Food Marketing and Selling Healthy Lifestyles with Science

Lauren Alex O’Hagan is a Research Fellow in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the Open University (UK) and an Affiliate Researcher in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Örebro University (Sweden). She specialises in performances of social class and power mediation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through visual and material artefacts, using a methodology that blends social semiotic analysis with archival research. She has published extensively on the sociocultural forms and functions of book inscriptions, food advertisements, postcards and writing implements. Göran Eriksson is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Örebro University (Sweden). He works in the field of discourse analysis and his current research is linked to the sociology of health and is concerned with multimodal representations of healthy food and healthy eating in different settings. Ongoing studies look at marketing and are especially interested in how science and scientific expertise is communicated. He publishes extensively in international peer-reviewed journals. Göran is associate editor of the SSCI-indexed journal Discourse, Context and Media.

Introduction: Selling Healthy Lifestyles with Science
(Göran Eriksson and Lauren Alex O’Hagan)

From Foods to Nutrients: 150 Years of Modern Nutrition Science
(Lauren Alex O’Hagan and Göran Eriksson)

SECTION 1: FOOD, HEALTHY BODIES AND NUTRITIONAL ADVICE

Chapter 1 - Vim, Vigour and Vitality: Physical Culture Marketing and the Promise of a Better Life (Conor Heffernan)

Chapter 2 - Multimodal Representations of Health and Science in Danish Advertisements for Dairy Products and Plant-Based Alternatives: A Diachronic Study (Iben Bredahl Jessen)

Chapter 3 - Consumer Activism, Ultra-Processed Food Marketing and the Meaning of Healthy Eating in Mexico: A Diachronic Study (Pilar Zazueta)

Chapter 4 - A Better Way to Start the Day: Pseudoscience, Health and Synthetic Personalisation in Breakfast Cereal Packaging (Angela Smith)

SECTION 2: DRINKS AS ELIXIRS OF HEALTH

Chapter 5 - Best for Babies? Powdered Milk and Scientific Discourse in Early Twentieth-Century China (Lo Shuk Ying)

Chapter 6 - “The Great Natural Health Drink of Our Time”: Health, Gender and Nutrition in British Advertisements for Ribena Blackcurrant Drink (Daniel Ewers)

Chapter 7 - A Cheap and Easy Way to Health: Advertising Coffee Substitutes in Sweden, 1870-1914 (Leif Runefelt)

Chapter 8 - “Unveil Your Inner Youth”: Science, Gender and Anti-Ageing Milk Marketing in a Chinese Society (Veronica Sau-wa Mak)

SECTION 3: PROMOTING ‘PURE’ AND ‘AUTHENTIC’ FOODS

Chapter 9 - Selling Motherhood Through Science: Advertisements for Dalda Cooking Oil in India, 1940s to the Present (Saurabh Mishra)

Chapter 10 - The Rhetoric of Unadulterated Wholemeal: Thomas Allinson and the Natural Food Company, 1892-1918 (Amber Hinde)

Chapter 11 - Between Science and Tradition: Nutrition Epistemologies and Extractionist Logics in Chia Seed Development and Marketing (Jessica Loyer)

SECTION 4: FOOD AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

Chapter 12 - “The Triumph of the New Over the Old”: Electric Restaurants, Health and Modernity (Lucy Jane Santos)

Chapter 13 - Bridging the Gap from the Petri Dish to Natural, Healthy Meat: An Insight into Marketing Communications for Cultured Meat (Andreja Vezovnik)

Afterword: A Transhistorical Semiotics of Food Marketing
(Caroline Tagg)