Health Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods - (Contemporary Food Studies: Economy, Culture and Politics) by Tina Sikka (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This book critically examines contemporary health and wellness culture through the lens of personalization, genetification and functional foods. These developments have had a significant impact on the intersecting categories of gender, race, and classin light of the increasing adoption of digital health and surveillance technologies like MyFitnessPal, Lifesum, HealthyifyMe, and Fooducate. These three vectors of identity, when analysed in relation to food, diet, health, and technology, reveal significant new ways in which inequality, hierarchy, and injustice become manifest.

In the book, Tina Sikka argues that the corporate-led trends associated with health apps, genetic testing, superfoods, and functional foods have produced a kind of dietary-genomic-functional food industrial complex. She makes the positive case for a prosocial, food secure, and biodiverse health and food culture that is rooted in community action, supported by strong public provisioning of health care, and grounded in principles of food justice and sovereignty.

Review Quotes

'This intriguing book lays out the landscape of contemporary health enterprises, analysing the broader sociomaterial contexts in which influencers and entrepreneurs seek to persuade consumers to adopt novel technologies and substances, attempting to profit from people's desire to achieve optimum wellbeing and fitness. Anyone wanting to know more about these products, markets and the affective forces that drive them will find this book of great interest.
Deborah Lupton, Professor, Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia

An ambitious synthesis of interdisciplinary scholarship that extends the reach of analyses of how the contemporary food/health/wellness landscape is informed by and perpetuates the intersections of racism, classism, gender, and fat oppression.
Jennifer Brady, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada

About the Author

Tina Sikka is Reader in Technoscience and Intersectional Justice at Newcastle University, UK.