Multimodal Commun. 2014; 3(1): 1–11 Rodney H. Jones* 1 The Multimodal Dimension of Claims in Food Packaging Abstract: Despite the proliferation of regulations governing health and content claims on food packages, customers continue to be confused and sometimes deceived. One reason for this is that most regulations adopt a rather restricted, language-centric view of what a claim is, a view that focuses on how claims represent reality as opposed to what claims “do”, the kinds of actions and human relationships they make possible. This paper introduces a perspective on package claims that takes account of their performative and multimodal dimensions. The pragmatic force of a food package, it argues, always depends on multiple conditions such as the identities of manufactures, retailers and customers, the conditions under which packages are encountered, and the way multiple semiotic modes such as language, graphics, colors, fonts, the shape of packages, and even the shape and texture of the food itself interact. The multimodal dimension of claims is not limited to the intratextual links among different modes and different materialities on the package, but also the intertextual links among the elements on the package and other modes and materialities in the environments in which customers make purchasing decisions. A multimodal view of package claims attempts to understand how claims are situated within specific material contexts, specific social actions, and specific social practices, and how they function to index social identities for manufacturers, retailers, customers, and even government officials who make and enforce regulations governing their use. 5 10 15 20 Keywords: mediated discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, package claims, regulatory discourse DOI 10.1515/mc-2014-0001 25 In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket. –Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”, 1955 30 What makes a claim? Q1 Q2 Q3 These days, going to a supermarket in Hong Kong is an interesting experience for a discourse analyst. Everywhere you look you see packages with large chunks of text redacted like secrets in classified 35 government documents (see Figure 1). The reason for most of these redactions is that the labels on many food products imported to Hong Kong from other countries contain nutritional claims that do not comply with Hong Kong’s new food labeling law (Public Health and Municipal Services Ordinance Cap 132 Food and Drugs Composition and Labeling Amendment), implemented in 2010. The Amendment stipulates rules for what sorts of claims are 40 allowable and what sorts are not, which are stricter than those in the countries from which the imported food comes. The law has caused considerable confusion among shoppers, who sometimes find it difficult to interpret the meaning of the redacted text they encounter in supermarkets and health food shops, and considerable anger among retailers and distributors, who are required to spend significant time and money 45 determining which claims are allowed and which are not and blacking out those that are not on each and every item on their shelves (Jones et al. 2011a, 2011b). Consider, for example, the package of Paul Newman popcorn shown in Figure 2. *Corresponding author: Rodney H. Jones, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong 50 Q4 2 R. H. Jones: The Multimodal Dimension of Claims in Food Packaging 1 5 10 15 Figure 1 Government information poster in Hong Kong (Center for Food Safety, Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) 20 Nutrition facts Serv. Size Calories Calories from fat Total fat Saturated fat Trans fat Cholesterol Sodium Total Carbohydrates Dietary Fiber Sugars Protein Vitamin A Vitamin C Calcium Iron 3.5 Cup (30 g) 130 45 5 g (8& DV) 2 g (10% DV) 0g 0 mg (0% DV) 200 mg (18% DV) 18 g (6% DV) 3 g (12% DV) 0g 2g (0% DV) (0% DV) (0% DV) (4% DV) 25 30 35 Figure 2 Newman’s own popcorn box When this product is sold in Hong Kong, the claim “No Trans Fats” on the front of this package is blacked out. This, however, is not because the claim is “false” in any obvious way. In fact, according to the 40 product’s “Nutrition Facts” panel, the amount of trans fat is indeed listed as 0 g. Under Hong Kong’s new law, however, in order to make the claim “no trans fats”, a product must fulfill three conditions: (1) it must contain not more than 0.3 g of trans fat per 100 g of food (a condition which this product fulfills), (2) it must contain not more than 1.5 g of saturated fat and trans fat combined per 100 g of food (a condition which, with 2 g of saturated fat, this product does not fulfill), and (3) the sum of saturated fat and trans fat 45 contributes not more than 10% of the foods calories (a condition which this product does not fulfill). Consequently, a claim, which, for most customers, would appear “true”, is not permitted on this package (Jones et al. 2011b). At the same time, the claim “all natural”, the truth or falsehood of which many customers would consider important, is not regulated, since the law does not stipulate a definition for the word “natural” (in the same way it stipulates a definition for the word “no”). 50 R. H. Jones: The Multimodal Dimension of Claims in Food Packaging Q5 3 This example illustrates some of the difficulties that can arise in the regulation of claims on food packages in situations where regulators, manufacturers, and customers might have different understandings of what makes a claim “true” or “false”. There are, however, even more fundamental difficulties to the regulation of claims having to do with the question of what constitutes the action of making a claim to begin with. There are, for example, a number of aspects to this package that might contribute to the action of “claiming”. Does, for example, the use of the adjective “oldstyle” constitute a claim, and if so, what sort of status does it claim for this product? The words “all profits to charity” makes a claim about what will happen to a portion of the money customers pay for this product, but does it also constitute a claim about the nature of this company that might lead customers to have certain kinds of expectations about the contents of the package? Does the use of Paul Newman’s name and image in any way contribute to the action of “claiming”? Are customers led to believe that it is Paul Newman himself who is somehow responsible for claims like “no trans fats” and “all natural”, and, if so, what is the relationship between our willingness to accept a claim and the person who is making that claim? Finally, would blacking out the claim “no trans fats” itself create a new claim, the claim that this statement is false and, by implication, that Paul Newman, or whoever is behind this claim, is out to deceive the public? Regulatory discourse Q6 The problems surrounding the regulation of discourse on food packages are, of course, not limited to Hong Kong. Food labeling laws in almost all of the countries where they have been implemented have had mixed effects. Studies have shown that, despite increasingly detailed regulations regarding health and content claims, food labels continue to contain false or misleading information (Silverglade and Heller 2010), and even when manufactures comply with regulations, consumers are often unsure of how to interpret the information they read on food packages (Balasubramanian and Cole 2002, Cowburn and Stockley 2005, Shine et al. 1997). One reason for this has to do with the way governments define “claims” to begin with, and the ways this definition is translated into policy. Most governments adopt the definition of a nutrition claim formulated by the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a joint body of the UN and World Health Organization. The CAC (2007) defines a claim as “any representation, which states, suggests or implies that a food has particular nutritional properties.” It further distinguishes among different kinds of nutrition claims such as content claims, that describe the level of a nutrient in a food, like “made with whole grains” or “a good source of fibre”, and “health claims”, of which there are two kinds: function claims which describe the physiological role of a nutrient in biological functions (such as “can help lower blood cholesterol”) and reduction of risk claims which relate the consumption of the food to the risk of developing a particular disease or health related condition (such as, “can help reduce the risk of heart disease”). All of these definitions, however, are based on a rather restricted, language-centric view of what a claim is, a view that focuses on how a claim “means”, how it represents reality, as opposed to what a claim “does”, the kinds of actions and human relationships it makes possible. Over the years, however, manufacturers have been able to come up with all sorts of inventive ways of engaging in the action of “claiming” without having to produce the kinds of explicit verbal representations that such regulations cover. Sometimes this simply involves replacing certain words (those whose definitions are regulated by law) with others (whose definitions are not). Manufacturers may, for example, use the word “natural” rather than the word “organic”, or claim that a product is “less sweet” rather than that it contains “less sugar”, or state that a product provides “power”, as in Grapenuts cereal’s slogan “Power from Grains”, or “goodness”, as in the slogan for Weetabix cereal: “The Goodness of Nature”. Sometimes manufactures even provide their own “scientific sounding” definitions for the terms for which regulators 1 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 4 R. H. Jones: The Multimodal Dimension of Claims in Food Packaging have no definitions. Minute Maid Orange Juice, for example, offers the following explanation of the word 1 “goodness”: Q7 Q8 Q9 And did you know Minute Maid Premium Orange Juice has even more natural orange goodness – which scientists call flavanones – than the fresh-squeezed juice you get from those fancy juice bars? Goodness found only in citrus fruits. 5 Scientists can call it anything they want. We call it good stuff. By assigning to “goodness” a “scientific sounding” definition, the manufacturers make it seem like “it is something that can actually be defined, isolated and measured. Furthermore, by including the voice of “scientists”, the statement implies that the claim of the amount of “goodness” in Minute Maid Orange Juice as compared to “fresh-squeezed” juice has some basis in science. A similar example of associating a product with an authoritative institution in order to give credence to an indirect claim can be seen on a package of Green Giant “Immunity Blend” vegetables, which promotes the work of the Susan G. Komen Foundation with a picture of a large pink ribbon. The juxtaposition of the reference to the organization and the name of the product creates the impression that the product provides immunity against breast cancer – it does not. Sometimes making claims indirectly involves changing the grammar of statements to alter their focus or qualifying statements with hedges or disclaimers. When the US government instructed General Mills to remove the claim: “can lower your cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks”, from its Cheerios package, the company altered their packages to read: “As part of a heart healthy diet, the soluble fiber in Cheerios can help reduce your cholesterol,” changing the focus of the claim from one about Cheerios to one about “soluble fiber” and contextualizing it within a broader set of dietary practices (“a heart healthy diet”). As regulators have become more specific about what kind of language is allowable, food manufacturers have become more inventive about engaging in the action of claiming without having to resort to explicit linguistic statements at all. Planters, for example, cannot claim on its packages of walnuts that they reduce the risk of heart disease. If they want to make this claim, they must use the following FDA approved language: 10 15 20 25 Supportive but not conclusive research shows that eating 1.5 ounces per day of walnuts, as part of a low saturated fat and low cholesterol diet and not resulting in increased caloric intake, may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease. The company, however, has managed to engage in the action of claiming that their product reduces the risk of heart disease by refraining from making such a claim altogether, and instead simply naming their product “NUT-rition” and including a large picture of a heart on the front of the package. Although the definition of a claim adopted from the Codex Alimentarius Commission potentially covers some of the examples described above, since it includes not just representations that “state” certain things, but also those that “suggest” or “imply”, regulations do not lend themselves to such ambiguities. There are simply too many ways for speakers or writers to create implicature, and so many opportunities for plausible deniability, that most labeling regulations, and most challenges brought under such regulations, limit themselves to the literal definitions of words. The problem here is twofold. First, it has to do with the nature of language itself. Most regulations focus primarily on the propositional content of claims, judging their truth or falsehood by whether or not they fulfill certain semantic conditions (as with the definition of “no trans fats” discussed above). Linguists and discourse analysts have long known, however, that the “force” of a piece of communication – the kind of action it is able to accomplish – is not necessarily dependent on its semantic meaning, but may also involve conditions beyond the meaning of the words, conditions involving things like who is speaking or writing the words, who is hearing or reading them, and under what conditions this speaking and hearing or reading and writing are taking place (Austin 1976), as well as how texts and utterance interact with readers’ and hearers’ expectations about what should be written or said in different circumstances and about communication in general (Grice 1989). Claiming is not just a matter of representation. It is something that is performed in particular circumstance, and whether or not the performance is successfully “brought off” (Goffman 1959) depends upon those circumstances. 30 35 40 45 50 R. H. Jones: The Multimodal Dimension of Claims in Food Packaging 5 The second problem is that the action of making a claim is rarely just a matter of delivering a bounded 1 message in a single semiotic mode (such as a verbal statement). In speech, whether or not an utterance is taken as a claim depends on the interaction of the words that are uttered and many other signals, including utterances that came before it, the expression on the speaker’s face, the tone of voice in which it is uttered, and the physical environment in which it is uttered. In written texts, whether or not a statement is taken as 5 a claim may depend on its interaction with other statements in the same text or in related texts, as well as other things like the font in which it is written and the images and other graphics that might accompany it, and the materiality of the medium through which it is delivered. In other words, claims are always multimodal. In the remainder of this paper, I will focus on these two problems, first considering the performative 10 nature of claims on food packages, and then examining their multimodal dimensions, showing that the issue of regulating claims on food packages is much more complex than requiring manufacturers to remove or black out “false statements”. 15 The performative nature of claims To say that regulators focus on the representative dimension of claims rather than their performative dimension means that they tend to assess claims strictly according to the truth or falsity of the proposition which they assert, and by doing so they miss out on the many other things claims do. Certainly the claim, for example, that Cocoa Krispies “now helps support your child’s immunity” is a representative in that it asserts the truth of the proposition about what Cocoa Krispies does, but it also has the force of many other kinds of speech acts. It functions as a commissive, a kind of promise or pledge that, if you feed your child Cocoa Krispies he or she will be healthier. It can also be taken as a directive, a suggestion to feed your child Cocoa Krispies. The font in which the statement is presented, with the word immunity “screaming out” in large block letters, along with the excited faces of Snap, Crackle, and Pop gazing down at it, also give to the statement the force of an expressive. In fact, claims are always more than just assertives, and it is this very fact that makes their regulation necessary. What is potentially “dangerous” about claims is not what they assert, but what they promise, express, suggest, or direct the reader to do (such as feeding their child a steady diet of Cocoa Krispies). The mistaken belief that a claim is nothing more than the performance of an assertion was dubbed by Searle (1969) “the assertion fallacy”, the “fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of the speech act of assertion with the analysis of the meaning of particular words occurring in certain assertions” (p. 141). According to Searle, the illocutionary force of an assertion is to commit the writer to the truth of the expressed proposition. The performance of the speech act is not the performance of this truth; rather, it is the performance of the commitment – the performance of a particular relationship of the speaker to what is said, as well as a particular relationship between the hearer and what is said. The main condition of an assertion, Searle notes, is not that it is true, but that it is remarkable. I would not “claim” that I’m a man or “assert” that the sun will rise tomorrow, because these are not remarkable statements. Another condition of an assertion is that what is asserted is somehow relevant to the hearer, that the hearer needs to be informed, reminded, or otherwise apprised of the information. Following from this, the signs that are most key to performing the claim “now helps support your child’s immunity” are not the words “supports” and “immunity” but “now”, signaling it as something remarkable, and “your child’s”, constructing the reader as someone for whom this news ought to be very important, Furthermore, just as important as these words in the performance of the claim are the familiar faces of Snap, Crackle, and Pop as the sources of these words, as “people” whom, on some gut level, parents trust, if only because they have become such iconic characters in Western culture. In other words, the important thing about claims is not just what is being claimed, but the way the claim constructs a certain set of social conditions, the way it constructs a certain identity (in this case, that 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 6 R. H. Jones: The Multimodal Dimension of Claims in Food Packaging of a parent) and a certain set of values (wishing to protect the health of one’s child) for the reader, as well as a certain identity for the writer, the identity of someone qualified to make the claim. Sometimes manufactures construct “trustworthy” identities through the appropriation of the “voice of science” or some other authoritative discourse by including things like medical jargon, scientific drawings, and pictures of people wearing lab coats. For well-established brands, however, a much more effective strategy is the invocation of familiar characters who have, over the years, come to be associated with reliability, characters like Aunt Jemima, The Jolly Green Giant, and Paul Newman (see above). What qualifies someone to make a claim is not just knowledge of the proposition, but, more importantly, knowledge of you and what is relevant to you, and this kind of knowledge is most effectively performed by the faces of these familiar figures, figures who watched you grow up, who “know” you. It is primarily this relationship of trust – not the propositional content of a claim – that makes it effective. This is something the food industry has understood for a long time. As far back as 1929, home economist and industry spokesperson Christine Frederick identified the modern shopper’s predicament as one not of having too little information, but of having too much. She recommended that homemakers learn brand names and leave the rest to food manufacturers. The whole point of branding is to create a relationship of trust between the consumer and the product, a relationship within which claims can gain currency. What gives potency to the claims on a bottle of Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice that it “purifies your body” and “strengthens your immune system”, is that they are attributed to the people who grew the cranberries, people who “know a good thing when they grow it”. Never mind that cranberry growers are not usually considered experts on the workings of the immune system. The notion that claims are “performative”, then, goes beyond the pragmatic sense of the term – that they “perform” certain “speech acts”. What product packages perform are more than just speech acts. They are culturally recognizable and emotionally resonant stories and relationships. We may not know much about the Hopi Indians and their practices of grinding corn, but the picture of Hopi women engaging in this practice on the back of a box of Nature’s Path Mesa Sunrise cereal gives the reader a comfortable feeling of authenticity. Of course nobody today would propose that regulators take this company to task for misleading customers into thinking that their cereal is made by Hopi Indians in the traditional way. This is not because this is not a claim. It is more because our standards for truth, particularly when it comes to claims made non-linguistically, have changed over the years, In 1913, Dr Harvey W. Wiley, director of the US government Bureau of Chemistry (predecessor of the Food and Drug Administration), did see fit to take Carnation to task for the pictures of cows that they featured in their advertisements. He wrote: 1 5 10 15 20 25 30 I had the curiosity to see the plant of this company, and a visit to the Pacific Coast gave me the opportunity to do so. But I could not find the farms and herds in the picture. What I saw made me sick. It is unethical, deceptive and false to advertise 35 that the product of a condensary is made from cows kept in a state of contentment in perennial pastures when in point of fact the animals are housed in dark, ill smelling rooms, covered with filth. (quoted in Vileisis 2010: 146) 40 The multimodality dimension of claims This last point brings me to the second problematic aspect of claims that makes them difficult to regulate in any simple or straightforward way, that is the fact that claims are always multimodal. That is to say, claims 45 always have some kind of non-verbal dimension. Sometimes the multimodal dimension of claims can be seen in pictures like those described above of cows and Hopi Indians and the smiling face of Paul Newman. Often, however, claims are performed through the much more subtle ways modes and media are combined, involving elements like colors, fonts, and the shape of packages, and even the shape, texture, and taste of the food itself. 50 R. H. Jones: The Multimodal Dimension of Claims in Food Packaging Q10 Q11 7 The most difficult thing about regulating the multimodal dimension of claims is that, more often than not, the force of the claim arises not from the communication that takes place using any one mode, but rather from the way the modes combine to form a “semiotic aggregate” (Scollon and Scollon 2003). On the package of Mesa Sunrise Cereal described above, for example, verbal claims like “organic” and “low fat” are reinforced by the color of the box, the images of a corn plant and the sunrise, the petroglypic font used for the product’s name, and even the shape and texture of the cereal. Similarly the claim on the package of Zesta Saltine Crackers that they are “Made with Whole Wheat” is reinforced by the dark brown color of the crackers inside the box, a color which, however, does not come from the whole wheat with which they are made, which is actually very little, but from the addition of molasses and artificial coloring (Silverglade and Heller 2010). Among the most important, yet little researched aspects of the persuasive power of food packaging are the material dimensions of the package itself as a medium of communication – its shape, size, and texture. While much work has been done in the fields of marketing and psychology on how the size and shape of food packages bias people’s perception of quantity and price (see, for example, Chandon 2013), less attention has been paid to the relationship between the materiality of food packages and claims about their contents. Food packages are quite unique as far as media go in that they are polyfunctional. They both carry the text and contain the food. Packaging is a tangible, three-dimensional object that carries its text through the ongoing experiences of shopping, cooking, eating, and even disposing of the package. Food packages have become intimate parts of customer’s lives, residing in their homes and sometimes taking on decorative functions in kitchens. When it comes to claims, one of the most important things about a package is that it is often the materiality of the package that makes it necessary to make a claim about its contents in the first place, since most packages prevent customers from using other means to ascertain the contents or the quality of the food inside, means that are traditionally used to assess non-packaged food like looking, touching, and smelling. The physical features of packages, such as “no-drip” spouts, microwavable containers, tamper proof seals, and re-sealable zip-lock bags can function as claims regarding all sorts of things including a food’s quality, quantity, convenience, cleanliness, and even its health benefits. Arnott’s, for example, can imply that its cookies can help you lose weight by calling their environmentally unfriendly single serve packages their “special portion control range”. The multimodal dimension of claims, however, is not limited to the intratextual links among different modes and different materialities, but also the intertextual links among the elements on the package and other modes and materialities in the environments in which these packages are placed, whether they be in customers’ kitchens or on the shelves of supermarkets. Food packages always constitute what the Scollons (2003) call “discourses in place”, and so their meaning is always partially determined by indexical relationships between the package and other texts in the material world. Most supermarkets, for example, are arranged around a system of classifying food packages in aisles based on their contents (see Figure 3). Where a product is placed in the supermarket, then, can also function as a kind of claim. It matters, for example, that granola bars are shelved with breakfast cereals rather than in the candy section, though the ingredients of many granola bars more closely resemble those of candy bars than they do breakfast cereals. Even the layouts of entire supermarkets and the facades of the buildings in which they are housed have come to function as claims for the kind of food customers can expect to find there. The green and brown storefront of a Whole Foods Market and the way products are arranged inside in the manner of a farmers’ market, function as claims regarding the contents and the quality of the food as much as do the explicit verbal claims found on any individual package. Finally, the act of reading a claim on a food package is always situated. It is always part of some social practice engaged in by real people at a particular place and at a particular moment in time. One problem with attempts to regulate the discourse on food packages is that regulators sometimes idealize these acts of reading, seeing them as separate from the contexts in which they occur. This tendency toward decontextualization is rather dramatically illustrated by the poster pictured in Figure 4, which was issued by the Hong Kong Food and Environmental Hygiene Department to instruct people to read food labels. 1 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 8 R. H. Jones: The Multimodal Dimension of Claims in Food Packaging 1 5 10 15 Figure 3 A typical supermarket aisle (credit: Rowen Peter, Creative Commons License http://www.flickr.com/photos/rowan_ peter/5416712673) 20 25 30 35 40 45 Figure 4 Poster from the Hong Kong Food and Environmental Hygiene Department 50 R. H. Jones: The Multimodal Dimension of Claims in Food Packaging Q12 Q13 9 The image on the poster constructs the act of reading labels as divorced from any social practice even remotely related to buying or preparing food. Instead, what is pictured is an idealized old-fashioned literacy practice of a mother reading a label to her child in the same way mothers typically read story books their children as a way of teaching them how to read. Perhaps the strangest thing about the image is the background which shows not a supermarket nor a kitchen, but a playground, a setting in which the practice of reading a food package seems rather out or place. The contexts in which food packages are actually read, however, usually involve customers in much more complex activities, such as harried parents trying to juggle the competing demands of shopping lists, screaming children, and the multitude of choices that confront them on the shelves. The act of reading and assessing a claim on a food package always takes place at a nexus of practice (Scollon and Scollon 2007) where discourses in place like shopping lists and food labels are appropriated into specific interaction orders (like a family) by particular historical bodies (like mothers shopping with their kids after a hard days work). Within these complex and dynamic combinations of social practices, claims on food packages can take on a range of different meanings and uses. They may function as claims about the content or quality of what is inside the packages, or they may function as claims about the kind of shop in which they are found, or they may even serve as claims about the people who purchase them. I have a friend who likes to take pictures of his shopping cart and post them on his Facebook Timeline. When he does this, he is always careful to arrange the healthy looking foods – those sporting conspicuous nutritional claims – at the top of the basket and to hide the unhealthy looking foods underneath. In this case package claims are less about claiming anything about the product and more about claiming a certain social identity for the shopper. Conclusion In 1999, applied linguists Guy Cook and Kieran O’Halloran published a paper on various ways customers understand the texts on baby food labels. They called the paper “Label literacy”, which they defined as “the consumer’s ability to select those labels and parts of labels relevant to their needs, to interpret wording to obtain needed information, and to assess critically the manufacturer’s intentions” (p. 146). Important as this paper has been in helping us understand the complex interaction between readers and texts when it comes to food labels, the definition of “label literacy” it employs is essentially the same as that employed by legislators and regulators who attempt to control the claims manufacturers make on food packages by restricting the kinds of words that they use. It is a definition based on a view of food packages as essentially verbal texts, the primary purpose of which is to convey information. As the analysis above reveals, however, the act of making a claim using the complex medium of a food package involves much more than the words that are written on the package and the “information” conveyed by those words. In order for consumers to be able to critically and effectively interact with food labels (and for regulators to successfully regulate the claims that they “perform”), a new version of “label literacy” is needed, one which takes its assumptions about texts from the “new literacy studies” (Gee 2011, Street 1984). In this version of label literacy, texts will be understood not as collections of words, but as semiotic aggregates in which multiple modes and materialities interact, forming webs of intratextual and intertextual links, which customers (and regulators) must navigate. They will be assessed not just in terms of what they mean, but also in terms of what they do, not just in terms of the “information” they contain, but also in terms of the social relationships and social identities they make possible. Food packages have become important “boundary objects” (Eden 2011, Star and Greismer 1989) in most modern societies, mediating the complex web of interaction orders and historical bodies that go into producing our food – business deals and supply chains and factory farms and government regulations– and the complex web of interaction orders and historical bodies that go into us consuming it – relations with family members, advice from healthcare providers, favorite recipes, cooking programs on TV, and 1 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 10 R. H. Jones: The Multimodal Dimension of Claims in Food Packaging interactions with friends at supermarket checkout counters and on Facebook pages. The problem is, that for all their multimodality, and for all the wealth of “information” they offer through images, and colors, and texts and tables of nutritional facts, food packages do not so much translate the practices of food production to customers as obscure them – serving to hide from us where our food really comes from. The tractors, gasoline, fertilizers, pesticides, migrant workers, laboratories, sanitized factories, stinking feedlots, semi-trucks, and highways are replaced by Snap, Crackle, and Pop or the smiling face of Paul Newman. The real problem with food packages might not be what they claim, but what they fail to claim. The most important questions we should be asking about claims, therefore, may not be whether they are true or false, or what should be allowed and what should not. The most important questions might be about what the need to make claims in the first place reveals about the way we have come to regard our food: as something that we read rather than taste. Meals themselves seem more and more like monomodal texts that are increasingly divorced from the social contexts in which they are produced and consumed. You might eat your “Happy Meal” at home, at your desk, in your car, utterly oblivious to the implicit claim that it is supposed to make you “happy”. A tomato that you grow yourself, on the other hand, does not need a claim. It has a touch, a smell, a taste. It does not need a label. Q14 1 5 10 15 Funding: This research was made possible by the General Research Fund Grant “The Discourse of Food Labeling in Hong Kong: Public Policy and Discursive Practice” (#CityU144110) from the Hong Kong 20 Research Grants Council. References 25 Q15 Q16 Q17 Austin, J. L. (1976). How to do Things with Words. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 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Washington, DC: Island Press. 11 1 5 Bionote Rodney Jones is Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at City University of Hong Kong. He is coeditor (with Sigrid Norris) of Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis (Routledge, 2005). 10 His latest book is Health and Risk Communication: An Applied Linguistic Perspective (Routledge, 2013). 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50