Designing food packaging to present healthy and ethical diets to the New Chinese middle classes

Abstract

‘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.