‘Personalised nutrition: studies in the biogenetics of race and food’

Abstract

Genomic based nutrition (or nutrigenomics) is a compelling area of study since it feeds into multiple overlapping and often competing epistemologies and conversations that are sociologically and scientifically significant. These include questions of perceived and assigned racial, ethnic, and ancestral identities, food culture, genetic science, body and health anxieties, gender issues, neoliberal capitalism, food safety, technology, equity, and privacy.In this article, I tease out and examine some of the more potentially pernicious outcomes of the commercialization of nutrigenomics through the use of popular genetic testing kits ostensibly aimed at improving public health through personalized diets based on ones' individual DNA. While the promise of personalized nutrition might, on the surface, give rise to the hope that it could obviate racial categorization by moving away from racialised and racializing assumptions, it remains the case that the majority of companies that make these recommendations are also testing for ancestry. Moreover, the practice of using race as a proxy for population has long been de rigeur in science and will likely continue. Similar to the outcome of the Human Genome Project, which established human beings are 99.9% genetically identical, the personalization of genetic data is unlikely to result in the challenging of biogenetic racism, the continued use of race as a category in science, or racialization in general. Kelly Happe, in her work on the Human Genome Project, demonstrates how race has become a black box allowing for health disparities to be explained using individual and biogenetic level explanations that are actually social (Happe, 2013). Margery Fee's research on the trope of the 'thrifty genotype', meant to explain high rates of diabetes amongst Indigenous groups, speaks directly to how race becomes a 'crude proxy' for genetic differences that are presumed rather than real (Fee, 2006(Fee, , p. 2988.As such, I argue that not only do genetic ancestry kits, and the nutritional recommendations that stem from them, represent a misunderstanding of current genetic science and state of genetic technologies, but that the most troubling outcomes of these applications are the further reification and perpetuation of racialised and racializing knowledge, discourses, structures, and actions. By coupling critiques of race-based medicine with those that surround ancestral DNA testing, I make the case that trends in personalized nutrition testing risk, re-entrenching historically rooted myths about race, biology, and identity leading to a myriad of harmful outcomes for racialised groups and individuals. These include the production of yet another locus of inequality based on disparities in access to the 'right' foods, the iniquitous distribution of dietary capital, the further responsibilisation of health to individuals, increased surveillance, and a more impoverished relationship to food itself.Thus, my objective is to critically assess trend toward personalized nutrition through an examina...