Functional Foods: Spaces of Innovation and the Materiality of Scientific Universality

Throughout human history, different authorities have prescribed what to eat and what foodstuffs to avoid. This paper looks at one particular authority that has gained considerable influence in the past two decades: nutrition science. Our aim is to render a subfield of nutrition science called ‘functional food science’ ethnographically analyzable, in order to add more precision to the common statement that the ‘findings’ of ‘scientists’ have become recognized by ‘the European Authorities’. Which actors are involved, what are the actors’ respective playing fields, and how are these fields related?
The paper is divided in a descriptive part, and a discussion section. In the descriptive part, we propose a brief genealogy of functional food science and the construction of a new scientific gaze on food. The genealogy enables us to distinguish a series of actors, choices, and locally rooted practices in a story that is qualitatively different from accounts in terms of scientific universality. The discussion section at the end of this paper proposes further venues for anthropological research into the relations between science, health and power in a competitive economic and political order. These research questions problematize the meaning and substance of ‘innovation’.