Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Superfoods” refers to a recent category of food products that are highly regarded for their extraordinary nutritiousness, naturalness (i.e., unprocessed state), and—in most cases—imagined connections to traditional foodways of Indigenous peoples of the non-Western world. At first glance, one may assume that the rising popularity of superfoods in the twenty-first century is the simple result of a marketing push. However, a culturally nuanced understanding must also address why a rebranding of old foods as superfoods resonates with contemporary consumers. To make sense of superfoods’ rising popularity in the twenty-first century, it is imperative to consider four distinct yet interdependent processes that coincided in this period: (1) the completely globalized provisioning of food, allowing for quick and cheap transportation of even the most perishable foods; (2) the global spread of nutritional science discourse into everyday language—known as the discourse/ideology of “nutritionism”—and the state of confusion this very process introduced to the consumers’ mind; (3) the neoliberal-era commodification of the connection between health and eating, whereby the individual is held responsible for choosing correct foods to “purchase” their own health via consumption; and (4) the continuing legacies of colonialism that exoticizes traditional ways of “the Other,” including their foods and medicines. The dual liminal status of superfoods (not only in-between food and medicine, but also in-between modern nutrition science and traditional knowledge) renders them powerful objects for cultural analyses. References included in the sections that follow are specifically chosen to help researchers make sense of the seemingly disparate processes and contradictory domains that all come together to create a unique cultural moment that is conducive to the making of superfoods as a new category of food products.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".