Paleo Diet Blogs and Commodity Fetishism
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WMST6903 GENDER, MEDIA AND CONSUMER SOCIETIES | ASSIGNMENT 3 – CASE STUDYALLISON JONES | 310268141
Paleo diet blogs: A case study of how commodity fetishism manifests in a diet subculture
“A lot of people on here are living the Paleo myth and that's fine, if it's
working for you: namely, you are truly maintaining good health. The
problem with myths is that they can fail you and you are so submerged in
them (like the fish scientists) that you can't see beyond them. There is at
least a comfort that comes from the certainty they provide.
Now I've got to tell you. I have been seduced by the Paleo narrative, but
it's time to throw it off. I have fared dismally on the Paleo diet. Mind
you, when I began this experiment I was not overweight. I have eaten
healthy for a long, long time, so I did not come to this screwed up from a
SAD diet. However, the negative results from this diet (for me, I
must qualify) have been dramatic. Despite having come to this
conclusion about two weeks ago, when I think about it, sometimes a voice
whispers to me, "...what would your Paleolithic ancestors have done?" “
(user “Thomas Seay” on PaleoHacks.com)
Introduction
In the Western world, the past decade in particular has seen an apparent
gastronomic fixation emerge, both reflected in and propelled by, different forms
of media, specifically television programs such as Masterchef, Two Fat Ladies
and Nigella Bites and their spinoff books and websites. The proverbial
watercooler at work, the Twitter feed and the Facebook wall are not immune
from the influence of this obsession with food, its provenance and its role as
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lifestyle accessory. Movements or trends such as Slow Food1, locavorism2 and
community gardens are gaining increasing amounts of media attention, entering
the lexicon and taking on significance within a growing anti-consumerist3
context.
Concurrently, more significant trends impact the context that these consumption
trends have emerged within: the startling rates of chronic illness rates in
developed nations such as the United States4 , healthcare systems that are
overstretched5 and the increasing use of the Internet as a source of health
information6 by lay people. The authors of Macrowikinomics believe that the
traditional health care paradigm of patients as passive health-care receivers and
doctors as the all-knowing provider is being challenged, a challenge facilitated by
the collaborative communication model of particular types of community
websites:
“And, just as journalists now coexist with a much broader ecosystem of
knowledge producers, self-organising patient communities and a greater
emphasis on education and preventative medicine are beginning to
augment conventional health care”.
1 Slow Food is an international movement, originally from northern Italy with a manifesto as follows:
“Slow Food's approach to agriculture, food production and gastronomy is based on a concept of food quality defined by three interconnected principles:
GOOD a fresh and flavorsome seasonal diet that satisfies the senses and is part of our local culture;CLEAN food production and consumption that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health;FAIR accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for small-scale producers.”http://www.slowfood.com/international/2/our-philosophy?-session=query_session:7CA8B9CD0ef1b0A4E8QLVX46AFA9
2 A “locavore” is defined as “a person whose diet consists only or principally of locally grown or produced food.”http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/locavore?region=us
3 Binkley (2008) identifies a growing anti-consumerist theme to modern consumption practices, which has become an almost de rigeur lifestyle choice for many consumer sectors rather than simply intellectuals and radicals.
4 Data from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention states that about 133 million Americans—nearly 1 in 2 adults—live with at least one chronic illness: http://www.cdc.gov /chronicdisease/resources/publications/AAG/pdf/chronic.pdf
5 According to Armstrong et al, “...advances are now under threat as our health system is stretched by an ageing population, the growing burden of chronic illness, and the increasingly outmoded organisation of our health services.” (2007)
6 Research by The Pew Internet and American Life Project (Fox and Jones: 2009) reports that 74% of American adults use the Internet and that 83% of them look online for health information (regardless of whether they have a chronic disease or not).
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(Tapscott and Williams, 2010: 26)
This societal context of intersecting trends and an undercurrent of discontent
and impending crisis, is the focus for this paper which will explore the hypothesis
that specific forms of digital media both reveal and drive the commodity
fetishisation of food through their content and production models. A case study
of two different Paleo diet websites – Nom Nom Paleo and PaleoHacks - will be
used to illustrate this hypothesis, with emphasis on the forms this fetishisation
takes. The significance of the growth of these types of movements in relation to
late capitalism will also be examined.
The Paleo diet: eat like a caveman
The Paleo diet, or ‘caveman’ diet, is one that purports to be a return to a style of
eating prior to the agricultural revolution and our modern day diet with its
abundance of processed, convenience foods. As such, the diet revolves around
fresh, unprocessed food - specifically meat, seafood, poultry, nuts, seeds,
vegetables and fruit. Professor Loren Cordain, one of the foremost Paleo
proponents, writes in The Paleo Solution of
“...the remarkable good health of our Paleolithic ancestors, and how that
health changed with the transition to agriculture and a diet dominated by
humanity’s “double-edged sword” – cereal grains.”
(Wolf, 2010: 9)
It is important to note that Paleo is considered ‘alternative’ as it sits outside of,
and in opposition to, the more common ‘SAD’ (Standard American Diet) which is
endorsed by various government agencies and promoted with such devices as
the Food Pyramid. The influence of SAD permeates different areas where power
is enacted: the medical profession, via nutritionists and health authorities, and
academia, in the form of the syllabus content all the way from early education to
tertiary education.
Paleo stands alongside more overtly anti-consumerist movements, such as strict
veganism and raw foodism, that are opposed to elements of mass food
production associated with late capitalism: factory-farmed animals, heavily
processed and marketed foods, exploitation of impoverished producers, and the
high “food miles” food often takes from farm to plate. It is an attempt to return
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to a way of eating supposedly closer to our evolutionary genetics, however most
adherents are not attempting to re-create the Paleolithic lifestyle as such. There
is emphasis placed on the provenance and production of food, for example the
encouragement to eat grass-fed rather than grain-fed beef, and wild, rather than
farmed, seafood.
An observation of the two sites examined for this paper reveals that people are
drawn to the diet and its attendant media (books, videos, websites and a newly
launched magazine) for a variety of reasons: the primary ones being the
management of, or hope of reversing, a chronic illness; a simple desire to be
healthy; weight loss goals, and physical and mental fitness. Since the diet is a
significant shift from the dominant “SAD”, Paleo media is consumed in order to
understand its finer details, to access creative food ideas and to communicate
with fellow Paleo adherents in supportive, collaborative environments.
The Paleo movement has spawned a niche market in specially-formulated
products that adhere to its dietary commandments and encourage people to stay
on the diet, with an implicit message that Paleo foods can be fun, attractive and
convenient - albeit expensive. These niche products serve to naturalise and
endorse the Paleo diet along with Paleo media and the scientific and medical
professionals who support it.
Figure 1: Paleo products. Source: nomnompaleo.com
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Commodity Fetishism: religious fervour in late capitalism
In citing Jhally, who wrote of Marx’s conception of the ‘commodity fetish’, Coles
and Crang outline that “as consumers, we usually know little about where the
goods we consume come from, of exactly what they are composed, under what
conditions they came to be...” (2010: 3). Jhally places the practice of advertising
as a central technique for inscribing meaning in goods where it had previously
been stripped from it during the production process (2000). The process of
commodity fetishism involves “imaginary/symbolic relations to be injected into
the construction of meaning at a secondary level” (2000:73). Since Paleo is an
emerging niche market, and Paleo foods are generally non-packaged and non-
branded compared to those that make up the SAD, I argue that in the Paleo
movement, blogs and other media replace advertising in Jhally’s model as the
source of the “magic” that fetishises commodities.
Paleo may be viewed as a form of post-modern “religion”, along the lines of an
emergent “neo-tribalism” whereby those with “shared lifestyle expressions” form
communities of shared interests (Maffesoli and Bauman, cited in Slater, 2005: 9).
The Paleo religion has its sacred texts, high priests, ex-communicated members,
commandments and a grand story that romanticises the lifestyle lived by our
Paleolithic ancestors.
Central to any religion, and to commodity fetishism, is the creation of meaning.
Paleo texts, specifically websites and blogs that are constantly revised, create an
evolving meaning of what Paleo is and is not. Meaning is created with language
in different ways – language that positions Paleo in the context of greater
consumption, in opposition to other ways of eating, and through debate within
the Paleo community.
In regards to the’symbolic value’ of the commodity that Baudrillard identified in
extending the Marxian concept of the commodity fetish (Koch and Elmore, 2006),
food for Paleo adherents becomes representational of something more than fuel
for the body. It becomes a political and social statement, representative of the
values and tastes of both individuals and the group that adheres to the diet. It
becomes entertainment - the more obscure the ingredients and nutritional
breakdown, the better.
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Nom Nom Paleo
In an examination of programs on the Food Network in the US, Cheri Ketchum
believes that commodities are so central and ’magical’ in consumer societies due
to their “promises of both psychic and physiological pleasure”. They are “thought
to stimulate and satiate”, a belief that is supported by “the public discourse in
our media” (Ketchum, 2005:221).The magical aura of food commodities in Paleo
can be clearly seen in the blog Nom Nom Paleo.
Nom Nom Paleo (www.nomnompaleo.com) is the popular personal blog of “M”, a
Northern California hospital shift-worker and mother of two small children. The
relatively new blog is characterised by its frank humour, daily updates featuring
M’s attractively styled Paleo cooking adventures, and rich detail in the form of
explanatory text framed by seductive professional-quality photographs where
the food almost leaps out from the screen, begging to be savoured. Nom Nom
Paleo is akin to healthy food porn for the Paleo community - its addictive
qualities encourage readers to live their Paleo consumption vicariously, with an
expectation of new, exciting content a result of the blog’s regular updates and its
promise of intimacy7.
The blog is aspirational, yet similar results are unattainable for most Paleo
adherents since M is privileged by the unique combination of specialist kitchen
equipment, a chef sister, healthy income and access to the plethora of gourmet
Paleo-friendly foods available in Northern California. Although M professes to be
“all about the lazy” in regards to cooking Paleo meals, there is ample evidence to
suggest otherwise, with most meals featuring very specific equipment used with
very specific ingredients. The audience may feel compelled to compete on this
uneven playing field, falling prey to the aspirational manipulation inherent in
publishing these types of blogs. In this way, Nom Nom Paleo works in a similar
way to the Food Network, becoming a “utopian fantasy” about Paleo food,
feeding our desire to work on our selves as a project with “commodities and
knowledge of food” (Ketchum, 2005:231). The blog is fantasy because the
reader is unaware of the financial cost and long hours that must be required to
maintain such regular, high-quality posts.
PaleoHacks
7 The intimacy of the Nom Nom Paleo blog provides a window in to the world of M, with many posts making specific references to her job, day to day life, the participation of her children in Paleo cooking and the cancer treatment of her mother in law.
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Like so many other online communities, PaleoHacks (www.paleohacks.com) has
a collaborative production model of content made for joint consumption, rather
than the more traditional sender/receiver model of older forms of media.
PaleoHacks is a community forum that features a voting system whereby
members “upvote” or “downvote” the contributions of fellow members in terms
of quality. Based on this acquired reputation, badges are awarded to all
members with a heirarchical system. The site’s purpose is inspired by sites such
as Lifehacker which aim to provide tips for improving different aspects of daily
life. Members are encouraged to submit questions about their own
circumstances with the aim of having fellow members “hack” the
question/problem with constructive suggestions. Examples include thread titles
such as: “Healthy way to decrease sleep hours”, “personality changes from
doing paleo?” and “Fallen off the paleo bandwagon, how to re-motivate and eat
healthy again?” Many of the individuals with the highest reputation level on the
site possess medical or scientific qualifications, with which they can expound
their thoughts in a sophisticated and authoritative manner.
Figure 2: Paleo Hacks homepage. Source: paleohacks.com
The PaleoHacks site is relevant to an examination of commodity fetishism in that
it displays what Gyorgy Scrinis has identified as “the ideology or paradigm of
nutritionism” that is characterised by a reductionism “with respect to nutrients,
foods and diets” (2008:40). Scrinis believes that the nutritionism paradigm
“obscures the broader cultural, geographical, and ecological contexts in which
food, diets and bodily health are situated” (2008:40). It is this reductionism WMST6903 GENDER, MEDIA AND CONSUMER SOCIETIES | ASSIGNMENT 3ALLISON JONES | 310268141
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which leads to the connection I make here: that nutritionism is a unique form of
commodity fetishism. The authentic meaning of foods has been removed by the
processes of capitalism, and a new meaning is ascribed to the commodity in the
form of nutritional information provided in responses to questions on the site.
Some examples of this emphasis on nutritional data of thread titles from
PaleoHacks are as follows:”Nutrition facts of camel meat?”, “partially grass fed
beef; better of two evils?”, “Frozen (wild) salmon - Chum Salmon fat content?,
and “Rank the sugars in order from most to least harmful”.
The Paleo diet media builds a fantasy of the perfect self with perfect physical and
mental health. All Paleo media affirms these ideas constantly, although
PaleoHacks, being a community site, does have some dissenting voices.
Dissenting voices, however, seem to be effectively silenced by a majority of
participants who cling tightly to the Paleo ideology. The authoritative voices on
the site have the effect of promoting nutritional reductionism as the community
as a whole feel ‘safe’ in the knowledge that there is ‘expert guidance’ available.
Paleo and the implications for capitalism
Although it appears to be a critique of the fetishism of food, in encouraging
adherents to become more aware of their food’s provenance, Paleo poses no real
challenge to capitalism and is indeed a continuation and diversification of
commodity fetishism. It is simply a new manifestation of the fetishisation of
commodities - a fetishisation based on the ‘goodness’ of foods, which are
concurrently reduced to their nutritional value, as ascertained by the Paleo
‘authorities’, and idealised as a way of reaching the fantasy of the perfect self.
Returning to the definition of festishism which holds that the conditions of
production are removed from the object, the majority of Paleo adherents are no
closer to knowing the conditions of production of the foods they consume. Those
Paleo adherents that are more enlightened are lucky enough to be growing their
own produce or in close proximity to farms where they can engage with the
producers themselves. Based on observation of PaleoHacks, these people would
be in the minority. Fetishisation therefore remains a key, inescapable part of
Paleo consumption. Nom Nom Paleo displays this fetishisation in its utopian food
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fantasies, and PaleoHacks does this by way of endless debate about the
nutritional value of different foods.
Conclusion
Rather than being a rejection of fetishisation and a return to a more ‘authentic’
consumption practice, Paleo blogs and online communities simply form new
expressions of commodity fetishisation. The presence of newer forms of
authority in the form of Paleo bloggers and esteemed community members,
means that consumers are as vulnerable to fantasy as ever, if not more so,
within a movement such as Paleo that has strong fetishistic elements and is
heavily mediated.
It would be naive to suggest that anti-consumerist movements will have
significant impacts on late capitalism, since it is so firmly entrenched. But,
together these movements may gradually impact on some pockets within
capitalist society such as the syllabus at medical schools, farming practices, and
shopping habits.
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REFERENCES
Armstrong, B. et al (2007) ‘Challenges in health and health care for Australia’ in eMJA, 2007; 187 (9): 485-489 Accessed from: http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/187_09_051107/arm11047_fm.html Last accessed: 5 June 2010
Binkley, S. (2008)’Liquid Consumption’, in Cultural Studies, 22:5, 599-623
Coles, B. and Crang, P. (2010) ’Placing Alternative Consumption: Commodity Fetishism in Borough Fine Foods Market, London’ in Lewis, T. and Potter, E. (eds)(2010) Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge
Fox, S. and Jones, S. (2009) The Social Life of Health Information Accessed at: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/8-The-Social-Life-of-Health-Information.aspx Last accessed: 5 June 2011
Jhally, Sut. “Advertising as religion: The dialectic of technology and magic” in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, ed. Lan Angus and Sut Jhally. New York: Routledge, 1998. 217-229. Reprinted in Advertising & Society Review 1 (1) 2000.
Ketchum, C. (2005)The Essence of Cooking Shows: How the Food Network Constructs Consumer Fantasies, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 29:3, 217-234
Koch, A. And Elmore, R. (2006) Simulation and Smbolic Exchange: Jean Baudrillard’s Augmentation of Marx’s Theory of Value, in Politics and Policy, 34:3, 556-575
Scrinis, G. (2008)’On the ideology of nutritionism’, in Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, 8:1, 39-48
Slater, Don. “The Sociology of Consumption and Lifestyle” in The Sage Handbook of Sociology, ed. C. Calhoun, C. Rojek and B. Turner. London: Sage, 2005. 174-187.
Tapscott, D. and Williams, A. (2010) MacroWikinomics : Rebooting business and the world, New York : Portfolio Penguin
Wolf, R. (2010) The Paleo Solution: The original human diet,Las Vegas: Victory Belt Publishing
WMST6903 GENDER, MEDIA AND CONSUMER SOCIETIES | ASSIGNMENT 3ALLISON JONES | 310268141