The cranberry as food, health food, and superfood: challenging or maintaining hegemonic nutrition?

Abstract

This paper explores the foundations of contemporary superfood trends by tracing the history of the American cranberry as a food, health food, and superfood. The cranberry we know today is the product of centuries of productive overlap between ideas about health and commerce. Historical understandings of the cranberry as a food, medicine, and exchangeable commodity underpin its evolution from a wild-harvested resource to a commercially cultivated crop, demonstrating continuity in cranberry’s dual work as medicinal foodstuff and commercial product. Yet despite the centrality of health discourses over four centuries of recorded cranberry history, the superfood label would not have been possible without broader changes in the food industry, nutrition science, and marketing that first occurred at the turn of the twentieth century. By examining the early days of the cranberry industry, this paper reveals the significance of strong alliances between industry actors and scientific researchers, the necessity of industrial processing to facilitate convenient and remote consumption, and the importance of the marketing of health attributes to the cranberry industry’s growth. These three themes, I argue, echo across contemporary superfood industries, suggesting that the unique history of the cranberry laid a foundation for the proliferation of contemporary superfood trends by providing a pathway for producers of less illustrious foods with healthful reputations. I contend that nutritional marketing of cranberry products is situated within reductive understandings of the relationship between food and health that has its origins in the earlier half of the twentieth century. However, the recent positioning of the cranberry as a superfood differs discursively from previous nutritional marketing by emphasizing the fruit’s therapeutic value alongside natural, traditional, and authentic qualities. This paper uses the biography of the cranberry to consider whether the superfoods trend represents a shift away from nutritional reductionism, and contributes to understandings of hegemonic nutrition in contemporary food and nutrition culture.