Selling the “Inca superfood”: nutritional primitivism in superfoods books and maca marketing

Abstract

The trend for novel and exotic “superfoods” exemplifies the contemporary tendency to idealize “primitive” food cultures as nutritional utopias. Based on critical textual and visual analysis of superfoods books and packaging, this article shows that “nutritional primitivism” has blossomed in superfoods discourse and marketing since the 1980s, evolving into a knowledge framework for evaluating a food’s healthfulness that challenges nutrition science. It demonstrates that nutritional primitivism emerges not only in response to a perceived crisis in Western health, but also social and environmental concerns about globalized and industrialized agri-food systems. However, primitivist representations of superfoods essentialize producers and production practices as traditional and timeless, obscuring their complex and changing reality. While nutritional primitivism can be understood as a popular critique of contemporary food systems and their underlying social structures, these incipient critiques thus fall short on key issues of food sovereignty.