Abstract
This paper examines the ways in which foods native to Australia are marketed as superfoods, and how they represent conflicting identities of a country and its people torn between colonial narratives and Indigenous sovereignty. Native food consumption has been and continues to be central to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural identity, ecological knowledge, and food sovereignty. Such consumption among non-Indigenous populations has historically been limited, appropriative, and marginal to Australian culinary identity. The associated notions of functional nutrition benefits of superfoods, alongside claims of naturalness and authenticity, offers one pathway to interrogate emerging meanings of native foods consumption and their identity implications for Indigenous and settler Australians. Through analysis of product packaging and marketing materials, this chapter examines how representations of Australia’s native foods as superfoods perpetuate notions of Australian identity based upon appropriation of Indigenous material culture. This study argues that these narratives rely on primitivist and ahistorical representations of native food production as “wild” and “pure”, while downplaying their significance as cultural foods central to Indigenous identities and food sovereignty, and subjugating the depth and breadth of Indigenous botanical, nutritional, and medicinal knowledges to the hegemony of Western nutrition science. By examining the contours of this Australian-flavoured primitivism, this study presents a national culinary identity beset with anxieties not only about how to define Australian food, but also about how to eat healthfully, morally, and ethically in the context of ongoing coloniality and its social and ecological consequences.
Presenters
Jessica LoyerSenior Lecturer in Food Studies, Higher Education, William Angliss Institute, Australia
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
FOOD MARKETING, INDIGENOUS FOODS, AUSTRALIAN FOOD, FOOD AND IDENTITY
