How Food Fads Could Save the Planet
Can we make foods that support biodiversity and regenerative agriculture the next Butter Board, Cronut, or Flaming Hot Cheeto?
75% of the food consumed globally comes from just 12 plants and 5 animal species: sugar, maize, rice, wheat, potato, soy, cassava, tomato, banana, onion, apple, grape, beef & dairy, chicken & eggs, pork, goat milk & meat, and sheep. This is in spite of the fact that there are thousands of edible species available to us on the planet. How did we arrive at a food system where we only consume such a small proportion of the Earth’s bounty?
Since the invention of agriculture, humans learned that by focusing their energy on producing larger quantities of a smaller set of crops, they could more easily maximize total food output. The Green Revolution in the 1960s accelerated this greatly by introducing industrial farming to the world. The current day food system is and has been dominated by monocultures for a long time. While monocultures are good at growing prodigious amounts of food, it happens at the expense of biodiversity and natural resilience in our ecosystems.
Today there are up to one million plant and animal species on Earth that are threatened with extinction, many within decades. Because monocultures typically don’t leverage the symbiotic and soil enriching effects of more biodiverse farming methods, they depend on synthetic fertilizers and other man-made inputs to make up for soil health deficiencies. Monoculture food systems are also more susceptible to big disruption events like the infamous Irish Potato Famine and the more recent Panama Disease, which has twice threatened to kill off the world’s banana supply, one of the world’s most highly concentrated monocultures. When you put all of your proverbial eggs in one basket, all it takes is one little germ to ruin everything.
Planetary biodiversity isn’t just good for ecosystem health and resilience, it represents a vast abundance of foods, flavors, nutrients, medicines, and value that shape our society and enrich our lives. But we are in a vicious circle where monoculture agriculture is feeding monoculture diets. Farmers are only going to cultivate foods that people will eat, so if eaters continue to derive 75% of their nutrition from those 12 plants and 5 animal species, then that’s what farmers will be incentivized to do.
By some estimates there are over 1,000 different banana varieties, many with distinct and delicious flavors. Yet, the Cavendish Banana, which is the banana stocked at almost every grocery store and fruit stand in the world, represents 47% of global banana supply. Sure, there are growers who offer exotic varieties like the Ice Cream banana, with its signature custardy, vanilla flavor, but it’s hard to survive as a grower who only grows a fruit that virtually no one knows about. Somehow the world kind of decided that we only needed one main banana, so for any farmer making a living off bananas, they almost have to grow the Cavendish. The same dynamic exists for other big crops like potatoes, corn, wheat and more.
Is there a way we could improve biodiversity by encouraging eaters to try new foods and add them to their diet? Could inspiring people to be more adventurous eaters create more demand for long-tail foods like the Ice Cream banana and so many other foods so we can move away from the current highly-concentrated system of farming?
The Hardest Thing to Do In Food
Legendary Boston Red Sox left fielder Ted Williams famously said in 1982 that “hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports.” In the food industry, the hardest thing to do is get people to add a new food to their diet. In professional baseball, you’re considered a star if you can hit the ball roughly 30% of the time, while in food, just 15% of the thousands of new food products launched every year will survive. With a career batting average of 34.4%, Ted Williams was one of the greatest of all time at doing the hardest thing there is in sports, but he never had to launch a new food product where simply surviving past the first year happens half as frequently than an all-star can hit a baseball.
Adding a new food to someone’s eating routine is exceptionally hard. “American families, on average, repeatedly buy the same 150 items, which constitute as much as 85% of their household needs,” says marketing consultant, Jack Trout. And with busier lives than ever, people simply don’t have the mental bandwidth to reconsider all the items in their weekly grocery shop. Even the most adventurous eaters have a discrete handful of foods they eat on a regular basis and most families repeatedly shuffle through the same dozen or so foods for dinner every month.
Humans can only handle so much novelty in their lives. In 1956, Harvard cognitive psychologist George A. Miller famously published one of the most cited papers in psychology where he posited that the average human mind could only hold “seven, plus or minus two” objects in their short term memory at one time. So when it comes time to answer the daily question, “what should we eat for breakfast / lunch / dinner?” it’s unfathomable that someone would stand in their kitchen listing off dozens of potential foods they could eat. Even if we’ve eaten 100s of different foods in our lifetimes at least once, we all tend to fall back into choosing one of the top 5 or 6 things that we like to eat during an average week. There’s even a day of the week defined by a food—Taco Tuesday—that’s really just a way to reduce the mental exertion of figuring out what to eat every night for dinner.
A Tale of Two Sushi Eaters
Years ago I sat down at a sushi restaurant in New York City for a meal. When having sushi, I almost always order Omakase style or at least an assortment platter of nigiri with a roll or two. The variety of flavors is something that I love about sushi and in the hands of a masterful sushi chef who is in tune with the rhythms of the fish markets, you can dine on an assortment that is varied and delicious. Mid-meal, a man sat next to me at the sushi counter and proceeded to order 12 pieces of Otoro, fatty tuna belly. To be fair, Otoro is one of the most decadent, wonderful bites of sushi one can eat. There’s simply nothing like it and it’s come to represent the more luxurious aspects of sushi amongst aficionados. I had an Otoro piece served to me somewhere in the middle of my Omakase tasting and while it was incredible, I appreciated the fact that I got to taste over a dozen other pieces of fish too.
As I finished my meal and could see the man next to me plowing his way through his big platter of Otoro, it occurred to me that the way he was eating strongly resembled the American food system. Between producers who create prodigious amounts of monocultures, to the food media who is constantly looking for the next big thing in food, American eaters tend to find something they love then eat as much of it as possible.
I get why this happens, since it’s far easier to manage a farm or a food magazine if you focus all your energies into promoting the hell out of one thing rather than spending a little time on dozens of things. If the Otoro guy and I had to write a story about our respective meals, he would probably have a much easier time writing about tuna belly, as opposed to me describing my journey through 21 different sushi bites, each with their own nuances. Simplicity is almost always easier to sell than complexity.
But while he’s completely entitled to eat the way he wants to eat, doubling down on one ingredient in a literal sea of ingredients isn’t helping the state of biodiversity and the health of fish populations. Tuna populations have been in trouble for years now since they became the “it” fish of the sushi bar. It’s comforting and exciting about a plate full of fatty tuna bites because you know it’s going to deliver maximum pleasure and you’re not going to be challenged by anything new that may clash with your palate. It’s the same reason why people gravitate toward eternally consistent restaurants like McDonald’s versus rolling the dice on eating a locally sourced, seasonally appropriate meal where the final result is not assured. Food should provide comfort, so I don’t begrudge anyone who doesn’t want to gamble on the quality of asparagus in early April or some foraged mushroom they’ve never tried before.
And while one guy in a sushi bar eating a dozen slices of tuna isn’t going to decimate the Bluefin Tuna population, this kind of highly concentrated eating happens globally at scale, which is a problem that can lead to species extinction or disasters like the Irish Potato Famine. So what can we do to compel the Otoro guy to add a 13th piece of non-Tuna sushi onto his plate? And could we shift the food system toward more biodiversity and resilience if we got everyone to add just one or two more things to their diet?
The Anatomy of a Food Fad
While it may be difficult to introduce new foods into people’s diets at scale, it’s not impossible. We’ve had food fads for decades that capture the attention and stomachs of a nation for a while until the next one comes. From Fondue and Quiche in the 1970s, to Atkins Diets and Sun Dried Tomatoes in the 1990s, to Bone Broth and Kale in the 2010s, there has always been something that everyone decides to eat all at once. These fads alone prove that you can get a mass of people to adopt a new food rather quickly, but making that food stick in their diet forever is an entirely different challenge. But is there something we can learn about how those fads caught on and use that knowledge to make foods with significant biodiversity value the next trendy foods?
While there is never any guarantee of success, there are certain characteristics of recent food trends that may provide a blueprint for how to set up future foods for success with eaters. Of course there are obvious table stakes like being delicious (at least to a meaningful part of the population), having some kind of tangible nutritional or health effect that people can feel, and being accessible to a wide enough audience in terms of price and availability. Without at least two of those fundamental factors met, no food has a good chance of becoming the next big thing. But assuming those things are all true, there are a host of other traits that most trendy foods share.
Having Your Cake and Eating it Too: The most exciting thing someone can hear is that they can eat something with few(er) bad repercussions to their health or the environment. This is the implied message behind brands like the Impossible and Beyond Burgers, Halo Top ice cream, Magic Spoon cereal, Annie’s mac and cheese, and even White Claw hard seltzer.
Foods like this become trendy in part because they’re perceived as being nutritionally and/or environmentally superior to legacy alternatives so eaters don’t have to feel as guilty about consuming them. There’s something powerful about being given permission to indulge in something without limit that speaks to our pleasure centers in a way that’s absolutely liberating and hard to resist.
Just a Spoonful of Sugar: For the “have your cake and eat it too” foods, they’re all grown-up versions of foods that everyone is already familiar with. But for less recognizable foods, finding ways to translate them from their original form to a form that is more relatable or palatable to the target audience is key. This is, literally and figuratively, the “spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down” strategy.
Danone did this masterfully back in the 1940s where they introduced their yogurt to Americans with the addition of a bit of sweet fruit jam on the bottom. Chobani reprised this move decades later when they introduced the then unfamiliar Greek Yogurt style to Americans and had equally great success by adding fruit jam to their yogurts. Countless other foods in America have taken flight amongst eaters by adding sugar to either mitigate unfamiliar tastes in the food or to simply hammer people’s dopamine receptors into submission. The “spoonful of sugar” method doesn’t work today as well as it used to, with more people actively trying to curb sugar consumption, but for nearly 100 years it was an almost surefire way to get people to like something.
When presented with an unfamiliar food, sugar is a flavor that virtually all humans will recognize. We’re hard wired since birth to crave sweet things, as sweetness signals high caloric content that’s valuable to rapidly developing bodies. It also just feels good. Sugar acts like a liaison, facilitating introductions between two parties who have never met and serving as the common ground they can both agree on.
Rating Cars in Horsepower: But sugar isn’t the only thing that can grease the wheels of a burgeoning relationship between human and new food trend. The wildly popular Cronut was an inspired amalgamation of two things people already knew and loved—donuts and croissants—and had the right balance of newness and familiarity to catch on like wildfire. Liquid Death canned water, with its $700 million valuation, became trendy by simply rejecting every established brand and packaging norm in the bottled water category to stand out in a saturated field with a completely new narrative.
And all the way back in the 1970s, the California Roll was invented and serves to this day as a gateway drug for Westerners to the world of sushi, by swapping the then super foreign idea of eating raw fish with more approachable ingredients that hooked everyone. Cars were originally rated in horsepower because it was a way to compare a new technology to the old one. These food trends took off by following the same formula of introducing something entirely new in the context of foods that people already recognized.
High Aspiration to Effort Ratio: Of course you can’t ignore the role that digital media has had in amplifying food trends. While simply posting about a food on social media is far from a promise for it to go viral, some kinds of foods tend to do better than others because they seem aspirational, visually appealing, and easy to recreate all at once. The avocado toast took flight because it was a healthy thing that was simple to prepare and customize. The more recently popular charcuterie board trend (and its more unhinged cousin, the butter board) was a revival of a thing that’s existed forever, but was done in a way that was more visually inspiring than ever before and highly attainable for the average person to create and post to their feeds.
These are examples of food trends where the aspirational feeling of accomplishment is much larger than the effort required to participate in the trend. There are obviously an endless amount of other food fads that rapidly come and go on TikTok and Instagram but the ones that seem to endure longer are the ones where they feel less like a one-time novelty and more of a thing that can reasonably be integrated into one’s diet for the long haul. Maybe it’s just me, but I can see myself making avocado toast and charcuterie boards well into my old age, but don’t think I’ll be making nacho tables in 5 years.
Having your cake and eating it too. Adding a spoonful of sugar. Rating cars in horsepower. And having a high aspiration to effort ratio. There are many ways to turn a food into a trend, but these are the common threads across many of yesterday and today’s trendiest foods. I think anyone can apply one or more of these lessons to the food project they’re working on and gain at least a small edge in attempting to gain notoriety. But just because you can try and make something go viral, does it mean you should?
Biodiversity Gone Viral
For years I’ve been ambivalent about the idea food trends in general. I know that sounds counterintuitive coming from a guy who writes and works under “The Future Market” moniker and earns a living in part by helping brands study and predict food trends. But I’ve done countless interviews, speeches, and panels over the years where people ask me what next year’s big trending food is going to be. And while I know why they’re asking the question, it never sat right with me and didn’t feel like the right question for those in the food industry to be asking.
I’ve wrestled for a long time on why I disliked that trend question. And I think it’s because asking that question implied that there was some invisible force deciding what these trends were going to be and we in the food industry just had to sit back and let it happen to us. Asking what next year’s trend is going to be is passive. Asking yourself what next year’s trend should be is active.
It’s frustrating to see an industry like food with so much infrastructure and influence asking what next year’s trends will be when they have the raw materials to create their own trends. It’s doubly frustrating to see that when they do decide to create a trend, they create something like the “flaming hot” snack trend that’s financially successful but has little redeeming quality for the health of people and planet. I mean, the food and beverage industry turned sugar water into a cultural cornerstone, so why can’t they use those same resources to make something utterly delicious, healthy, and sustainable all at the same time?
Most consumers don’t have an ongoing, close relationship with agriculture. Therefore, they don’t always know exactly what is good for the planet or not. Because Big Food relentlessly chases after the whims of consumers, they rarely end up creating products that have nature’s best interests in mind, just the consumers needs and wants. It’s ultimately disempowering for farmers too, as they also need to chase after whatever people are demanding, even if they know of better ways to farm or grow different products that would be more environmentally and nutritionally beneficial. This is a lost opportunity for Big Food to take a more active role in designing products that have nature and eaters in mind, then using the usual Big Food tactics to market that product.
No matter if a food trend comes from a teenager on TikTok or a brand manager in Big Food, the question that needs to be answered for all of them is “why?” I’m no Puritan when it comes to food and I’ve already written about my unapologetic love of tasty junk food. But Big Food has overemphasized servicing the whims of consumers and not the needs of nature or farmers. Or what would be even better is if Big Food could start creating more food products with the piousness of an organic quinoa bowl, but with the verve of a Flaming Hot Cheeto. There is room for both in the world and I wish they weren’t so mutually exclusive.
Which brings us back to biodiversity and expanding diets. I want more people to see how eating a more varied and diverse diet is not just a way to take the wind out of monocultures, but a way to be a pleasure-seeking hedonist. I don’t know how many people share this sentiment, but I truly think eating that assortment of sushi is way more fun than a dozen pieces tuna. If we all took that approach to all other categories of food, from grains to fruits and vegetables to animal products, so many more kinds of agriculture could thrive and we’d have a more diverse, resilient planet. And I think we as eaters would find more enrichment and fun in how we eat.
Why shouldn’t the next thing trending on TikTok be some insanely viral spin on the Three Sisters instead of throwing yet another weird thing into an air fryer? Why can’t we watch Mr. Beast do a taste test of all 1,000+ banana varieties to find the best ones? Will we start to see people including “forgotten foods” that improve biodiversity into their charcuterie and butter boards? These are definitely not the trends that are actually happening now, but they’re the kind of trends that should be happening for the health of people and planet.
Even if you don’t understand or care about biodiversity from an ecological perspective, you probably care about eating good food if you’ve made it this far in this essay. In our highly concentrated food system today, we are leaving flavor and nutrition on the table by continuing to primarily eat those 12 plants and 5 animals all the time. We are all that guy eating the platter of tuna belly and that needs to change.
And to me, that’s an idea that deserves to go viral.
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Footnotes
3 Recent posts from my Substack
3 Highlights from my current reading list
American Companies Held Hostage by the Whims of TikTok by Chavie Lieber and Suzanne Vranica - WSJ
Welcome to the Next Generation of Agricultural Drones by Naoki Nitta - Modern Farmer
How ESG became part of America’s culture wars - The Economist
My email is mike@thefuturemarket.com for questions, comments, consulting, or speaking inquiries.
Good read! I think that we need to rework our entire system of incentives; the current system allows way too much destructive moneymaking and power-grabbing by larger institutions, and doesn't really incentivize any sorts of other behavior. We consumers are capable of changing what we're demanding, but the corporations will always cater to what we demand... so that's what has to change.