Food for Thought

Contemporary Examples of Food in Sport Media

There is no shortage of contemporary media stories that situate food within the constellation of technologies commonly used to enhance athletic performance, the most publicized of which concerned Houston Texans star running back Arian Foster and his announcement that he was “going vegan” in advance of the 2012 NFL season. Foster’s decision was a source of considerable controversy and debate across social and popular sports media. Sportswriters, coaches, teammates, and fans fervently deliberated how Foster’s new diet would affect his on-field performance; many questioned, as one journalist wrote, “Is a vegan running back going to lack power?” (Kuharsky, 2012). Critics also voiced concerns about how a vegan diet would lead to dehydration and insufficient protein intake, and questioned how Foster’s body could possibly endure the rigors of the NFL season without consuming meat or other animal-based foods (Kuharsky, 2012; Ward, 2012). Our investigations into the media panic surrounding Foster’s veganism explores how the controversy was tied to deeply held beliefs that connect food and eating with ideological constructions of masculinity, and how these understandings intersect with notions of race, class, and national/regional identities (Brady & Ventresca, 2014). Yet in spite of the ways in which Foster’s veganism was constructed as a non-traditional gender performance, the underlying assumption that food choices will directly affect athletic performance remained a central and unquestioned aspect of these narratives. In response to critics predicting that a plant-based diet would limit his strength and productivity, Foster envisioned his veganism as a regimen that would ultimately enhance his athletic performance: “I’m feeling good. It will affect me in a positive way. If you improve your health, you’ll improve your performance” (Foster in Robertson, 2012). Similarly, the ways in which Foster’s story was framed according to measurable outcomes and expert medical knowledge demonstrates how scientific and functional understandings of food and eating pervade sport nutrition practices.

We suggest that the coverage afforded Foster’s announcement (and the fact that an announcement was warranted at all) reflects and reinforces the increasing attention given to food in sporting contexts. While discussions of nutrition in sport are not entirely new phenomena, we have observed that a greater variety of dietary practices are represented in media narratives that construct direct links between food choices and enhanced athletic performance; these reports include, most notably, portrayals of how trendy or alternative diets are being taken up by elite athletes. As indicated by the extent of the Foster panic, veganism has been particularly prevalent within these media discourses. Professional hockey player Mike Zigomanis, former WNBA superstar Taj McWilliams-Franklin, and NFL fullback Tony Fiammetta have all recently gained some media attention for their respective decisions to switch to plant-based diets (Archer, 2011; Savin, 2012; White, 2008). As demonstrated by the headlines “Now a vegan, Fiammetta stronger than ever” (Archer, 2011) and “Former NHLer [Zigomanis] trades hours of gym time for a vegan diet” (Savin, 2012), these food choices are explicitly linked to boosting physical fitness and athletic performance. Yet other alternative dietary practices have also gained traction in the sports media as strategies through which athletes can gain a competitive edge. NBA star Steve Nash’s strict reliance on whole-food, sugar-free meals was widely publicized as “The Nash Diet” (Nash, 2009; Swiat, 2009). Similarly, journalists reported on Major League Baseball outfielder Hunter Pence’s experimentation with the Paleolithic Diet and NFL wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald’s endorsement of the Genotype Diet, a regimen in which food choices are structured around one’s blood type (Calcaterra, 2013; Rogers, 2012). These alternative approaches to sports nutrition are commonly portrayed in relation to the conventional wisdom that athletes (especially male athletes) require copious amounts of protein best obtained from meat and other animal-based products (McGann, 2002; Paresecoli, 2005).

However, perhaps the most instructive case involving sport and food, albeit one that largely flew under the sports media radar, is the story of NFL offensive lineman Deuce Lutui. Media accounts detail how the 340 pound Lutui had long-standing issues managing his body size and weight. These issues are thought to have severely limited his conditioning and on-field productivity to the point where, by 2012, his career was thought to be in jeopardy. In preparation for the 2012 season, however, Lutui lost a substantial amount of weight and credited a newly adopted vegan diet for the drastic change in his physique (Farnsworth, 2012; Farrar, 2012; Sessler, 2012). The newly slender Lutui was then rewarded with a 1-year contract to play with the Tennessee Titans and started nine games for the team in 2012. However, following that season, Lutui was suspended four games for violating the league’s policy on performance-enhancing substances and has since been unable to find employment with an NFL team (Rappaport, 2013). In Lutui’s story, we have a vivid illustration of the classifications that govern substances used by athletes to enhance their performance. On one hand, Lutui was applauded by coaches, teammates, and sportswriters for improved play after his adoption of a vegan diet; on the other, he was reprimanded by the NFL for taking what is commonly assumed to be a synthetic, chemically based performance-enhancing substance. This distinction between food choices and pharmacological interventions appears self-evident or simply common sense. Yet this readymade dichotomy persists although both types of, often synthetically produced, concentrated, and fortified, substances are incorporated into rigorous training programs intended to enhance athletic performance. We argue that it is important to interrogate common sense distinctions between food and the broad constellation of technologies that are regularly constructed as performance enhancers.

Setting the Scene: Critical Perspectives on Food and Performance Enhancement

While only a small literature exists that examines the links between food and sport, there is extensive work that elaborates on the social construction of PETs. This body of scholarship comprises a variety of approaches to understanding how and why a particular selection of substances and practices has come to be defined as illicit and worthy of public concern. One particularly prevalent approach among scholars concerned with this topic explores how the construction of PETs is informed by popular mythologies of sport, such as is advanced in the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (World Anti-Doping Agency, 2009) quixotic declarations on the “spirit of sport” ² (Beamish, 2011; Connor, 2009; Gayles, 2009; Lopez, 2011, 2012; Ryall, 2013). This stream of research generally posits that understandings of sport as inherently pure and moral construct the overarching mythos through which PETs are popularly elaborated and understood as illicit and unnatural. Many of these authors argue that rather than being informed by notions of health, camaraderie, and fair play, this mythology is rooted in various unspoken political economic forces and commercial interests. Beamish (2011) makes similar links between the “demonization” of PETs and the foundational values of the Olympic Games and Olympism more broadly.

Another approach has seen scholars focus their analysis on specific aspects of the spirit of sport mythology such as health (Hanstad & Waddington, 2009) or meritocracy and fair play (Dixon, 2008; Gayles, 2009), while others have related the social construction of various PETs to broader issues of identity politics such as gender and heteronormativity (Atkinson, 2007; Burke, 1998; Burke & Roberts, 1997; Burke & Symons, 1999; Lock, 2003). We share Hanstad and Waddington’s (2009) willingness to investigate the discourses surrounding PETs by critically examining those practices and substances that are permitted across sporting cultures. The authors seek to disentangle the supposedly inextricable relationship between sport and health by pointing to sponsorships of sport by alcohol and tobacco companies, sport’s masculine culture of “playing hurt,” the deleterious short-and long-term impacts of training on the body, and the fluctuating list of approved drugs and sport supplements (see also King et al., 2014; Loland, Skirstad, & Waddington, 2006; Messner, 1990; Waddington, 2000; Young & White, 2000). Yet Hanstad and Waddington also provide a glimpse into the absent-presence of food in critical studies of sport and PETs. Their analysis seeks to unsettle common dietary practices such as “carbohydrate loading,” a process used by athletes to maximize muscle glycogen just prior to competition. Hanstad and Waddington highlight the negative health effects of the cycles of glycogen depletion and repletion associated with carb-loading but do not explore the food choices that constitute this practice. Similarly, Connor (2009) begins his investigation into the social construction of performance-enhancing drugs by describing the typical day of an elite athlete. This scene paints a vivid picture of the rigorous day-to-day activities of high-performance athletes, including how “A nutritionist crafted his diet to achieve a perfect balance of carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals” (p. 327). Yet how was this “perfect balance” achieved? What social and political implications are bound up in the nutritionist’s choices? Connor’s vignette makes it clear that food and, perhaps now more often, food’s component macro-and micro-nutrient parts are the targets of intense management for the express purpose of manipulating athletic performance. However, Connor, like most other scholars concerned with the production and maintenance of athletic bodies, does not consider how this aspect of an athlete’s routine is co-constructed with broader understandings of “performance enhancement.”

The modest pool of critical literature that does explicitly consider sport-related food and nutrition sheds some light on how shifting trends in dietary practices shape, and are shaped by, cultural ideas concerning sport, food, and athleticism (Applegate & Grivetti, 1997; Johns, 1998; Johns & Johns, 2000; Papakonstantinou, 2012; Pelly, O’Connor, Denyer, & Caterson, 2011). For example, Johns’ (1998) analysis considers the challenge that athletes’ extreme dietary and weight management practices presents to the normalized ethic of sport. He discusses the paradoxical relationship between the extreme dietary practices of elite athletes and a sporting ethic that requires the pursuit of excellence through hard work and the acceptance of risk, pain, and sacrifice. However, Johns’ focus is primarily on how extreme weight management regimes complicate and challenge the sport ethic, rather than on the food choices that constitute these practices. Other authors have focused on the history of sport-related dietary practices and food rituals from the Classical period (Papakonstantinou, 2012) to the 19th and 20th centuries (Applegate & Grivetti, 1997; Pelly et al., 2011). This historical work also considers food practices as a means to disrupt or preserve broader meanings attributed to sport and athleticism. For example, Pelly and colleagues’ (2011) account of the evolving food services and dietary practices at the Summer Olympics makes note of physicians employed at the 1936 Berlin Games to ensure that all food, drink, and nutrition support supplements (i.e., Ovaltine) were not altered or contaminated by foreign substances. The authors suggest that this practice represents an early effort to avert the use of performance-enhancing substances in high-performance sport. Applegate and Grivetti (1997) similarly provide an historical review of trends in the use of various ergogenic aids ³ including food. Their analysis interrogates the assumption that sport should reward an individual’s determination to work with “what [they]’ve got” rather than celebrate the pursuit of performance through technological, pharmacological or nutritional enhancements (p. 869). Yet these diverse examinations of sport nutrition are primarily concerned with the disciplinary and historical practices surrounding food and eating and less focused on how food itself is discursively and materially constituted.

Some authors have interrogated how the social construction of food and nutrition shapes how dietary practices are incorporated into sport training programs. Paresecoli (2005) and McGann (2002), for example, have examined how gender shapes the processes through which certain types of food are linked to athletic success. Both Paresecoli and McGann detail how the nutritional benefits of eating meat for athletes are part of a masculine performance that values increased muscle, power, strength, and dominance as the preferred outcomes of food consumption. We sought to further unsettle these links between sport, food, and masculinity in our work concerning Arian Foster’s veganism and the media panic that ensued following his announcement (Brady & Ventresca, 2014). Yet our previous analysis, such as those undertaken by Paresecoli and McGann, did not call into question the meanings that underlie the normalization of food consumption as a method of performance enhancement. It is assumed that athletes, coaches, and trainers know that eating the “right” kinds of food will improve performance. Our aim with this research note, then, is to outline potential avenues for interrogating the prevailing epistemologies that underlie the consumption of food in athletic contexts, and to address substantial gaps in current theoretical understandings of PETs.

Food and Sport: Testing the Limits of Naturalness

In their short commentary from a 2007 issue of the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Cole and Cate offer one of the few analyses to put food in conversation with popular understandings of steroids, doping, and other performance-enhancing substances. They detail how milk, long perceived as nature’s super-food, is now commonly promoted as a sports drink that aids in muscle and energy recovery if consumed after exercise. Cole and Cate reveal how the claims made in advertisements about the positive effects of (chocolate) milk consumption for athletes are strikingly similar to those associated with illicit performance enhancers. Ironically, milk’s growing niche in the sports drink industry comes at a time when industrialized milk production is increasingly shrouded in controversies surrounding the use of genetically engineered growth hormones and antibiotics, or as Cole and Cate (2007) call it, “the dairy industry’s own performance-enhancing-drug scandal” (p. 314). Like Cole and Cate, our work sees food products such as milk as key sites through which we can investigate and problematize the increasingly blurred boundaries between licit and illicit methods of performance enhancement. We not only seek to build on their provocative analysis but also push the conversation around food and athletic performance in substantially different directions. Cole and Cate are primarily concerned with highlighting the problematic ways in which discourses of performance enhancement are appropriated in certain milk advertising campaigns given the deleterious health effects being increasingly linked to industrialized milk production. Although they argue that such a contradiction renders the line between licit and illicit “ever thinner” (Cole & Cate, 2007, p. 314), their analysis rests on the notion that, at least in sporting contexts, food and PETs are two distinct and knowable entities. It appears that, for Cole and Cate, although milk may not be as “pure” as the dairy industry would have us believe, food’s status outside the realm of PETs remains firmly intact. We feel it necessary, however, to consider the epistemological assumptions about food, sport, and the body that supports the maintenance of this binary, but also those that contribute to its erosion. In the remainder of the article, we will consider how these assumptions are constructed by underlying binaristic categorizations of natural and unnatural and recent shifts in how food is widely understood, a paradigm shift that Scrinis (2008, 2013) has described as nutritionism. In conducting the proceeding exploration of these ideas, we will follow Cole and Cate and use milk as our primary object of analysis.

First, the dominant set of meanings that firmly position food outside the realm of performance-enhancing substances are tied to powerful binary oppositions distinguishing natural from unnatural, organic from synthetic, and healthy from unhealthy. As Tara Magdalinksi (2008) asserts, it is the dichotomous conceptualization of naturalness and the associated moralism on either side of these binaries that underlie the construction of sport and the use of PETs as antithetical practices. Naturalness is understood as virtuous, honorable, and authentic whereas to be unnatural is to be spoiled, aberrant, and manufactured; this natural/unnatural binary is clearly captured in the mythologies that constitute the “spirit of sport.” Moreover, the athletic body is firmly entrenched within this conceptualization as a pure, organic entity that literally personifies these core values. The use of PETs, thus, threatens the sanctity of the athlete body and the very foundations of sport, its meanings, and core values.

Irrespective of its origins, ingredients, or health effects, food remains undisturbed as a natural component of an athlete’s preparation that is consistent with the spirit of sport. This parallel was vividly encapsulated by Philadelphia baseball fans who famously greeted home run record-holder (and suspected steroid user) Barry Bonds holding a large sign that read “[Babe] Ruth did it on hot dogs and beer” (Associated Press, 2006). The banner’s clever slogan illustrates the certainty with which the distinction between food and PETs is held within the popular consciousness: Babe Ruth’s home runs supposedly fueled by potentially artificial or unhealthy foods are perceived as undeniably preferable to the record-setting statistics posted by sluggers such as Bonds throughout baseball’s steroid era. As demonstrated by the mythologies that underlie long-standing cultural ideas about milk, for example, traditional understandings of food as a natural and healthy way to nourish the body are very much tied to nostalgic visions of agriculture and pastoral farming (Dupuis, 2002). As these myths are unsettled by controversies such as those currently troubling the dairy industry, the once unshakeable status of commodities such as milk as natural and wholesome is increasingly being called into question. Yet despite greater public awareness that much of what we eat is processed in factories using artificial ingredients linked to detrimental or destructive health effects, enduring conceptions of food as a product of nature render these practices somehow less synthetic or less harmful than illicit methods of performance enhancement.

However, Magdalinski reminds us that negotiating this boundary is not a simple matter of delineating and eradicating the unnatural practices that produce unnatural bodies. It is not simply binaristic thinking about naturalness that informs the mythos of sport and performance enhancers, but it is the uncertainty with which the line between natural and unnatural is drawn that is important. This is because the boundary between natural and unnatural is constantly shifting and permeable in a way that allows new threats to the stability of the dichotomy to be reinterpreted and subsumed by the binary as they emerge. Through the ways in which they materialize in cultures of sport, more and more food categories are positioned within this liminal space between natural and unnatural. The intensifying scrutiny on the bodies of athletes and the heightened surveillance of substances used by athletes to improve their performance are practices through which the natural/unnatural binary is continually contested. As nutrition and dietetics are further institutionalized within sporting cultures, an increasing number of food items (processed foods, artificial sweeteners, non-organic meat and produce) are viewed as adversely affecting performance and unfit for consumption by athletes. Yet renewed panics concerning the use of steroids and other PETs further entrench the value of “natural” modes of improving performance in preserving the “spirit of sport” mythos. Thus, the blurry, liminal space between the two poles of the binary is the very space that allows for its persistence (Magdalinski, 2008). Shifting ideas about the “naturalness” of food play a crucial role in shaping widespread discourses about sport supplementation and performance enhancement.

Second, it is similarly important to consider how the discursive formations that position food alongside sport as natural and moral entities are shaped by new modes of thinking about food and eating. Scrinis (2008, 2013) has defined “nutritionism” to describe a cultural shift in how we think about food as something that was once perceived as familiar, holistic, and natural, but is now evermore reducible into its nutrient component parts. Food is now commonly framed by scientific discourses through which the perceived nutritional benefits of eating are measurable and objective, and are identifiable as distinct from other benefits such as social or relational ones. Similarly, nutrients that have been extracted, concentrated, or processed are synthesized in laboratories and are integrated into everyday food items. For example, framed by nutritionism, the Dairy Farmers of Canada are enabled to make claims about the regenerative properties of milk that draw on quantifiable measurements of “essential” vitamins and nutrients, protein, and electrolytes. These measurements, along with the common knowledge that milk is already fortified with vitamin D, allow the dairy industry to promote milk as objectively superior to other sports drinks or post–work out beverages in advertising campaigns with names such as “Recharge With Milk” or “Body by Milk.” As Scrinis (2013) outlines, the evaluation of food according to amounts of its component nutrients is a relatively new phenomenon but one that has widely shaped cultural practices of food selection, preparation, and consumption.

While nutritionism constitutes a pervasive shift in contemporary understandings of food and eating, the ideas that make up these discourses are taken up differently in different cultural contexts. We argue that sport is a specific context in which the discourses of nutritionism are heightened through the increasingly systematic and scientific management of the bodies of athletes, especially at elite or professional levels. Yet these practices can also be observed at amateur and youth levels as specialized food products and more rigorous dietary regimens are finding their way into everyday exercise and training routines. Kane Race (2012) similarly describes how scientific discourses of (de)hydration emerged primarily through high-performance sport, but that these ideas were rapidly extended to comprise broader cultural norms to the point where “the consumer appears to be always at risk of dehydration” (p. 73).

As nutritionism comes to characterize to an even greater extent how and why we understand and consume food and drink, sports marketers invent new ways to differentiate sports-specific products from the abundance of commodities that could as easily be linked to health and nutrition (or more precise conditions such as dehydration). Consumable products are now frequently engineered to augment the athlete’s body when participating in different activities, and in some instances, different parts of one activity. One example of this phenomenon is Gatorade’s “G-Series” line that includes three products, Prime, Perform, and Recover, each specifically tailored to boost performance at a particular phase of the activity: either before, during, or after sport. Power Bar also markets “specially formulated” energy bars for different phases of a sporting activity. These commodities may occupy the liminal space between food and sport supplements; but the ways in which these products are manufactured to simulate flavors of everyday foods illustrates how our experience of consuming these items is very much connected to broader cultural ideas about food and eating. These examples demonstrate how the consumption of food and its component nutrients can be purposefully geared toward its particular function with the explicit intent of enhancing athlete performance. As food is evermore imagined through the discourses of nutritionism, a substantial contradiction materializes between the scientific language through which we know and experience food and the supposed naturalness that connects it so readily to the spirit of sport. It is with these shifts in contemporary understandings of food and consumption practices that present a real challenge to the widely taken-for-granted notion that food is natural and a normal part of sport and PETs are not.

Future Directions: Interrogating the Food–Sport Nexus

Given its centrality in the “highly medicalized, regime-driven” world of high-performance sport, we are advocating for scholars in the sociology of sport, and sport studies more broadly, to take food seriously as an object of study (Connor, 2009, p. 337). We consider the absent-presence of food in current critical scholarship concerning the athletic body as an example of the “performativity of theory” (Gibson-Graham, 2006), whereby investigations into the socially constructed boundaries between licit and illicit or natural and unnatural modes of performance enhancement are reified rather than dissolved. To engage with more nuanced conceptions of PETs, we argue that it is crucial for scholars to examine the taken-for-granted assumptions that produce the constellation of legal or legitimate substances and practices that comprise contemporary sport training regimes. We have highlighted food and eating as especially fruitful sites for this type of analysis. By interrogating how food is firmly positioned as more “natural” than illicit performance enhancers and shaped by broader modes of thinking about eating and nutrition, we have sought to further reveal and unsettle the underlying meanings and epistemologies that govern constructions of the athletic body and the “spirit of sport.”

Yet we do not seek to limit explorations into the nexus of food, sport, and the athletic body to these particular areas and are cognizant that such a complex, multi-layered topic requires multiple theoretical, empirical, and methodological approaches. We would encourage, for example, research that situates food within sport’s global economies of media integration and corporate sponsorship. Of course, certain branded food items or behaviors are frequently endorsed by celebrity athletes; Subway’s claim to be the “training restaurant” for a host of sports celebrities stands as a notable example. However, food products and logos are often seamlessly woven into mediated sports spectacles just as product placements have become commonplace in other areas of popular culture. Our vision for a thorough, nuanced investigation into food as a means to enhance athletic performance would consider how the fluid and contested boundaries that separate food from illicit PETs are enacted and legitimized through corporate sponsorship. The existence of a Major League Soccer franchise both owned by and named after a popular energy drink, even in the face of concerns about excessive caffeine consumption by athletes (Tanzi, 2010), demonstrates how certain foods become institutionalized through sport’s synergistic promotional culture.

Future research could also explore the material boundaries of food and traditional sport supplements, and the thresholds that produce common understandings of these substances. While many protein and creatine supplements are sold as powders, for example, they are consumed only after being mixed with water, milk, or other solvents to create the common protein shake. How does the permeability of these food substances affect the meanings athletes, trainers, or policymakers attribute to these practices? How much supplementation or fortification is required for a substance such as milk to be understood as something other than food, or other than natural? These types of questions could inform ethnographies or interviews investigating how food troubles contemporary sport policies concerning modes of performance enhancement. Similarly, while many of the most vivid examples of the shifting dichotomies around food and PETs exist on the edges of these binaries, the discourses of performance enhancement also affect and pervade everyday food cultures. The increased cultural emphasis on sports nutrition can be seen as privileging particular types of food choices and culinary traditions. Indeed, while nutritionism represents a substantial shift in how food is commonly understood, the effects and implications of these changes need to be considered according to varying cultural contexts and social relations of power (Biltekoff, 2013). Thus, it is important that future research explore how the institution of sports nutrition can work to marginalize specific food choices as illegitimate or “unhealthy,” and how these practices are constructed along gender, racial, ethnic, or class lines. The intricacies of the sport–food nexus and their implications for athletes require greater attention from scholars concerned with the athletic body and the politics of sport training regimes. We consider such a research agenda as contributing to an increasingly thorough sociological literature about PETs, as well as informing more nuanced policy around illicit and banned substances.