ABSTRACT

Riding on the rising concern of public health and the growing neoliberal self-care agenda, the food market has witnessed a surge in ‘healthy’ food despite the criticism of this food does not help consumers eat more healthily. A growing interest in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is how food marketers colonise not only the food discourse but also the broader ideas and values such as health, politics, and environment. Contributing to this growing body of research, we look at one of the fastest-growing food trends, ‘functional drinks’, which claim to target physiological and psychological processes in the body, so that consumers can manage their health and performance. Company websites rely on forms of infographics to communicate how the products work. Adopting the notion of ‘integrated design’ from multimodal CDS, we show how these infographics, drawing on their affordances, are particularly useful in symbolising classifications and causalities which could not be accounted for in running texts. The paper argues that this is a way health and science converge with a neoliberal discourse of self-management and enterprise culture. Given the increased use of forms of integrated design in communication, more critical discursive work is needed in this area.

摘要

在公众健康日益受到关注以及新自由主义自我保健议程日益增长的推动下，尽管人们批评这种食品不能帮助消费者更健康地饮食，但食品市场却见证了“健康”食品的激增。食品批判者如何在批判性话语研究（CDS）中引起人们越来越多的兴趣，他们不仅在食物话语中而且在更广泛的思想和价值观（例如健康，政治和环境）中都进行殖民化。为了促进这一不断增长的研究，我们将研究增长最快的食品趋势之一，即“功能性饮料”，该饮料声称针对体内的生理和心理过程，以便消费者可以管理自己的健康和表现。公司网站依靠图表的形式来传达产品的工作原理。我们采用多模式CDS的“集成设计”概念，展示了这些信息图表如何 利用它们的承受能力，在符号化分类和因果关系方面特别有用，而分类和因果关系在运行文本中无法解释。该论文认为，这是健康与科学与自我管理和企业文化的新自由主义话语融合的一种方式。鉴于在通信中越来越多地使用集成设计形式，因此在这一领域需要进行更严格的讨论。