Modern superfoods

The selling point of superfoods is not so much their taste but the extent to which they will enhance your health if you eat them. It is not qualities that are mere add-ons, like fortified cereals, but the quality apparently comes from deep within them.

Some regular foodstuffs such as broccoli and spinach have been rebranded for their health-giving qualities. 

The volume of blueberries and cranberries sold in Britain quadrupled in the last decade, for example. However, critics warn that the description encourages us to focus on a single foodstuff at the expense of a healthy diet.

Cooks in the past have often doubled as herbalists who sought to soothe and strengthen. Long before "superfoods," we consumed tonics and home remedies. For example, sage was believed to improve a person's memory. Science later confirmed its memory benefits.

The word was coined during the 1940s after a Canadian newspaper referred to a particular muffin as a "superfood that contained all the known vitamins and some that had not been discovered." It took nearly another 50 years for the idea of superfoods to gain traction.

In the 1990s superfoods were fruits, mainly berries. Pomegranate was supposedly a superfruit above the rest. Today, you can find superfoods in every category, from drinks to dairy products and baked goods such as acai-berry cheesecake.

Superfood seems like the perfect health food because, gram for gram, much of what we eat these days is lacking in nutrients. The average diet in America and Europe today is energy-dense but nutrient-poor. The average diet contains lots of sugar and processed carbohydrates but is rather lacking in vitamins, minerals or fiber.

Superfoods should be common foods. Our desire for superfoods is symptomatic of a food system that prizes quantity over quality. Diets have often narrowed at the expense of nutritional richness. 

Superfoods might have been more common if the rest of our food supply did a better job of feeding us.