Functional foods, between the new and old corporalities

Abstract

This article deals with practices and representations of various income sectors in AMBA (Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires-Argentina. They tell about how inclusion criteria for functional foods — i.e. those that prove benefitial for health.These foods are said to be medi-food and their consumption has grown expenentialy over the past 25 years. Using primary and secondary sources, we will explore representations of the body, of the foods, and of commensality, as together these representations explain why certain foods are included in consummer baskets. We will also compare this findings with the corresponding categories whitin the research and development of functional foods. While these are advertised as the acme of scientificaly based nutrition, they in fact exploit the reduction of corporality, erasing sense and sicial dinamics. Functional foods refer to mere biology, as if the consummer where no more than an intestine to be monitored and shaped from inside the body. The values that support their consumption are founded in hight per capita income populations but they pervade the whole of the society through deceitful and agresive marketing practices, with an aura of modernity. Thus they create a demand suited to the offer, disregarding needs, recomendatios and possibilities.