Look! Down on the Plate!

So what is a superfood?  Suddenly every second advertisement on television is spruiking the staggering benefits of this or that superfood.  New ones pop up every day.  I've just heard that boysenberries have thirty seven times the Omega-3 of a cattle prod.  How is it that the miraculous properties of boysenberries have eluded us for so long?  What is a boysenberry anyway?  But back to my original question.  A superfood is essentially one that you will pay a ridiculous amount of money for.  It may have this nutrient or that vitamin, it is possibly stuffed with an essential amino acid or protein chain, most foods have something of the like.  That's why we eat them.

Not many people know this but superfoods have been around for centuries, millennia even.  Back in the old days we just had another word for them.  We called them food.  Mind you back in the old days we'd call anything we could throw in a cookpot food even it made quite determined attempts to crawl back out again.

The principal differences between superfoods and traditional foods is that superfoods come in smaller quantities and cost more.  Still, I suppose that's only fair.  Has anyone done a price comparison on coal and diamonds lately?  It's pretty much exactly the same stuff, its just the packaging that's different.  And packaging is the most important thing because without packaging there could be no marketing and without marketing we wouldn't realise we were eating superfoods at all.

Marketing ordinary foods is hard.  OK, you have a good basic hook "eat or you'll starve to death" but to get people to eat your particular product as opposed to any of the others on the market is a lot more difficult.  After all, why should anyone pick one particular foodstuff over another?  By the time we're old enough to buy our own food we generally know what we like.  If you want to market food you've got to create difference and add value.  Hence superfoods.  In fact, superfoods are a marketing department's wet dream because you can add value and create difference without doing a damn thing.  A car manufacturer, for example, if it wants to create difference and add value actually has to create difference and add value.  Their product has got to be faster or sexier or more fuel economic or more family friendly than the competition.  All the producer of superfoods have to do is produce the same old stuff and slap a new label on it, even most marketing departments are capable of that.

So, we know why people sell superfoods.  Why do other people buy them?  This is the clever bit.  Superfoods plug into two basic human traits; concern for their health and fundamental laziness.  Sure you could exercise and eat a balanced diet but why bother when you can spread some superfood on a biscuit and live forever?  In actual fact anybody above the poverty line in this country has a longer and healthier life expectancy than in any previous generation when a good number of the people were eating superfoods because it was the only thing they could get their hands on.

One interesting thing about superfoods is the implicit assumption that we're not going to be eating them because they're the only thing between us and starvation.  Superfoods are for people who already have a functioning food supply but want to trade up to impress the neighbours.  Strangely a good many of the people who are living much closer to the starvation line are eating superfoods.  They have to, there isn't anything else.

I gazed over a list of superfoods in preparation for this blog entry (not even I am game to call that "research") and I noticed something quite interesting.  With the exception of quinoa which I am comfortably certain she had never heard of pretty much everything on the list was the sort of thing my mother told me to eat "because it was good for me".  My mother doesn't have a degree in nutrition and her food shopping was largely determined by what we could afford but there the superfoods were sitting unloved on my plate while I tried to distract my mothers attention as I lobbed them discreetly out the window.  If I had only kept them I could have sold them for a fortune now.