To Örebro University

'Healthy' and 'ethical' food is one of the fastest-growing food trends around the world. Yet scholars in this journal have shown that what this means in many territories tends to be dominated by Western-centric concepts. They call for the need to decenter the dominant Euro-American and Anglo-centric food scholarship in order to throw light on these processes. To better understand food globalization, one must consider how regional history, culture, economics, and politics foster a complex dynamic of global-local and West-East flows. Aligning with these concerns, we analyze food packages from China marketed at a rapidly growing health and ethical food market. Using an in-depth qualitative method, Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we examine the discursive and material power of healthy and ethical food products as these are communicated through packaging designs, showing how these carry ideas, value, and identities. We explore how this might be understood in the context of where such designs target an emerging Chinese middle class, concerned about food integrity, but also who seek out distinction and modern cosmopolitanism. We ask how the ideas carried by the packages might shape and steer local understandings of healthy and ethical food.

Riding on the rising concern of public health and the growing neoliberal self-care agenda, the food market has witnessed a surge in ‘healthy’ food despite the criticism of this food does not help consumers eat more healthily. A growing interest in CriticalDiscourse Studies (CDS) is how food marketers colonise not only the food discourse but also the broader ideas and values such as health, politics, and environment. Contributing to this growing body of research, we look at one of the fastest-growing food trends, ‘functional drinks’, which claim to target physiological and psychological processes in the body, so that consumers can manage their health and performance. Company websites rely on forms of infographics to communicate how the products work. Adopting the notion of ‘integrated design’ from multimodal CDS, we show how these infographics, drawing on their affordancesare particularly useful in symbolising classifications and causalities which could not be accounted for in running texts. The paper argues that this is a way health and science converge with a neoliberal discourse of self-management and enterprise culture. Given the increased use of forms of integrated design incommunication, more critical discursive work is needed in this area.

Gendered identities are communicated in places as frequent and ordinary as food packaging, becoming mundane features of everyday life as they sit on supermarket shelves, in cupboards and on office desks. Multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) allows us to investigate how such identities are buried in packaging in relation to health and fitness. Despite observed broader changes in gendered representations of the body in advertising, in particular relating to the arrival of 'power femininity', the products analysed in this article are found to carry fairly traditional and prototypical gender representations, and products marketed at both men and women highlight the need for more precise body management. For women, however, this precision is related to managing the demands of everyday life, packaged as a moral imperative to be healthy, responsible and successful.

This paper uses a social semiotic approach to analyse the posts of women fitness experts/influencers on Chinese Weibo. On the posts, we find a harmonized world where all parts of life can be managed by making the right choices and by having a striving attitude. Here, success and happiness become tasks to be worked on. Yet this is a decontextualized world, where there is no room for actual situations and dispositions. We discuss how these representations can be related to rising neoliberal ideas, values, and identities among the new Chinese middle classes, which, in these instances, are used to create a rather overdetermined stance against more traditional Confucian women's roles with an emphasis on caring, knowing one's position, and kinship obligations. But the one-size-fits-all rhetoric of empowerment, getting-ahead and choice leaves little room for sharing the actual restrictions, conflicts, and struggles faced by these women.

This paper examines how snack brands represent themselves as producers of healthy food through corporatestories on their websites. The increased emphasis on health in ‘‘the new public health era” has createda market for products promoted as healthy or with some kind of wellbeing association. Riding onthis trend, many companies have emerged and positioned themselves as providing good food options.Employing the theory of social semiotics and using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we ask the following questions: How do these companies use corporate stories to make themselves appear as a better alternative than their competitors? How do they make their products appear healthy and attractive to consumers? And how can this kind of marketing help consumers choose healthier products? The analysis of 22 corporate stories of healthy snack companies shows that healthy eating is colonized by a moral discourse for marketing and branding purposes. Furthermore, the health qualities these companies claim to have are abstract, symbolic, and commercialized. We argue that these corporate stories provide no meaningful indication as to the healthiness of these products and can mislead consumers to consume less healthy food while having the intention to eat healthily.

This paper examines how protein snacks are marketed as good food choices through their packaging and how these packages reproduce a discourse – what we see as a myth – of the benefits of high protein intake. Research shows that consumers believe high protein food has a positive impact on physical performance and body composition, although there is very little evidence of this. Protein foods and beverages are nevertheless one of the fastest growing sectors in the food market and we now see food companies exploit peoples beliefs by adding protein to food that was formerly seen as unhealthy. Adopting a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) we look in detail at the packaging of a group of snacks that are usually high in fat and sugar but now appear as good food options, particularly through accentuating the protein content. The analysis shows that the packages market these products as an outcome of scientific modern technology, but this is done in playful and comforting ways. This goes along with neoliberal ideas about wellness and demands of an active lifestyle. From these findings, we discuss the limitations of existing regulations as marketing shape and capitalize on discourses of health.

In this paper, we examine how protein snacks are marketed as a healthy choice through their packaging and discuss the cultural meanings of protein that are communicated to consumers via packaging. With the rise of obesity and chronic disease, the EU and many member national governments are promoting healthy diet as the solution to this public health challenge. The new wellness food industry is now a trillion dollarbusiness. Food companies are capitalising on this via reformulating products to appear healthier. One common strategy is adding protein to food that wasformerly seen as unhealthy. This is in line with research that has found that consumers believe high protein food has a positive impact on physical performance, body composition, and weight control. It has been discussed that in the West the modern healthy food discourse has become not being healthy perse but instead linked to multiple possibilities of cultural meaning. What has not yet been carefully explored is how ideas of healthy eating and its cultural meaning are embedded in food packaging. Adopting Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) we look at the packaging of a group of snacks that are usually high in fat and sugar that have been reformulated to enhance their protein content and thereby appear to be healthy food options. We argue that the kind of healthy food messages this packaging creates is often confusing and misleading. The discourse favours profit-driven marketers and might have a negative impact on public health.