Food promotion does tend to go over the top into silliness. What is
correct is that a combination of beans and rice will provide a full
protein diet rather easily and everything else in that category of
staple adds variety.
Then it is a case of adding plenty of different vegetables and fruit.
As he mentions, blueberries in particular need to be in our diets.
In short is is si mple to do quite cas well without touching the
annual fad.
Yet after saying all that, each super food has other characteristics
that also make it attractive. I found acai seeds acted as a great
thickener for fruit dishes.
We live in an age in which many formally wild plants are been
optimized for mass marketing. That is excellent news and we can
expect increasing pleasure in dining.
Take something like the wild strawberry. This could be grown in a
hot house. The berries would be ample, as much as even an inch long
and a third of an inch thick. It would likely cost a full half hour
to pick a pound of these berries, yet the quality is untouchable.
Are Quinoa, Chia
Seeds, and Other "Superfoods" a Scam?
Sure, trendy
ingredients work like magic—for industry's bottom line.
Tom Philpott
They're widely
vilified—including by me—but food industry marketers really do
have a tough job. People can only eat so much, and in industrialized
countries where food is plentiful, they don't tend to consume more of
it as their incomes grow. Unlike sales of, say, personal computers in
the 1990s or tablets in the 2010s, overall US food spending
tends to be pretty flat—it rises roughly with the growth of
population.
One way the industry
responds to this stagnation is to roll out "new and improved"
products—an endless grope for bigger pieces of a slow-growing pie.
Junk food manufacturers are masters of this game: Smokin' Bacon
Ranch Miracle Whip Dipping Sauce, anyone? But the natural-food
industry does it, too—with superfoods such as açaí berries, goji
berries, quinoa, and chia seeds. These pricey, often exotic
ingredients cycle quickly in and out of the foodie spotlight. Açaí
berries were barely known outside of Brazil a decade ago,
but last year açaí-laced products grossed nearly $200 million in
the United States. And while açaí sales have dropped recently as
their novelty has worn thin, coconut oil—touted as a wonder
fat—is picking up the slack with $62 million in 2012, double
the previous year's level.
Some of the super
claims are true: Açaí berries, native to the Amazon rainforest, and
goji berries, produced mostly in northern China, are indeed
loaded with phytochemicals, plant compounds that seem to protect
us from heart disease, brain deterioration, and cancer. And quinoa,
the seed of a spinachlike plant grown in the Andes, really does offer
a complete, high-quality vegetarian protein. Other boasts are,
well, less true: Açaí and goji berries are not really miracle cures
for everything from obesity to sexual dysfunction. Indeed, in 2006,
the Food and Drug Administration reprimanded two different goji
product manufacturers for making unsubstantiated health claims in
violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
Nor do all superfoods
come from the pristine places that their packaging would suggest. One
prominent US goji supplier, Navitas, calls its berries a
"Himalayan superfruit," but the company's website reveals
they're a product of China, grown in the "lush, fertile valleys
of the Ningxia Province." That's nowhere near Tibet—and,
it turns out, most of the world's goji berries hail from industrial
fields in this region.
Worse than superfoods'
origin myths, though, are their effects on the people in their native
regions. In 2009, at the height of the açaí berry hype, Bloomberg
News reported that the fruit's wholesale price had jumped
60-fold since the early 2000s, pricing the Amazonian villagers
who rely on it out of the market. In the Andes, where quinoa has been
cultivated since the time of the Incas, price spikes have turned
a one-time staple into a luxury, and quinoa monocrops are
crowding out the more sustainable traditional methods.
If that doesn't faze
you, perhaps this will: Quinoa may deliver a complete
protein—all of the amino acids you require—in a compact package,
but rice and beans together actually do better.
And like goji berries, blueberries and strawberries are packed
with phytochemicals. The only problem is that lacking an exotic back
story, food marketers can't wring as exorbitant a markup from these
staples: The domestic blueberry, for example, is periodically (and
justifiably) marketed as a superfood, and in 2012, products featuring
blueberries as a primary ingredient saw their sales nearly quadruple.
But they only raked in $3.5 million—less than 2 percent of
açaí-based product sales.
Yes, the food
industry's hawkers have a tough job—and you can make it even
tougher. The real superfoods are lurking exactly where marketers
don't want you to look: in produce sections, bulk food aisles, and
backyard gardens. Not quite as exotic as the Himalayas. But then
again, neither are those industrial plots in China where goji berries
actually come from.
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