The Post-eugenic Promises of Fish Flour and Other Super Powders

Hannah LeBlanc

On June 29, 1962, Life Magazine reported on a scientific and humanitarian breakthrough. US government scientists at the Department of Interior were turning “trash fish” into “a powder that is tasteless, odorless, chemically pure and rich in vital animal proteins.” When “mixed in stews, vegetable dishes and baking flour,” fish protein concentrate (FPC) could provide 2 billion undernourished people with their daily protein and make the United States the “chief benefactor to the world’s hungry” (“A Miracle of the Fishes” 1962). Drawing a starker picture of the political economic stakes, one FPC manufacturer told a group of international students at the University of Illinois that the “‘have-nots’ … will either find food, or be given food by those who have it, or they will fight to try to take it from those who have it.” He succinctly summarized fish flour’s appeal: “Cheap fish protein can turn the Red tide in Latin America” (Levin 1960).

Half a century later, a different kind of food powder hit consumer markets. A new start-up called Your Super began selling powder mixes made of “superfoods” such as maca, chia seeds, spirulina, açaí, and lucuma (Crawford 2019). Sold at “premium” prices and wrapped in minimalist brown packaging, Your Super mixes are named for the results they promise: “Forever Beautiful,” “Skinny Protein,” and “Muscle Power.” With products free of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), additives, dairy, gluten, soy, and animal products and sourced from “Africa, Bolivia, Brazil, Finland, Germany, Greece, Japan, Peru, Romania, Spain & Sri Lanka,” Your Super suggests that “ancient” cultures can be the benefactors of overfed but undernourished Americans.

What do these two food powders have to do with one another? On their face, they are fifty years and a world apart. Fish flour sold for pennies per pound; Your Super powders go for dollars per ounce. Proponents of fish flour touted its scientific origins and reliance on industrial technology; Your Super sells its powders as natural and ancient. Fish flour was designed as a food supplement for poor people in the then-called Third World; Your Super’s prices are aimed at wealthier customers, most of whom are in the United States.

Yet, I argue, the makers of fish flour and Your Super operate under the same fundamental assumption. Proponents of fish flour and superfoods aim to transform eaters’ bodies and, by extension, their capabilities and the social and economic possibilities open to them. Each seeks biological and social improvement through targeted nutritional interventions—the addition of powders to existing foods—in ways that respond to the specific economic and cultural needs of their times. And despite the differences between those times, fish flour and Your Super assume similar bodily hierarchies, hierarchies that also animated American eugenic schemes earlier in the twentieth century.

Your Super and fish flour are useful case studies because they both exemplify larger trends in dietary intervention. Your Super is only one player in an increasingly crowded field of contemporary superfood purveyors. I use

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