Fancy food for thought

Fancy+food+for+thought

As of late, I’ve gotten into the habit of whimsically throwing some spinach leaves and hunks of goat cheese on to a Jack’s Frozen Pizza I get from the store as part of a three-for-ten-dollars sort of deal.

I call it artisanal pizza. 

In categorizing my otherwise ordinary frozen dinner as “artisanal” merely for the fact that it is topped ever-so-artistically with toppings one does not find typically atop a Jack’s Frozen Pizza, my personal goal is, one might have guessed, to mock and criticize the increasing trend of over-branding various food products to take on a pretentious aura.

To be frank, the increased popularity of over-branding foods is a topic I find equal parts puzzling and hilarious. But it creates other implications that go beyond mere hilarity.

Several online publications, such as Bitch Magazine and EcoSalon have published articles demonizing the branding of certain food items, such as kale and quinoa, claiming these labels alienate the lower classes and prevent them from purchasing nutritious, healthy foods. They call it “food gentrification.” 

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The term gentrification is generally used to describe real estate, but in general signifies an increase in value, alienating a lower class.

In my eyes, the notion of food gentrification is extreme and out of place; the only outcomes created through certain foods labeled as “super” is an absence of information in place of trendy, fashionable advertising. 

The European Union has taken measures to address this problem of fad-foods. Like myself, a BBC article emphasized the importance and simultaneous lack of nutritional food information. As the article explains, in 2007, the EU “will ban the use of the term superfood unless it is accompanied by a specific authorised health claim that explains to customers why the product is good for their health.” 

I think this is a good, useful tactic. If the same provisions were applied to food products at say, Whole Foods, the description cards for super chic kale and boring broccoli would reveal that the latter is just as much, if not more, nutritional than the faddy former produce, where kale consists of .6 grams of fiber per cup and broccoli has 2.3. Similarly, there are 278 mg potassium per cup of broccoli and 79 mg per cup of kale. 

It seems as though almost anybody — but most prevalently places such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s — can attach a trendy vibe onto the names of food products and, in doing so, can potentially increase consumer demand.

Let me illustrate this phenomenon for you with a Whole Foods blog post from January, 2014: “Collards are the New Kale.” 

Not once does the Whole Foods blog post mention any nutritional benefits associated with the frequent digestion of collards; instead, it replaces substantial information with cute, pleasing-to-the-eye photographs of artfully prepared collard greens featured alongside phrases containing sexy words like “versatile,” “interchangeable” and “beautiful.” If you want to be healthier, that’s great — but broccoli or the now-out-of-vogue celery sticks will certainly suffice. 

Before the age of trendy food, it would have never occurred to me that anybody could act so passionately on behalf of a vegetable. These days, you can find a wide range of fancy products gracing the shelves of your local Whole Foods, ranging from organic heirloom tomatoes to chia seeds.

But beyond my incessant, snarky and ultimately ineffectual laughter, and besides the lack of substantial information offered on the behalf of these superfood products, there are few larger-scale impacts of the branded food craze.

Although I do think the term food gentrification — and the hashtag that ultimately accompanied its advent into American English usage — is a bit on the extreme, overly dramatized side, its underlying point gets across an important message: Foods should be nutritious before they are fashionable, and they should be readily accessible to families across all incomes.

Beyond the mask of frivolity branding foods attaches to once-mundane vegetable products, for example, it does little to harm the less fortunate’s ability to consume healthy, nutritious foods. 

So, let the bourgeois eat their hard-earned superfluous food products, and the rest of us can stick, unharmed, to broccoli and cauliflower.

Carly is a junior in FAA. She can be reached at [email protected].