Comfort Foods and Inconvenient Truths

It’s a lot easier to think about slowing climate change with your diet when you’re not in fear of dying in a pandemic.

Over the past 40+ years, the natural and organic food products industry has been growing in size and influence as the self-declared antidote to the hyper processed foods that have dominated grocery store aisles for generations.

The Natural Products Expo West, the biggest American trade show for the natural and organic food products industry, started in 1981 with 3,000 attendees and ballooned to a whopping 85,540 attendees with 3,521 exhibiting companies from 132 different countries in 2018.

On the consumer side, Whole Foods has become a household name with 100s of others like it and their effect has brought scores of natural and organic products to mainstream retail giants like Kroger, Costco, and WalMart. So-called “better for you” (BFY) foods are everywhere now and you might expect that big food is imploding, but that’s not the case.

During PepsiCo’s October 2022 earnings report, the company announced third-quarter revenue grew by 9% and over 20% profit growth compared to the same quarter a year ago. This was good news for the soft drink and snack giant, especially as inflation continued to rear its ugly head on Americans at that time. PepsiCo’s CEO Ramon Laguarta stated on an earnings call that “our brands are being stretched to higher price points and consumers are following us.”

Despite having more BFY snacks and beverages available to us than ever before, the old guard big food companies appear to still be finding success today. While these companies have been investing and acquiring many of the better for you brands that have scaled, the iconic legacy brands like Coke, Pepsi, Doritos, Oreos, and others are still the businesses that keep the lights on for big food companies.

If you want to understand why things in the world are the way they are, look at the people who profit from the status quo. Big Food companies are key players in the global food industry, which accounts for 26% of all greenhouse gas emissions. The kinds of products they decide to sell have huge influence on what and how farmers grow crops. But with customers staying loyal—for the moment—to their products and propping up earnings, there is little economic incentive for Big Food to overhaul its agricultural footprint to be more sustainable or regenerative.

In progressive food entrepreneur circles, the narrative that BFY brands would eventually replace their junk food counterparts has been the rallying cry for a long time. While I’m supportive of this movement, it’s easy to get trapped in a bubble and forget that much of America and the world still eats the brands that progressive foodies look to replace.

Betcha Can’t Eat Just One

Unencumbered from any sort of meaningful human or planetary health mission, legacy food brands are maniacally focused on delivering maximum pleasure to all. Food scientists carefully calibrate these products in lab kitchens to reach the perfect “bliss point,” where there is enough flavor to send streams of dopamine through your body but not so much that your taste buds become fully satiated and you want to stop.

The 1967 Lay’s potato chip commercial, where actor Bert Lahr (who played the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz) is literally dressed as a devil holding a bag of Lay’s challenging himself, in human Bert form, with the slogan, “betcha can’t eat just one,” is a direct showcase of big food trying to get you to indulge without abandon. And while the marketing has become less overt over the years, the main call-to-action to keep snacking and drinking has not.

In the years leading up to the pandemic, BFY food brands were on a roll, catching consumer attention, investment dollars, grocery store shelf space, and taking the wind out of big food’s stranglehold on the food industry. But once the pandemic hit and all hell broke loose worldwide, we saw that a lot of these seemingly out of fashion big food brands spiked in sales.

In early 2020 as the fear set in from the pandemic, brands like Campbell's reported soup sales soaring 59% year-over-year, Prego pasta sauce increasing 52%, and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers climbing nearly 23%. The renewed interest in junk food, fleeting as it may have been, was a reminder that emotions ultimately have the power to dominate our food choices especially in times of stress. Suddenly the big brands that were meant to be left behind by BFY brands showed signs of life.

Our Hierarchy of Needs

We all exist on some level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Once fundamental safety and physiological needs are met, humans have a surplus of logical and emotional bandwidth to devote to higher order pursuits like self-esteem, and self-actualization. At the start of the pandemic when the situation was especially unknown and frightening, people’s priorities fell down the hierarchy a few steps to ensuring that basic safety and physiological needs were met.

The higher order goal of making a moral statement with our snacks and support better health and planetary outcomes took a momentary backseat to simply ensuring there was any food in the house at all and that we weren’t going to get infected. Even in progressive leaning states like California, environmental initiatives like their 2016 ban on plastic grocery bags was suspended temporarily in April 2020 to protect grocery workers from potentially being infected by customers bringing their reusable grocery bags from home. There’s a pecking order of priorities and it seems that plastic pollution will always take a backseat to protecting oneself from a lethal disease.

This natural human instinct to seek comfort and safety in times of existential threat helps to explain why legacy junk food sales soared at the start of the pandemic. It’s a lot easier to think about solving climate change with your diet when you’re not in fear of dying in a pandemic. In fact, something as mundane as being “hangry” is all it takes for someone to seek out whatever food they can find, regardless of that food’s carbon footprint. When it comes to making a food choice right now, my immediate and visceral hunger is always going to feel more real than the thought of average global temperatures rising 5.4°C by the year 2100.

For Many, “Big Food” is just “Food”

Pandemic driven behaviors aside, eating big food produced foods is simply a way of life for many people worldwide. The better for you snack and beverage movement has momentum for sure, but it’s still in the minority when you look at the full spectrum of eaters in America. In 2020, total organic food product sales accounted for just 6% of total food sales in America. While that number was a 12.4% increase from the year before, it still means that 94% of the market is conventionally produced.

Many people unfortunately live in situations where basic safety and physiological needs are not guaranteed. Their definition of “better for you food” is simply having food. And other people are just too preoccupied with everyday life to see their food choices as a referendum on climate change and big food, and just buy food that’s tasty and affordable. Convincing Americans to make more sustainable food choices is as much an education and awareness problem as it is a poverty and inequality problem.

How can we consistently expect masses of people living below the poverty line to educate themselves about food sustainability and pay a premium for BFY / local / organic food products when they are primarily preoccupied with making sure they have any food at all? The allure of a McDonald’s dollar menu cheeseburger or a $0.79 bag of Lay’s chips is real and often necessary for those with very limited means.

This is not at all to pass judgement on the eating habits of those living in poverty, but it’s recognition that humans with limited means need to take care of their basic needs first (e.g., eat the $1 McDonald’s cheeseburger) before they are afforded the option to think about how their meal affects global issues like climate change (e.g., eat the $11 locally sourced Sweetgreen salad). As they say on a airplane, you’ve got to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you can help others with theirs.

“Place the oxygen mask on yourself before assisting others.”

Sadly for the planet, making sustainable food choices is a luxury for many and it’s still far too easy to reach for that tasty, comforting, cheap snack at the corner store. I’ve written at length on how sustainable food companies need to tap into the power of hedonism to make planet-smart eating the most inherently desirable form of eating. And many authors have written about how food in America is artificially cheap due to the considerable subsidies and commoditization of cash crops like corn, wheat and soy. It feels like the deck is stacked against making the most planet-smart and personal health friendly food options the most accessible. But we in the food industry must continue to meet people where they are and find a happy medium between a consumer’s need and the planet’s needs.

The Sideways Effect

One way to do this is to keep exploring ways to make distant, abstract, big problems and opportunities feel more immediate. It’s hard to imagine the future and feel what it’s like to live in a world where the ice caps have melted, or even to understand what it might be like to develop heart disease or diabetes later in life.

But if you look to Hollywood, that industry has been able to build worlds on screen that people immerse themselves in. Star Wars is fiction, but the mythology of it has virtually become religion for its fans and they will spend inordinate amounts of time and energy believing that they are living in that world through costumes, conventions, video games, and more. Media like the satirical, Don’t Look Up, or the dystopian climate change series Extrapolations, paint a vivid picture of natural disasters ending the world as we know it, but few showcase food’s influence on those disasters.

How might we harness the power of the most successful storytellers to build a world that shows the effects of our food choices today? Solving things like climate change certainly require a lot of science, but it also requires our culture to change and art is one proven way to shift cultural attitudes and behaviors.

Sideways, 2005

In 2005, the wine film Sideways won multiple Academy Awards including the Oscar for best picture. The main character, played by Paul Giamatti, romanticized the Pinot Noir grape and despised Merlot. Following the success of that film, the wine industry witnessed Pinot Noir sales skyrocket 170% while the Merlot market took a dive. There is no objective reason why Pinot Noir is better than Merlot, but the movie shifted consumer buying patterns anyway. Pop culture, when done well, can have profound impacts on how people make food choices, for better or worse, logical or illogical.

While the state of Earth’s climate doesn’t hinge on the popularity of Pinot Noir or Merlot grapes, I wonder how someone could create a pop culture meme that shifts people’s preferences toward healthier, climate-smart foods just like Sideways did for those grapes.

Food Sustainability Needs the Best Storytellers

Shifting food behaviors at scale can’t be done with logical arguments alone. It needs to deal with emotions, and those in the sustainable food movement need to become as masterful at connecting with people’s emotions as they are with their logic. Why are we not encouraging the world’s best storytellers to help tell the story of how food choices can profoundly affect your health and the planet’s?

If Coca-Cola and their ad agencies can build one of the most recognizable cultural narratives in the history of the world around a red can of corn syrup and carbonated water, why can’t anyone do this for nutritionally balanced, biodiverse diets made from regeneratively raised animals and crops? I refuse to accept the fact that it can’t be done, rather it simply hasn’t been attempted with the same force that Coke applied to its flagship product.

Food choices are emotional choices and flavor is the lubricant that enables your emotional engine to run. Over the last 100 years, Big Food has proven that selling flavor leads to profit. For the next 100 years, the world’s food producers need to prove that selling flavor can also lead to a healthier planet and people.