Jones 2014 Multimodal Claims

Rodney H. Jones*

The Multimodal Dimension of Claims in Food Packaging

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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 regulationsadopt a rather restricted, language-centric view of what a claim is, a view that focuses on how claimsrepresent reality as opposed to what claims “do”, the kinds of actions and human relationships they makepossible. This paper introduces a perspective on package claims that takes account of their performativeand multimodal dimensions. The pragmatic force of a food package, it argues, always depends on multipleconditions such as the identities of manufactures, retailers and customers, the conditions under whichpackages 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 multimodaldimension of claims is not limited to the intratextual links among different modes and different materialitieson the package, but also the intertextual links among the elements on the package and other modes andmaterialities in the environments in which customers make purchasing decisions. A multimodal view ofpackage claims attempts to understand how claims are situated within specific material contexts, specificsocial actions, and specific social practices, and how they function to index social identities for manufac-turers, retailers, customers, and even government officials who make and enforce regulations governingtheir use.

Keywords: mediated discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, package claims, regulatorydiscourse

DOI 10.1515/mc-2014-0001

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket.

–Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”, 1955

What makes a claim?

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 classifiedgovernment documents (see Figure 1).

The reason for most of these redactions is that the labels on many food products imported to HongKong from other countries contain nutritional claims that do not comply with Hong Kong’s new foodlabeling law (Public Health and Municipal Services Ordinance Cap 132 Food and Drugs Composition andLabeling Amendment), implemented in 2010. The Amendment stipulates rules for what sorts of claims areallowable and what sorts are not, which are stricter than those in the countries from which the importedfood comes.

The law has caused considerable confusion among shoppers, who sometimes find it difficult tointerpret the meaning of the redacted text they encounter in supermarkets and health food shops, andconsiderable anger among retailers and distributors, who are required to spend significant time and moneydetermining which claims are allowed and which are not and blacking out those that are not on each andevery item on their shelves (Jones et al. 2011a, 2011b).

Consider, for example, the package of Paul Newman popcorn shown in Figure 2Q1 .

*Corresponding author: Rodney H. Jones, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Multimodal Commun. 2014; 3(1): 1–11

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When this product is sold in Hong Kong, the claim “No Trans Fats” on the front of this package isblacked out. This, however, is not because the claim is “false” in any obvious way. In fact, according to theproduct’s “Nutrition Facts” panel, the amount of trans fat is indeed listed as 0 g. Under Hong Kong’s newlaw, however, in order to make the claim “no trans fats”, a product must fulfill three conditions: (1) it mustcontain not more than 0.3 g of trans fat per 100 g of food (a condition which this product fulfills), (2) it mustcontain 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 fatcontributes 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 manycustomers would consider important, is not regulated, since the law does not stipulate a definition for theword “natural” (in the same way it stipulates a definition for the word “no”).

Figure 1 Government information poster in Hong Kong (Center for Food Safety, Government of the Hong Kong SpecialAdministrative Region)

Nutrition facts

Serv. Size 3.5 Cup (30 g)130455 g (8& DV)2 g (10% DV)0 g0 mg (0% DV)200 mg (18% DV)18 g (6% DV)3 g (12% DV)0 g2 g(0% DV)(0% DV)(0% DV)(4% DV)

CaloriesCalories from fatTotal fatSaturated fatTrans fatCholesterolSodiumTotal CarbohydratesDietary FiberSugarsProteinVitamin AVitamin CCalciumIron

Figure 2 Newman’s own popcorn box

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This example illustrates some of the difficulties that can arise in the regulation of claims on foodpackages in situations where regulators, manufacturers, and customers might have different under-standings of what makes a claim “true” or “false”. There are, however, even more fundamentaldifficulties to the regulation of claims having to do with the question of what constitutes the action ofmaking a claim to begin with. There are, for example, a number of aspects to this package that mightcontribute to the action of “claiming”. Does, for example, the use of the adjective “oldstyle” constitute aclaim, 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, butdoes it also constitute a claim about the nature of this company that might lead customers to havecertain kinds of expectations about the contents of the package? Does the use of Paul Newman’s nameand image in any way contribute to the action of “claiming”Q5 ? Are customers led to believe that it is PaulNewman 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 thatclaim? Finally, would blacking out the claim “no trans fats” itself create a new claim, the claim that thisstatement is false and, by implication, that Paul Newman, or whoever is behind this claim, is out todeceive the public?

Regulatory discourse

The problems surrounding the regulation of discourse on food packages are, of course, not limited to HongKong. Food labeling laws in almost all of the countries where they have been implemented have had mixedeffects. Studies have shown that, despite increasingly detailed regulations regarding health and contentclaims, food labels continue to contain false or misleading information (Silverglade and Heller 2010), andeven when manufactures comply with regulations, consumers are often unsure of how to interpret theinformation they read on food packages (Balasubramanian and Cole 2002, Cowburn and Stockley 2005,Shine et al. 1997Q6 ).

One reason for this has to do with the way governments define “claims” to begin with, and the waysthis definition is translated into policy. Most governments adopt the definition of a nutrition claimformulated by the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a joint body of the UN and World HealthOrganization. The CAC (2007) defines a claim as “any representation, which states, suggests or impliesthat a food has particular nutritional properties.” It further distinguishes among different kinds ofnutrition claims such as content claims, that describe the level of a nutrient in a food, like “made withwhole grains” or “a good source of fibre”, and “health claims”, of which there are two kinds: functionclaims which describe the physiological role of a nutrient in biological functions (such as “can help lowerblood cholesterol”) and reduction of risk claims which relate the consumption of the food to the risk ofdeveloping a particular disease or health related condition (such as, “can help reduce the risk of heartdisease”).

All of these definitions, however, are based on a rather restricted, language-centric view of what a claimis, 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 ofengaging in the action of “claiming” without having to produce the kinds of explicit verbal representationsthat such regulations cover. Sometimes this simply involves replacing certain words (those whose defini-tions are regulated by law) with others (whose definitions are not). Manufacturers may, for example, use theword “natural” rather than the word “organic”, or claim that a product is “less sweet” rather than that itcontains “less sugar”, or state that a product provides “power”, as in Grapenuts cereal’s slogan “Powerfrom Grains”, or “goodness”, as in the slogan for Weetabix cereal: “The Goodness of Nature”. Sometimesmanufactures even provide their own “scientific sounding” definitions for the terms for which regulators

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have no definitions. Minute Maid Orange Juice, for example, offers the following explanation of the word“goodness”:

And did you know Minute Maid Premium Orange Juice has even more natural orange goodness – which scientists callflavanones – than the fresh-squeezed juice you get from those fancy juice bars? Goodness found only in citrus fruits.Scientists can call it anything they want. We call it good stuffQ7 .

By assigning to “goodness” a “scientific sounding” definition, the manufacturers make it seem like “Q8 it issomething 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 Juiceas compared to “fresh-squeezed” juice has some basis in science. A similar example of associating aproduct with an authoritative institution in order to give credence to an indirect claim can be seen on apackage of Green Giant “Immunity Blend” vegetables, which promotes the work of the Susan G. KomenFoundation with a picture of a large pink ribbon. The juxtaposition of the reference to the organization andthe 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 orqualifying statements with hedges or disclaimers. When the US government instructed General Mills toremove the claim: “can lower your cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks”, from its Cheerios package, the companyaltered their packages to read: “As part of a heart healthy diet, the soluble fiber in Cheerios can help reduceyour cholesterol,” changing the focus of the claim from one about Cheerios to one about “soluble fiber” andcontextualizing it within a broader set of dietary practices (“a heart healthy diet”Q9 ).

As regulators have become more specific about what kind of language is allowable, food manufacturershave become more inventive about engaging in the action of claiming without having to resort to explicitlinguistic statements at all. Planters, for example, cannot claim on its packages of walnuts that they reducethe risk of heart disease. If they want to make this claim, they must use the following FDA approved language:

Supportive but not conclusive research shows that eating 1.5 ounces per day of walnuts, as part of a low saturated fat andlow 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 riskof heart disease by refraining from making such a claim altogether, and instead simply naming theirproduct “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 coverssome 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 aresimply too many ways for speakers or writers to create implicature, and so many opportunities for plausibledeniability, that most labeling regulations, and most challenges brought under such regulations, limitthemselves to the literal definitions of words.

The problem here is twofold. First, it has to do with the nature of language itself. Most regulations focusprimarily on the propositional content of claims, judging their truth or falsehood by whether or not theyfulfill certain semantic conditions (as with the definition of “no trans fats” discussed above). Linguists anddiscourse analysts have long known, however, that the “force” of a piece of communication – the kind ofaction it is able to accomplish – is not necessarily dependent on its semantic meaning, but may also involveconditions beyond the meaning of the words, conditions involving things like who is speaking or writingthe words, who is hearing or reading them, and under what conditions this speaking and hearing or readingand writing are taking place (Austin 1976), as well as how texts and utterance interact with readers’ andhearers’ expectations about what should be written or said in different circumstances and about commu-nication in general (Grice 1989). Claiming is not just a matter of representation. It is something that isperformed in particular circumstance, and whether or not the performance is successfully “brought off”(Goffman 1959) depends upon those circumstances.

4 R. H. Jones: The Multimodal Dimension of Claims in Food Packaging

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The second problem is that the action of making a claim is rarely just a matter of delivering a boundedmessage in a single semiotic mode (such as a verbal statement). In speech, whether or not an utterance istaken as a claim depends on the interaction of the words that are uttered and many other signals, includingutterances 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 asa claim may depend on its interaction with other statements in the same text or in related texts, as well asother 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 alwaysmultimodal.

In the remainder of this paper, I will focus on these two problems, first considering the performativenature of claims on food packages, and then examining their multimodal dimensions, showing that theissue of regulating claims on food packages is much more complex than requiring manufacturers to removeor black out “false statements”.

The performative nature of claims

To say that regulators focus on the representative dimension of claims rather than their performativedimension means that they tend to assess claims strictly according to the truth or falsity of the propositionwhich 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 itasserts the truth of the proposition about what Cocoa Krispies does, but it also has the force of many otherkinds of speech acts. It functions as a commissive, a kind of promise or pledge that, if you feed your childCocoa Krispies he or she will be healthier. It can also be taken as a directive, a suggestion to feed your childCocoa Krispies. The font in which the statement is presented, with the word immunity “screaming out” inlarge block letters, along with the excited faces of Snap, Crackle, and Pop gazing down at it, also give to thestatement the force of an expressive. In fact, claims are always more than just assertives, and it is this veryfact that makes their regulation necessary. What is potentially “dangerous” about claims is not what theyassert, but what they promise, express, suggest, or direct the reader to do (such as feeding their child asteady diet of Cocoa Krispies).

The mistaken belief that a claim is nothing more than the performance of an assertion was dubbed bySearle (1969) “the assertion fallacy”, the “fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of thespeech 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 theexpressed proposition. The performance of the speech act is not the performance of this truth; rather, it isthe performance of the commitment – the performance of a particular relationship of the speaker to what issaid, as well as a particular relationship between the hearer and what is said. The main condition of anassertion, 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 ofan assertion is that what is asserted is somehow relevant to the hearer, that the hearer needs to beinformed, reminded, or otherwise apprised of the information. Following from this, the signs that aremost 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 thereader as someone for whom this news ought to be very important, Furthermore, just as important as thesewords in the performance of the claim are the familiar faces of Snap, Crackle, and Pop as the sources ofthese words, as “people” whom, on some gut level, parents trust, if only because they have become suchiconic characters in Western culture.

In other words, the important thing about claims is not just what is being claimed, but the way theclaim constructs a certain set of social conditions, the way it constructs a certain identity (in this case, that


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of a parent) and a certain set of values (wishing to protect the health of one’s child) for the reader, as wellas a certain identity for the writer, the identity of someone qualified to make the claim. Sometimesmanufactures construct “trustworthy” identities through the appropriation of the “voice of science” orsome other authoritative discourse by including things like medical jargon, scientific drawings, andpictures of people wearing lab coats. For well-established brands, however, a much more effective strategyis 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 someoneto make a claim is not just knowledge of the proposition, but, more importantly, knowledge of you andwhat is relevant to you, and this kind of knowledge is most effectively performed by the faces of thesefamiliar 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 iteffective. This is something the food industry has understood for a long time. As far back as 1929, homeeconomist and industry spokesperson Christine Frederick identified the modern shopper’s predicament asone not of having too little information, but of having too much. She recommended that homemakers learnbrand names and leave the rest to food manufacturers. The whole point of branding is to create arelationship of trust between the consumer and the product, a relationship within which claims can gaincurrency. What gives potency to the claims on a bottle of Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice that it “purifies yourbody” and “strengthens your immune system”, is that they are attributed to the people who grew thecranberries, people who “know a good thing when they grow it”. Never mind that cranberry growers are notusually considered experts on the workings of the immune system.

The notion that claims are “performative”, then, goes beyond the pragmatic sense of the term – thatthey “perform” certain “speech acts”. What product packages perform are more than just speech acts. Theyare culturally recognizable and emotionally resonant stories and relationships. We may not know muchabout the Hopi Indians and their practices of grinding corn, but the picture of Hopi women engaging in thispractice on the back of a box of Nature’s Path Mesa Sunrise cereal gives the reader a comfortable feeling ofauthenticity.

Of course nobody today would propose that regulators take this company to task for misleadingcustomers into thinking that their cereal is made by Hopi Indians in the traditional way. This is not becausethis is not a claim. It is more because our standards for truth, particularly when it comes to claims madenon-linguistically, have changed over the years, In 1913, Dr Harvey W. Wiley, director of the US governmentBureau of Chemistry (predecessor of the Food and Drug Administration), did see fit to take Carnation to taskfor the pictures of cows that they featured in their advertisements. He wrote:

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 Icould not find the farms and herds in the picture. What I saw made me sick. It is unethical, deceptive and false to advertisethat the product of a condensary is made from cows kept in a state of contentment in perennial pastures when in point offact the animals are housed in dark, ill smelling rooms, covered with filth.

(quoted in Vileisis 2010: 146)

The multimodality dimension of claims

This last point brings me to the second problematic aspect of claims that makes them difficult to regulate inany simple or straightforward way, that is the fact that claims are always multimodal. That is to say, claimsalways have some kind of non-verbal dimension. Sometimes the multimodal dimension of claims can beseen 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 ofthe food itself.


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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 fromthe way the modes combine to form a “semiotic aggregate” (Scollon and Scollon 2003). On the package ofMesa Sunrise Cereal described above, for example, verbal claims like “organic” and “low fat” are reinforcedby the color of the box, the images of a corn plant and the sunrise, the petroglypic font used for the product’sname, and even the shape and texture of the cereal. Similarly the claim on the package of Zesta SaltineCrackers that they are “Made with Whole Wheat” is reinforced by the dark brown color of the crackers insidethe box, a color which, however, does not come from the whole wheat with which they are made, which isactually 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 arethe 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 offood packages bias people’s perception of quantity and price (see, for example, Chandon 2013), lessattention has been paid to the relationship between the materiality of food packages and claims abouttheir contents. Food packages are quite unique as far as media go in that they are polyfunctional. They bothcarry the text and contain the food. Packaging is a tangible, three-dimensional object that carries its textthrough the ongoing experiences of shopping, cooking, eating, and even disposing of the package. Foodpackages have become intimate parts of customer’s lives, residing in their homes and sometimes taking ondecorative functions in kitchens. When it comes to claims, one of the most important things about apackage is that it is often the materiality of the package that makes it necessary to make a claim about itscontents in the first place, since most packages prevent customers from using other means to ascertain thecontents or the quality of the food inside, means that are traditionally used to assess non-packaged foodlike looking, touching, and smelling.

The physical features of packages, such as “no-drip” spouts, microwavable containers, tamper proofseals, and re-sealable zip-lock bags can function as claims regarding all sorts of things including a food’squality, quantity, convenience, cleanliness, and even its health benefits. Arnott’s, for example, can implythat its cookies can help you lose weight by calling their environmentally unfriendly single serve packagestheir “special portion control range”.

The multimodal dimension of claims, however, is not limited to the intratextual links among differentmodes and different materialities, but also the intertextual links among the elements on the package andother modes and materialities in the environments in which these packages are placed, whether they be incustomers’ kitchens or on the shelves of supermarkets. Food packages always constitute what the Scollons(2003)Q10 call “discourses in place”, and so their meaning is always partially determined by indexical relation-ships between the package and other texts in the material world.

Most supermarkets, for example, are arranged around a system of classifying food packages in aislesbased on their contents (see Figure 3). Where a product is placed in the supermarket, then, can alsofunction as a kind of claim. It matters, for example, that granola bars are shelved with breakfast cerealsrather than in the candy section, though the ingredients of many granola bars more closely resemble thoseof candy bars than they do breakfast cereals.

Even the layouts of entire supermarkets and the facades of the buildings in which they are housed havecome to function as claims for the kind of food customers can expect to find there. The green and brownstorefront 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 explicitverbal 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 socialpractice engaged in by real people at a particular place and at a particular moment in time. One problemwith attempts to regulate the discourse on food packages is that regulators sometimes idealize these acts ofreading, seeing them as separate from the contexts in which they occur. This tendency toward decontex-tualization is rather dramatically illustrated by the poster pictured in Figure 4Q11 , which was issued by theHong Kong Food and Environmental Hygiene Department to instruct people to read food labels.


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Figure 3 A typical supermarket aisle (credit: Rowen Peter, Creative Commons License http://www.flickr.com/photos/rowan_peter/5416712673)

Figure 4 Poster from the Hong Kong Food and Environmental Hygiene Department


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The image on the poster constructs the act of reading labels as divorced from any social practice evenremotely related to buying or preparing food. Instead, what is pictured is an idealized old-fashioned literacypractice of a mother reading a label to her child in the same way mothers typically read story books theirchildren as a way of teaching them how to read. Perhaps the strangest thing about the image is thebackground which shows not a supermarket nor a kitchen, but a playground, a setting in which the practiceof reading a food package seems rather out or placeQ12 .

The contexts in which food packages are actually read, however, usually involve customers in muchmore 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 andassessing 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 interactionorders (like a family) by particular historical bodies (like mothers shopping with their kids after a hard daysworkQ13 ).

Within these complex and dynamic combinations of social practices, claims on food packages can takeon a range of different meanings and uses. They may function as claims about the content or quality ofwhat 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 takepictures of his shopping cart and post them on his Facebook Timeline. When he does this, he is alwayscareful to arrange the healthy looking foods – those sporting conspicuous nutritional claims – at the top ofthe basket and to hide the unhealthy looking foods underneath. In this case package claims are less aboutclaiming 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 customersunderstand the texts on baby food labels. They called the paper “Label literacy”, which they defined as “theconsumer’s ability to select those labels and parts of labels relevant to their needs, to interpret wording toobtain needed information, and to assess critically the manufacturer’s intentions” (p. 146). Important as thispaper has been in helping us understand the complex interaction between readers and texts when it comesto food labels, the definition of “label literacy” it employs is essentially the same as that employed bylegislators and regulators who attempt to control the claims manufacturers make on food packages byrestricting the kinds of words that they use. It is a definition based on a view of food packages as essentiallyverbal 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 morethan 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 forregulators to successfully regulate the claims that they “perform”), a new version of “label literacy” isneeded, 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 semioticaggregates in which multiple modes and materialities interact, forming webs of intratextual and intertextuallinks, which customers (and regulators) must navigate. They will be assessed not just in terms of what theymean, but also in terms of what they do, not just in terms of the “information” they contain, but also interms of the social relationships and social identities they make possible.

Food packages have become important “boundary objects” (Eden 2011, Star and Greismer 1989) in mostmodern societies, mediating the complex web of interaction orders and historical bodies that go intoproducing 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 – relationswith family members, advice from healthcare providers, favorite recipes, cooking programs on TV, and


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interactions with friends at supermarket checkout counters and on Facebook pages. The problem is, that forall their multimodality, and for all the wealth of “information” they offer through images, and colors, andtexts and tables of nutritional facts, food packages do not so much translate the practices of foodproduction 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 faceof Paul Newman. The real problem with food packages might not be what they claim, but what they fail toclaim.

The most important questions we should be asking about claims, therefore, may not be whether theyare true or false, or what should be allowed and what should not. The most important questions might beabout what the need to make claims in the first place reveals about the way we have come to regard ourfood: as something that we read rather than taste. Meals themselves seem more and more like monomodaltexts that are increasingly divorced from the social contexts in which they are produced and consumed. Youmight eat your “Happy Meal” at home, at your desk, in your car, utterly oblivious to the implicit claim thatit is supposed to make you “happy”. A tomato that you grow yourself, on the other hand, does not need aclaim. It has a touch, a smell, a taste. It does not need a label.

Funding: This research was made possible by the General Research Fund Grant “The Discourse of FoodLabeling in Hong Kong: Public Policy and Discursive Practice” (#CityU144110) from the Hong KongResearch Grants Council.Q14

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practices and pragmatic expectations in the regulation of food labeling. In: A paper presented at the Applied Linguisticsand Professional Practice (ALAPP) Conference, Cardiff, UK, June 23–24.

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Washington, DC: Island Press.

Bionote

Rodney Jones is Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at City University of Hong Kong. He is co-editor (with Sigrid Norris) of Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis (Routledge, 2005).His latest book is Health and Risk Communication: An Applied Linguistic Perspective (Routledge, 2013).


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Jones 2014 Multimodal Claims

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