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Paper long abstract:

For the marketing of functional food, scientific evidence is an operator regulating access to the market. Legally, no medical properties can be ascribed to food, such as curing or preventing disease. Food can only be statistically related to 'health' or 'the reduction of disease risk', which both lie ahead in time and are not immediately observable. Therefore, scientific evidence alone is insufficient in order to market functional foods. This paper unfolds cases where scientific evidence is echoing moral imperatives, standing on the fragile edge which delineate medicine from values. For instance, the morality of these industrial foods lies in the relationship that humans must develop with these foods, based on trust and cooperation. Functional foods will only realize their promise if humans put their faith in them and cooperate by consuming specific products and adopting healthy lifestyles. They can be understood as "matter of concern" (Latour 2004).

In this paper, we analyse recent advertisements of cholesterol-lowering margarine. This issue will allow us to ask more encompassing questions about specific forms of cooperation that are required by objects generated by a 'speculative economy of the promise' (Stengers, 2013). We intend to tell the story of how the involved actors revolving around functional foods cross lines between medicine and morals, humour and irony. This distinction matters when it comes to the politics of solidarity, as we intend to show.