Food and the commodification of health

Consumers and the conceptual and practical appropriation of functional foods 

Mari Niva

https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/20929/consumer.pdf?sequence=1

1 Introduction

Food is more than just something to eat. It acquires countless meanings and expressions in different cultures, times and places. It is part of our social identity, a means of distinction and of distinguishing between ‘us’ and ‘others’. It simultaneously embraces traditions and innovations, the everyday and the feast, asceticism and hedonism, individuality and commensality. It fascinates us all in the different roles in our lives, whether we are its consumers, producers or researchers.

The concepts and categorisations of food reflect the social and cultural environment in which we live (e.g., Douglas & Isherwood 1979, 66; Mäkelä 2002, 18). The visibility of health in the debate on food is a characteristic feature of modern consumer society (Warde 1997; 79). It is a regular, evenpervasive topic just as much in the media as in everyday discussions with members of the family, colleagues and friends. Healthy eating advice startsearly in life when parents tell their children to eat their vegetables and in Finland it continues at school, where nutrition education is part of domestic science lessons. The food sections of bookshops are full of guides to diet and dieting and cookbooks for healthy eating. National and internationalcommittees and task forces draw up nutrition recommendations and try to guide the public towards choosing healthy food. In addition, food and diet occupy a focal position in the prevention and treatment of many chronic diseases. We live in a world in which it is increasingly difficult to avoid the discourse on healthy eating in the media and everyday life. As the formed social norms, habits and traditions of eating have eroded, it has been asked whether it is the perspective of medicine that has begun to dominate food and eating in contemporary societies (Fischler 1980, 949).

The discourse on food and health that consumers face in their everyday life is, however, becoming more and more fragmentary and the information increasingly detailed. Foods once condemned as unhealthy are found to contain health-promoting substances, and vice versa, and research into the links between food or food substances and specific diseases gains wide publicity. The gamut of increasingly detailed research findings on food and health in the media and the abundance of diet programmes on the market do not always support the basic message of the nutrition recommendation.

 Consumers and the conceptual and practical appropriation of functional foods tions, which has for decades been relatively constant. The optimist would say that modern consumers can choose the knowledge that best suits them and their lifestyle and use it as they see fit; the pessimist would argue that it is nowadays impossible for consumers to know what to believe. (E.g., Warde 1997, 83–84; Coveney 2000, 114–116; Nestle 2002, 67.)

The vast attention paid to healthiness and its antithesis, unhealthiness, reveals a change in our attitude to food in an age of plenty. As recently as the early decades of the 20th century, there were major shortcomings in the nutrition of the indigent Finns, and during the Second World War the question of whether the nation at large was getting enough to eat was a cause of considerable concern. Soon after the war, in the late 1950s, as shortages and rationing gave way to plenty, the problems familiar today began to emerge. People grew obese, their blood pressure and cholesterol levels rose and the number of deaths from cardiovascular diseases began to increase. In contrast, problems once common, such as goitre, rickets and night blindness gradually vanished as nutrition improved and foods weresupplemented with vitamins and minerals. (Suojanen 2003.)

Over the past few decades, the Finns’ eating habits have tended more towards the nutrition recommendations. We are eating more and more vegetables, fruit, vegetable oils and low-fat dairy products while consumption of such items as butter and full-fat milk has plummeted (e.g., Tike 2007 23–24). Modern consumers are more aware than ever of health and ways of promoting it. Most Finns can quote food, exercise, smoking, alcohol and restas factors that influence health (Aarva & Pasanen 2005, 61). The spread of information about health has not, however, meant that health now guides all our everyday practices. True, we are familiar with the guidelines, but applying them is laborious. Various eating-related problems, such as obesity and related diseases, are on the increase. Furthermore, there are social differences in their incidence. They are encountered differently by people on high and low incomes, with high and little education, with families and without. (E.g., Kokko & Räsänen 1996, S23, S26; Sarlio-Lähteenkorva 2007, 26; Prättälä & Paalanen 2007, 84–86.)

The emphasis on health is also visible in the range of foods on the market in Finland and elsewhere in advanced societies. Health and fitness have become increasingly commercialised and commodified into foods. In the early 1980s such relatively unprocessed basic foods as vegetables, fruit, wholemeal flour and (low-fat) milk traditionally known to be healthy were joined by processed products advertised as ‘light’ in which ingredients considered to be unhealthy or high in energy had been reduced. During the decade foods each lighter and lower in fat, salt and sugar content than the previous ones were increasingly vying for a place on the supermarket shelves. In flavour and consistency they imitated their models, but they were marketed as healthier alternatives to the customary products. (Heasman & Mellentin 2001, 60–61; Nestle 2002, 298–300.) 

As the 1990s dawned, a turning point was reached in the commodification of healthiness that has even been described as a revolution in nutrition (Heasman & Mellentin 2001, 55). It was then that functional foods, as they came to be called, entered the market, promoting not only general well-being but also providing targeted effects, relief from certain complaints and help in maintaining health. Functional foods differ from conventional and light foods that are marketed at most as ‘healthy’, as they do from the basic nutrition education according to which a healthy diet is one that is varied, balanced and moderate and avoids the excessive consumption of fat, sugar and salt. Whereas the established nutrition education emphasises the overall diet, pointing out that single choices neither make nor break a diet, functional foods carry the message that a single product can influence health now and in the future. Functional foods have in fact been marketed as a new, ‘positive’ way of promoting health (Sloan 1999, 55). According to this way of thinking, health is attained not by denying oneself and avoiding certain treats but by choosing the new, health-promoting

food products. In everyday life, the ‘nutritional revolution’ would mean the reconciliation of various views on healthiness and the adoption of new, targeted food products.

In this dissertation I analyse the ways in which consumers appropriate the new kind of healthiness commodified into functional foods. On the one hand, I examine consumers’ interpretations and opinions on functional foods, and on the other, I look at how functional foods have entered everyday life by examining the role of sociodemographic and food- and healthrelated background factors in the use of functional foods. I claim that the appropriation of functional foods is a complex process with, on the one hand, a conceptual dimension related to trust and the meanings of products, and on the other a practical dimension related to experience and everyday practices. The various modes of appropriation are not necessarily unidirectional or simultaneous, because consumers may personally adopt products yet still wonder whether these products merit their trust. Appropriation is an ongoing process in which consumers’ relation to healthiness and functional foods is moulded with time and even after the products have already become part of everyday life or have been rejected. Functional foods challenge the established concepts of healthiness and ways of promoting it but at the same time modify them.

This article provides a summary of the findings presented in the four original articles that are part of my doctoral dissertation and ties them together using the concept of appropriation. In the rest of Chapter one I present the background of the study by examining the concept of functional foods and the expectations and contradictions surrounding the new products, discuss the earlier consumer research on them, and present appropriation as a novel perspective on the way consumers receive and adopt functional foods. In Chapter two I describe the objectives of my research, its  Consumers and the conceptual and practical appropriation of functional foodsdata and the four original articles of the dissertation. Chapter three first examines the theoretical basis of the concept of appropriation in consumption research and in the sociology of consumption. It then addresses the perspectives of science and technology studies on appropriation and domestication and looks at the ways in which food has been studied in consumption research using appropriation as a theoretical approach. I end the chapter by making my own interpretation of the concept of appropriation and single out two analytically divergent dimensions of appropriation: the conceptual and the practical.

Chapter four concentrates on my findings. I summarise my empirical results concerning consumers’ conceptual and practical appropriation of functional foods. At the end of chapter four I reflect on my study, its data and methods and their limitations and present some thoughts about future research on functional foods. Based on the results, the fifth, concluding chapter deals with the changes in healthy eating from three angles. I examine the many different practices of eating and their significance for functional foods, analyse the role of routines and trust in appropriating functional foods, and discuss what the individualising tendencies, particularly the bioscientific visions of genetically tailored diets may mean for the practices of eating.