The First Food Influencer
How Sigmund Freud’s nephew, a self-proclaimed propagandist, shaped modern food marketing and got us to consume more bacon, cigarettes, and even the color green.
Did you ever wonder why bacon and eggs are a staple of American breakfast? How did we in the United States all agree that this was the default morning meal? It certainly didn’t happen organically on a grassroots level. Rather, in the 1920s the Beech-Nut Packing company was trying to drum up sales for their bacon product and hired a man who most people have never heard of but all live amongst the legacy of his work: Edward Bernays.
Bernays is considered to be the father of the public relations industry. His uncle was none other than Sigmund Freud and his landmark book, Propaganda, published in 1928 openly advocated for manipulating public opinion as a matter of patriotic duty. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” said Bernays. In one of his first and most meta acts of good public relations, he actually coined the term “public relations” because he knew that the word “propaganda” had too many negative associations.
To help Beech-Nut sell more bacon, he didn’t just design an advertising campaign to talk about the virtues of bacon. Instead, he spoke to the doctor that his PR agency had on staff and asked him if he agreed with the idea that people should have heartier breakfasts instead of lighter ones, as was common back then. American breakfast in the early 1900s more closely resembled a European breakfast that consisted of some bread-like thing with coffee or tea instead of the monster breakfast platters we commonly see today.
Once Bernays planted the seed in the doctor’s mind that bigger breakfasts could be better for people, the doctor began to backfill this conclusion with a plausible sounding, yet never scientifically validated, argument. The doctor reasoned that while people slept, they expended calories and would wake up with a calorie deficit. Having a big breakfast in the morning would alleviate this deficit and get people off on the right foot for the day. Bernays asked the doctor if he would write to 5,000 other doctors to ask if they agreed with his assertion about big breakfasts. They received 4,500 responses back from doctors who all agreed with the idea that big is best at breakfast.
Bernays used that fact as a key element of his propaganda public relations campaign and in the same breath suggested that there is no heartier breakfast than a plate of bacon and eggs. Beech-Nut’s bacon sales went through the roof and bacon and eggs has been the mascot for American breakfast ever since.
Edward Bernays went on to pull off similar victories with clients like Lucky Strike cigarettes, where he convinced more women to smoke by labeling them “Torches of Freedom,” and paying a group of women to march in the 1929 Easter Sunday Parade in New York City while smoking cigarettes, which was taboo for women at the time. He didn’t make it about the cigarette, it was about what the cigarette stood for: women's liberation.
After that he worked for the Dixie Cup company to promote the sale of disposable cups. Bernays conjured up a fake organization clumsily named the “Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink,” and ran ads under that name suggesting that drinking from non-disposable glass cups was utterly unsanitary.
While Bernays died in 1995, his legacy and tactics live on in almost every corner of the food industry today from bottled water to pomegranate juice to fake "holidays" invented by social media managers like National Bagel Day (January 15) or National Carbonara Day (April 6). His life’s work was not only seminal in shaping the public relations and advertising industries but is absolutely crucial to the existence of Big Food and the things we eat today.
Big Food Needs to Be Big
As the name implies, the classical idea of Big Food only works if food companies are really big. Achieving economies of scale from an agricultural, processing, and distribution standpoint are required to derive healthy profit margins from selling massive amounts of goods. Because of this need for scale, Big Food has built an enormous amount of infrastructure to efficiently create all the products you see at your local grocery store.
Building significant food production capacity is obviously not without risks. If you’re in the potato chip business, you need to spend millions of dollars up front to build out your supply chain and a factory that can fabricate chips at virtually zero marginal unit cost over time. On day one of your potato chip factory coming online, the company starts to recuperate its investment and needs to crank out chips nearly nonstop until the factory is paid for. One of the worst things that can happen to a Big Food company is to have one of its factories laying idle due to lack of demand, with millions of dollars of processing machinery sitting there not earning money.
Big Food needs insatiable, never-ending demand from eaters in order to stay big and make their economies of scale work. This is where Bernaysian tactics come in to manufacture demand amongst consumers that will justify the existence of huge and expensive production capacity.
Publicly traded food companies are expected to grow revenues at least 5-7% each year, every year to be seen as healthy businesses. But unless you’re a teenage athlete trying to put on pounds to make the football team, our stomachs simply don’t experience an annual growth rate of 5-7% every year. Big Food needs to find other ways to fuel growth, by going after untapped markets, making their food even cheaper to produce, and/or convincing you that you need their products with bells, whistles, and stories.
Most of the food in a grocery store—especially in the center aisles—meets people’s wants, not needs. If we only sold enough food to suit people’s basic nutritional needs, big food would not exist as we know it today. The food industry has become extremely complicated but in theory, feeding people appropriately is not rocket science. If you follow the Michael Pollan adage, “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” then most people could subsist on the items found at a local farmers market without a brand in sight. But selling whole, minimally processed foods in a farmer’s market isn’t nearly as profitable as selling billions of cans of Coke or tons of fake meat burgers.
Big Food brand marketers use terms like “unmet consumer needs” and “jobs to be done” as a north star to direct their marketing efforts. But do we really need water with an “optimized” pH of 9.5? Or is alkaline water simply a solution to a problem it convinced people was a problem? There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with selling products that meet people’s wants instead of needs, but brand managers need to be honest with themselves about how truly important a particular consumer need they are selling to actually is.
The average percentage of revenues spent on research & development amongst the top 10 Big Food companies in 2022 was 2.9%, while 10.5% was spent on marketing. Contrast that with the top 10 tech companies who spent an average of 13.5% on R&D and 11.7% on marketing in 2022. If you work at Google or Meta, software engineers set the tone and drive the business by building tools that we all hopefully find useful or entertaining. For all its flaws, the tech industry still generally follows a meritocracy where no amount of marketing can get people to use a high-tech tool that sucks (I’m looking at you Google Glass, Theranos, and FTX). In tech, product development is the main value driver, not marketing.
But in Big Food, it’s the often the opposite. Brand managers set the tone by creating the marketing that ideally convinces people to buy whatever comes out of the food factory. R&D certainly plays an important role in the food industry, but its not like once the formula for original Coke was invented, there was a team of food scientists working every year to update and improve that formula like we see with Apple and its annual iPhone releases and constant software updates.
The ideal Big Food model is to create a product that is relatively simple to make and crank out tons of copies that will be bought by people on the receiving end of expensive marketing campaigns. From a nutritional quality standpoint, legacy mass produced breakfast cereals are inferior to a breakfast made of real food, but the vapid charisma of Toucan Sam or Tony the Tiger makes you forget that you’re eating something that’s not terribly good for you. In Big Food, marketing is the main value driver, not product development.
Power Tools
“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.” -Edward Bernays
In another one of Bernays campaigns, again for Lucky Strike cigarettes, he convinced women that the color green was trending in order to sell more packs which were colored green prior to 1942. Bernays initially suggested that Lucky Strike redesign the pack to use a different color that would clash less with women’s wardrobes, which was an actual complaint many of them had. Lucky Strike rejected the idea. The brand had already spent significant amounts of money to create and advertise the green packaging so instead of changing the product to better suit the existing preferences of its target consumer, Bernays simply changed their preferences to suit Lucky Strike’s existing design.
The centerpiece of this effort was the Green Ball, an elegant, highly publicized charity event hosted at the Waldorf Astoria in New York that consisted of nearly all green decor, art, and guests in fashionable green clothing. The Green Ball plan was successful and sounds ridiculous in hindsight, but is it really any different than someone declaring on Instagram that this coming Sunday, August 13th, is National Prosecco Day?
Like a power tool, this kind of marketing can be extremely useful or harmful, depending on your vantage point and how you’re using the tool. In the 1920s, infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels was a huge fan of Bernays’ work, despite Bernays being a Jew. Goebbels was instrumental in helping to build a cult of personality around Hitler using Bernays’ tactics, a fact that Bernays later lamented in his 1965 autobiography.
Manipulating public opinion to support a genocidal dictator like Goebbels did is an objectively horrible thing. But what are we to think of the act of using Bernays’ methods to drum up support for more innocent things, like eating more bacon or drinking from Dixie cups? If you’re working at Beech-Nut in the 1920s and the spike in bacon sales gets you a promotion and gives you more money to take care of your family, then maybe the ends justify the means. Beech-Nut never held a gun to anyone’s head and forced them to eat bacon, so what’s the harm, right? To some, bacon is a pillar of the American diet while to those who keep Kosher or Halal, it’s to be avoided at all costs. Because the goodness of people’s food values are all relative, it’s tough to say who is right or wrong.
But does the absolute goodness of an outcome ever excuse the use of ethically dubious means? If Bernays were still alive and working today, how might he have swayed public opinion about something like our climate crisis? Would he have produced a Green Ball of a different sort? Would he be guilty of greenwashing? Greenwashing feels so icky because companies not only distort the truth about their efforts to save the planet, but they never actually do anything real to help save the planet. It’s just a joke without a punchline. And we’ll never truly know who is greenwashing and who is not until we see tangible results from a company’s environmental efforts. Real evidence will always cut through spin.
The idea of the end justifying the means is fraught with moral shades of gray and cognitive dissonance. Are your sins absolved if you do something to singlehandedly save the planet and human race, but do it by lying to the public? These are hard questions that philosophers, moralists, and everyday people have and will continue to argue over for centuries and the “right” answer probably includes the words, “it depends.”
I don’t think Bernays’ bacon campaign would work as well today as it did in the 1920s. We are far too heterogenous in our thinking to expect everyone to buy into the bacon thing, despite how great bacon can be. But I do think it would find some success with the primal-meathead influencer contingent on TikTok. In fact, influencers like the Liver King are literally the Bernays bacon campaign reincarnated. The more things change, the more they stay the same, amirite?
When it comes to our food choices, eaters need to remember that they have the final say on what enters their body, not 4,500 doctors they’ve never met. This is not to say that eaters should automatically abandon widely accepted and scientifically backed ways of eating that are good for you. One should always consider the incentives and credibility of a person telling them to do something, especially regarding personal food choices. I know this kind of independent thinking has gone malignant lately with scores of people trusting Dr. Oz or Goop more than their actual doctors, but the emergence of conspiracy theories on the fringes might be an unavoidable consequence of not all mindlessly obeying a campaign to eat a hearty breakfast.
These are the complicated issues that arise when things that should be basic human rights like food, clean water, and healthcare also happen to be lucrative industries. Beech-Nut didn’t hire Edward Bernays because they wanted to legitimately advance public health, they simply had a ton of bacon they needed to sell. The things you need to do to promote health and wellbeing are not always the same things you need to do to grow your profits.
Generations of Bernaysian marketing and public relations have arguably made us more jaded and distrustful of mass media than ever, especially from brands trying to sell us something. His work succeeded in the pre-Internet era because it was simply harder to find alternative points of view. Brands today need to do better in how they structure their communications, as consumers know exactly when they’re being sold to and everyone’s bullshit meters are ultra-sensitive.
We can demonize Bernays and dismiss him as a snake oil salesman, but our modern economy is dictated by capitalism, not altruism, and his skill set carries a lot of value in that kind of world. Many organizations supporting worthy causes out there would probably love to have some of that Edward Bernays mojo rub off on their marketing efforts. But once a brand finds success as a result of spinning the truth and manipulating the public, it’s hard to stop the train of lies. When it comes to lying, the end almost never justifies the means.
I just wish that in the future, for all our sakes, altruists can find as much success as Bernays did as a capitalist, but on their own, more honest terms. I certainly hope at least 4,500 of you out there agree with me.
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Footnotes
3 Recent posts from my Substack
3 Highlights from my current reading list
Welcome to the Next Generation of Agricultural Drones by Naoki Nitta - Modern Farmer
The Meat Paradox by Peter Singer - The Atlantic
Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models by Niamh Rowe - The Guardian
My email is mike@thefuturemarket.com for questions, comments, consulting, or speaking inquiries.
What's crazy is that our society still works pretty much exactly the same way!