I used to write mini-cookbooks. One month, I decided the theme would be superfoods, and I started looking up lists of superfoods. And then trying to figure out what qualifies something as a “superfood.*
It is basically every fucking unprocessed food. All veggies, all fruits, all grains and nuts and seeds, all meats.
Even milk. Even potatoes. Even rice, as long as it’s not white rice. Even wheat, as long as it’s whole wheat.
They’ve all turned up somewhere on someone’s list of superfoods you just HAVE to try. And then the person goes on about all the vitamins and minerals and amino acids in there. All the protein, or the fiber, or the nice healthy fats.
Literally, almost every damn thing you can eat is a superfood.
And yes, definitely, if they can somehow be described as Ancient or Exotic or both, they get a thousand times the attention. Because that plays into all these racist biases, and there’s somebody behind the scenes marketing the shit out of that.
And when you can’t label it as Exotic and Ancient? The reason that people can write big ridiculous articles about all the incredible health benefits you would never have imagined were in The Lowly Sweet Potato or The Humble Apple is that they’ve spent decades telling us that everything is bad for you.
That being fat is bad, (which it is not), and that eating will make you fat – unless you eat and do only the specific, temporarily-approved things that they’re currently making money by promoting!
It’s fucking decades and decades of telling people that certain foods will make you good and approved of and gorgeous and finally have self esteem lose weight and certain foods will make you bad, disapproved of, stared at and insulted and unattractive fat. Because that is what sells – but you have to keep changing the story if you want to keep making money off this stuff.
When you take a second to say “OMG there are sooooooooo many nutrients in this one weird fruit?!!!!!!!!!????! DOCTORS HATE US,” it’s ridiculously easy to sell as a “superfood.” Because people aren’t used to thinking of food, overall, as healthy. Or as fuel.
The message for so long has been “there are a few isolated things that it’s okay to eat, like tofu organic carob low-cal (insert current fad here)!” that we totally believe them when they tell us that nutritionally dense foods are a rarity that everyone should freak out about.
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