The social and environmental considerations of ethical eating, with a focus on ' nutritional

breakthrough' foods (e.g. 'superfoods')

Plymouth UniversityFebruary 1, 2017

Jane DixonLeverhulme Trust Visiting Professor

Centre for Food PolicyCity, University of London

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THE FOOD CRISISA developed country government perspective

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Diet-related non-communicable disease ‘epidemics’

Multiple forms of mal-nutrition – including micro-nutrient deficiencies - co-exist in mainly low SES households = search for evidence-based responses, currently a ‘black box’

Two thirds of populations overweight & obese, a risk factor for Type 2 diabetes, cancers, muscolo-skeletal disorders etc = costly treatments; ‘ethical’ decisions re. surgery; psychological distress for the body-shamed; lost productivity due to absenteeism and presenteeism

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Common public policy responses

Designing behaviour change programs based on nutrition education Improving consumer access to affordable fresh food through charitable

approaches: food banks & social supermarkets Encouraging industry product reformulation - less salt, sugar and

oils/fats Agricultural R&D – public and private - to improve nutrient values of

commodities Paying for bariatric surgery as the most effective treatment Considerations of household income security & affordable housing –

the food provisioning contextMulti-pronged, disparate, largely nutrition-focused, ineffective to-

date

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Corporate development of nutrition + civil society & individual led initiatives

The rising prevalence of diet-related disease exerts a contradictory force: creates tension between governments, agri-food corporations and international regulatory agencies AND provides the same corporations with a new capital accumulation platform: disease-reduction products and services

The ontological insecurity of cosmopolitans = the emergence of a new class fraction pursuing ecological embeddness of diets: nature, culture, and social justice* AND/OR pursuit of individualised but ethical eating in terms of taking responsibility for bodily health

*Conclusion

THE NUTRITIONALISATION OF THE FOOD SYSTEM

A critical nutrition perspective of the food crisis

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Health is the ‘heavy’ trend in the food system

Using peoples fears … about their health and possible future disease risk … as a basis for

development … and marketing … is fundamentally different from how traditional foodstuffs are marketed and sold (Heasman and

Mellentin 2001, p.33)

Nutritionalisation

Key process: nutritionalisation, a cultural economy process for attaching nutritional properties and health qualities to foods (Dixon 2009). It involves:

three sub-processes: the enumeration, enrichment and promotion of both single foods and national food supplies in terms of a nutrient values profile (amounts and types of energy, protein, fats etc.)

the co-option of nutrition science to extract surplus value and authority relations from food

the ‘creation’ of a particular consumer/citizen = the nutricentric consumer (Scrinis 2008)

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Critical nutrition studies

A debate with hegemonic nutrition: a singular view on the [ideal] food-body relationship; narrow metrics; decontextualized knowledge (Guthman 2014)

Large terrain:The science-policy-advice interface and the moral personNutrition and governmentalityFood production practices and effects on bodiesAlternative ways of knowing nutrition and knowing food

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Capitalism and bio-power

Bodies are literally absorbing the conditions and externalities of production and consumption (Guthman 2011: 182)… Food processing has introduced new risks (Guthman 2011; Winson 2013)

Need to adopt a strong critique – questioning how the scientific knowledge is translated into dietary guidelines (Scrinis 2013)

… meaningful solutions entail serious questioning of the economic system that subordinates nutritional quality and human health to the maximisation of investor returns (Winson 2013: 251)

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Ontological crisis in nutrition & the nutri-centric citizen

Healthism and nutritionism have sidelined pleasure in food: a handful of corporations have a vested interest in not letting eating … be simply a random act of average human imagination (Winson 2013:2)

Life for nutri-centric citizens is now lived through bio-markers (Scrinis 2007)

‘Good’ and ‘bad’ cholesterol Blood pressure Blood sugar

GI BMI HWR

150 year evolution

Mid 1800s: isolation of the role of protein, and a view that protein was ‘the master nutrient’

1880s: acceptance that the calorie was an effective metric for human energy requirements

1912: the idea of ‘protective foods’ following the 1912 application of the term ‘vitamine’ (see Dixon 2009)

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The master nutrient, protein (meat)

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The imperial calorie

The calorie “popularized a set of assumptions that allowed Americans to see food as an instrument of power, and to envisage a ‘world food problem’ amenable to political and scientific interventions” (Cullather 2007, p.34)

Atwater’s calorimeter

The irrefutable and passionless yardstick

Protective foods

‘Vitamania’ based on isolation of ‘vitamine’ to encapsulate the life giving nature of amine compounds and other micro-nutrients (Levenstein 1993; Cannon and Leitzmann 2005)

Enter dairy and vegetables

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+ Highly processed protective foods

Functional foods (industrially processed C20th): A nutrition-enhanced food, advertised as having evidence-based health promoting properties

With food shortages of World War 2, the British fortified margarine and flour with vitamins A, D and calcium, whilst in the US white bread was enriched with niacin, riboflavin, thiamine and iron: the same micronutrients removed in the previous 50 years through roller milling and bleaching of wheat (Lawrence and Worsley 2007)

Impetus for functional foods/phoods

Developed world’s obsession with longevity and increased corporeal performance

Developing world’s desire to curb diseases caused by micro-nutrient deficiencies – Golden Rice

Food companies’ need for competitive advantage in highly competitive marketplace – so novel foods

“Healthy convenience’ : people can consume more in the present and nullify the risks through future acts of consumption: cholesterol lowering margarines; Yakult to aid digestion; Nestle’s LCI Yoghurt to boost the immune system

Healthier reformulation: the quiet revolution?

59% of UK shoppers feel that their diet isn’t as healthy as it could be but it’s healthy enough... Can reformulation help? (Pearse IGD)

“The great public health benefit of reformulation is that people’s diets can improve without any need to changes habits or behaviour” (Pearse) OR act to improve the food system

The medicalisation of the food system

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A form of functional food : the superfood

Largely based on identification of protective foods – especially anti-oxidants: molecules that slow or prevent the oxidation of other chemicals, a process implicated in CVD & cancers

Super-foods distinct from industrially manufactured functional foods because found ‘in nature’: consumed from circa 2004, beginning with superfruits (or oily fish?)

‘The term ‘superfood’ is really just a marketing tool, with little scientific basis to it’ (Cancer Research UK 2013); term banned by the EU in 2007 unless accompanied by evidence from ‘authoritative’ science

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Scientific eating

“’Taste and habit, long the sole arbiters of the dining table, seem overthrown’, wrote one observer in 1930. ‘Man, and perhaps more particularly woman, of the 1930 genus no longer eats what he likes in nonchalant abandon, fancy free. He eats what he thinks is good for him, on some scientific or pseudo-scientific hypothesis’” (quoted in Levenstein 1993, p. 12)

Uncritical support for nutritionalisation

narrow view of the food crisis

corporate embrace: the search for competitive advantage among agri-food TNCs will continue to use nutrition claims attached to foods as cultural and economic capital accumulation strategy

public health folklore: the nutrition led economic advances ‘miracle’

Multiple sources of resistance

Reaction against medicinal eating and the nutrition cacophony, including from within medical and nutrition science

Economic critiques of the corporate dominance of food systems

Social movement pressure for the ecological reembedding of diets

THE FOOD CRISIS An ecological food systems perspective

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The food crisis…

Limits to growth of food supply (environmental changes, new diseases, urban encroachment on food producing habitats and labour incomes and shortages); distributional issues (corporate power within food chains, food waste); and consumer incomes, skills and knowledge (livelihood and social protection inadequacy, nutritional cacophony/confusion and ontological insecurity)

Capitalism and the 4 ‘cheaps’

Capitalism ‘prevents us from seeing [through their harnessing of 4 Cheaps: food, energy, labour power and nature/resources] …capitalism as a way of organizing nature – human and non-human – to produce a particular form of value relations’ (Moore 2015)

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The food crisis in terms of the metabolic rift

Human metabolism Food production & processing as linked to cheap labour power & nutritional energy via the calorie

Agri-culture Bio-spheric environments as a source of cheap natural resources & energy

Food sovereignty Corporate control of food trade, safety & culinary culture rules driving ontological insecurity

(Moore 2011; Moore 2015; Schneider & McMichael 2010; Dixon et al. 2014)

A food system that delivers human and animal diseases and environmental degradation due to a ‘robbery system’

Trans fats

1800 2000200,000 yrs ago (advent of modern Homo sapiens)

The nutritional & environmental consequences of the metabolic rift

20%

40%

n-6 (main veg oils)

Year

n-3 (omega-3: ‘fish oils’)

Unsat fats/oils

Sat (animal) fats

Note: 1. Change in ratio of n6:n3 = 1:1 15:12. Recent rise in trans FA intake

Fat intake as % of total energy intake (high-income countries)

Total fat

15oC

16oC

17oCGlobal Surface Temperature

A. McMichael 2011

From geopolitical economies to bio-economies

Political economy theory posits the key role of food in forging geo-political economies – through trade, commodification, cheap-food/cheap-labour

Biological economies instead considers the politics of the what it means to be a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ eater within a context of the why and how of eating practices, which in turn are linked to moral, political economy and bio-physical forces (Goodman 2016; Campbell et al 2016)

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What role for citizen-consumers?

Citizen-consumers have a role to play in becoming more food quality literate (Scrinis 2013)

BUT

Does the healthy eating movement go “to the heart of the contradictions that are produced by the capitalist control of food” (Winson 2013: 255)?

orIs health a personal responsibility, promoted by an ideology of ‘healthism’: a ‘super value’ that trumps other social concerns (Guthman 2011: 52)?

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THE CASE OF QUINOA

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A case for quinoa: high protein and gluten-free

NASA 1993: “while no single food can supply all the essential life-sustaining nutrients, quinoa comes as close as any other in the plant or animal kingdom”Quinoa is one of the only known grains that provide all the essential amino acids needed by the human body www.goodness.com.au/Organic-White-.Promoted by the Coeliac Society of Victoria, plus….An absence of consumption among traditional eaters has contributed to rise in type 2 diabetes (Mattei et al. 2015)

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The perfect meal in spaceQuinoa and mackerel

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Multiple actors driving the market

Celebrities from Oprah to NASA The United Nations: 2013 International Year of Quinoa Health authorities Cosmopolitan consumers seeking health advantage and

novel food experiences, including ‘authentic’ foods/heritage foods & healthy convenience

Governments: The crop will provide a high value alternative break crop for different farming systems across Australia (RIRDC nd)

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A commercial response: The Australian SuperFood Co

There’s a new group of superfood contenders. They come from an exotic and faraway land, where the weather is warm, the beaches are pristine and the forests are lush. This powerful group of fruits and seeds is so rich in vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, that it surpasses the past superfood master, the blueberry, and sets new global standards for nutrition and taste.It’s Australian native bush food.-See more at: http://austsuperfoods.com.au/story/#sthash.4DR0MSmL.dpuf

See more at: Konczak et al Antioxidant capacity and phenolic compounds in commercially grown native: Australian herbs and spices, CSIRO

‘How hipster food staple quinoa could make Australia a global superfood superpower with plans to start growing the expensive high-protein cereal across the country’ (Mail Online): 2 trials – government sponsored industrial scale in Western Australia and organic family farm in Tasmania

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New consumer demand triggers new supply chains, price volatility & environmental benefit / damage?

Largest producers, 2015: Peru (1) and Bolivia (2) Production grew 124% 2011-2014, 55% of Peruvian output goes to US & only

10% of Bolivia’s crop stays (Garcia 2013) In Peru, traditionally grown in 3 regions but now moving to northern coast

replacing more water intensive crops, but new pests & pesticides 80% of Peruvian pop. consumes it regularly, with debate re. impact of price and

access (depends on urban/rural, economic status) (USDA 2014; Mattei 2015): a natural turning toward novel foods (noodles) or too expensive????

Surging prices have lifted producer household expenditures by 46%, 2004-2013, leading to expansion of producers growing Q., but then supply gluts & plunging prices – those pushed out are poorer traditional Andean farmers, they need to find heirloom varieties (The Economist 2016)

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“There’s trouble ahead”: the bio-diversity challenge

Quinoa has reached NASA but is becoming inaccessible for Andean consumers (World Bank 2014) OR

Your quinoa habit really did help Peru’s poor. But there’s trouble ahead (Cherfas 2016)

Reliance on narrow range of varieties (out of 3000 varieties)Damage to producing soils through over productionLlama herd reduction, so less manure available

Biodiversity International working with producers on developing internal markets – hospitals and schools - using other varieties

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Are nested markets a way forward?

“Nested markets constitute increasingly robust strategies for rural development practices, processes and policies, being able to create opportunities for families’ livelihood in rural areas” (Schneider et al. 2016)... They connect small farmers to markets

Strategically organised around ‘social interactions between concrete actors [producers and consumers] in concrete spaces [rural and urban]’

Exist by virtue of a larger, often conventional, market - a specialist niche market – thus tenuous but innovative

Differ with conventional markets: distinctiveness, socio-material infrastructures (rules) & common pool resources (Schneider et al. 2016)...

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A nested markets response: Quinoa

Nested markets emerge out of social struggles, and their reproduction over time is the object of complex sometimes extended social struggles (Hebinck et al, 2016: 3)

Examples:fair trade and organic supply chains, involving consumer buying power support (case of Green Earth Organics); hybrid global-cooperative production models involving producer-led supply chains (Walsh-Dilley 2013; Ton et al. 2006).

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Need research of bio-economy models

Can the concept of bio-economies (le Heron et al. 2015)

augmented by social solidarity or nested markets, begin to heal the metabolic rift?The Australian response: eat imported [in solidarity with peasant farmers far-away], or wait for 1 organic producer in the clean/green state or WA producer in fragile environments & no partnerships with consumer groups/eaters? What are the ethical answers?The South American case: quinoa producers organising together across national boundaries

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Other superfoods

Oily fish/fish oil

Green leafy veg: kale

Super-fruits/nuts/seeds: acai, almonds

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CONCLUSION

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Greater relationality: justice studies

Special Issue: Just Food, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 8(2), 2015Developments in food and agriculture amount to a range of injustices in the way they amount to the maldistribution of the burdens and benefits associated with food …the deep roots of contemporary food injustice lie in socioculturally dominant ways of thinking about and dealing with vulnerability, dependency, and relationalityHence need to deal with their antinomies: reductionism, detachment and privatization Food justice follows when relationality changes: can we eat and live well together? (Gilson 2015)

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Where is the state?: nutrition sensitive social protection

Hossain et al (2016) Delivering social protection that nourishes: lessons from the food price crisis, IDS Policy Briefing Issue 124, IDS.

As people work harder, longer and migrate to towns – ie precarious work – they turn to processed, Westernised foods

This is a sensible adjustment to food price rises (work more and more precariously, and eat more convenient, energy dense yet unhealthy food that also suits a precarious working regime) amplifies political norms/value systems change in sympathy with broader trends to marketization of social relations, welcome to some and resisted by others

Nutrition-sensitive social protection: protect against obesogenic environments, food insecurity and dependence on cheap foods, precarious labour

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Attend to producer disadvantage through supporting bio-sensitive diets

Sustainable, nutrition-sensitive agriculture and food security policies help improve the availability and accessibility of nutritious food, and promote healthy and sustainable diets and prosperity in rural areas (UN System High Level Task Force on Global Food Security 2012, p.8)

Where are ‘alternative’ food systems?

Not transformative when they lead to a bifurcated system (Guthman 2011; Winson 2013)

Pricing of healthy foods is critical (Winson 2013)

The organics movement can “accentuate the already widespread perceptions and fears of nutrient security in the food supply” (Scrinis 2013 p. 226)

BUT, what of nested markets that forge social and economic solidarity among producers and between producers and consumers?

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Where is the citizen/consumer/eater?

The eater – doing the right thing personally but doing the wrong thing by the food system – raises questions about the cherry picking of nutritional advice in an era of self-regulation – good citizens but unfair eaters… how to become poly-ethics (fair, fresh and friendly) food citizens - or too onerous?

Re-orient towards culinary modernism (flexitarianism?) or culinary traditionalism/socio-localism

OR defetishise nutritional foods & become food justice activists: Pay less attention to what is on the table and attend to the chief injustices that the cheap food dilemma rests on (Guthman 2011: 194) in conjunction with the state & healthy food movement, re-colonise schools and other food environments with healthy eating (Winson 2013)

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References

Cannon, G., & C. Leitzmann (2005) The new nutrition science. Public Health Nutrition 8 (6A): 673–694.Cherfas, J. (2016) Your quinoa habit really did help Peru’s poor. The Salt, March 31.Dixon, J. (2009) From the imperial to the empty calorie: how nutrition relations underpin food regime transitions, Agriculture and Human Values, vol 26 (4), pp.321-331Dixon, J., Hattersley, L. and Isaacs, B. (2014) Transgressing retail: Supermarkets, liminoid power and the metabolic rift. In M. Goodman and C. Sage (eds), Food transgressions: Making sense of contemporary politics, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 131-153Dixon, J. (2015) IUHPE Position Paper: Advancing health promoting food systems. Paris: International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE).Dixon, J. (2016) Critical nutrition studies within critical agrarian studies: A review and analysis, Journal of Peasant Studies http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1198513Economist (2016) The fad for the Andean staple has not hurt the poor – yet, The Economist May 21.FAO & CIRAD (2015) State of the Art Report of Quinoa in the World in 2013, by D. Bazile, D. Bertero & C. Nieto, eds, RomeFriedmann, H & P. McMichael (1989) Agriculture and the state system. Sociologia Ruralis 39 (2): 93–117.Friedmann, H. (2005) From colonialism to green capitalism: Social movements and emergence of food regimes. In New directions in the sociology of global development, ed. F. Buttel and P. McMichael, 227–264. Oxford: Elsevier..

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References (contd)

Gilson, E. (2015) Vulnerability, relationality, and dependency: feminist conceptual resources for food justice, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 8(2), pp. 10-46Guthman, J. (2011) Weighing In. Obesity, food justice, and the limits of capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.Guthman, J. (2014) Introducing critical nutrition, Gastronomica 14(3), pp. 1-4Hebbinck, P. et al. (2016) The construction of new nested markets and the role of rural development policies. In Hebinck et al. Rural development and the construction of new markets, Routledge, 1-15.Hossain, N. et al. (2016) Delivering social protection that nourishes: lessons from the food price crisis, IDS.Le Heron, R. et al. (2016) Biological economies. Experimentation and the politics of agri-food frontiers, Earthscan. Levenstein, H. (1996) The politics of nutrition in North America, Neuroscience and Behavioural Reviews 20 (1): 75–78.McMichael, A. (2005) Integrating nutrition with ecology: Balancing the health of humans and biosphere. Public Health Nutrition 8 (6A): 706–715.McMichael, P. (2005) Global development and the corporate food regime. In New directions in the sociology of global development, ed. F. Buttel and P. McMichael, 265–299. Oxford: Elsevier.Mattei, J. et al. (2015) Reducing the global burden of type 2 diabetes... Globalization and Health 11: 23

.

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References (contd)

Moore, J. (2015) Capitalism in the web of life, VersoMudry, J. (2006) Quantifying an American eater: Early USDA food guidance, and a language of numbers. Food, Culture and Society 9 (1): 49–67Schneider, S. et al. (2016) Nested markets, food networks and new pathways for rural development in Brazil, Agriculture 8, 61; doi: 10.3390/agriculture60400061Scrinis, G. (2008) On the ideology of nutritionism. Gastronomica, 8(1), pp. 39-48. Scrinis, G. (2013) Nutritionism: The science and politics of dietary advice. New York: Columbia University Press.USDA (2014) Gain Report: Peru. Quinoa Outlook, GAIN 23 December.Winson, A. (2013) The industrial diet: The degradation of food and the struggle for healthy eating, UBC Press.

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