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Big Food Taste Tricksters

In August, the Business Roundtable, redefined the purpose of a corporation: to promote "an economy that serves all Americans." There was a lot of fanfare, which opens Big Food corporations and other food purveyors to an under-defined good citizen role. As Mars Food says, to help consumers lead healthier lives while nourishing wellbeing. Food giant Danone—known for its yogurt—as a B Corp now "aspires to nourish lives and inspire a healthier world through food." Platitudes aside, the trend for more benevolent corporate governance creates the social possibility of real change. Going green and sustainability corporate initiatives are examples of what can be accomplished when widespread public effort marks a trail for the Big Food industry to follow.

Food science and technology has enabled food purveyors to create ever more uniform, less expensive, and more plentiful food offerings. Hidden harm and the resulting craveability of this industrialized foodstuff combine in a myriad of ways to entice overeating. Most of us will eat anything to satisfy our taste buds, fulfill desires, comfort angst, or encourage others to more readily accept us; especially whenever and wherever the food at hand is flavorful or attractive. A long time ago taste protected us as we foraged for sustenance now it's killing us slowly, yet gladly.

The situation is as unnatural as most of America's food itself.

We view America's food purveyors as taste tricksters not diabolical schemers or money grubbers. The paradox is that they're unusually good corporate citizens who excel at making food irresistible. They're fully onboard with going green and Big Food companies rank among the best places in America to work.

Since these taste tricksters are equally capable of tricking us to eat better food let's, at minimum, collectively ask—via counterconditioning actions—them to use their portion of America's 13,300 food scientists to make their worst-of-the-worst food offerings less harmful to the long-term health of your customers and particularly their children.

The trick is in how we make this ask to these master taste tricksters. All Fools' Food Day will be an entertaining and whimsical way to begin doing exactly that. And if our efforts only slightly alter the course of the Big Food industrial complex, it'll become a "FoodZy Fools" microbrewery classic that positively differentiates your taproom in the eyes of beer drinkers from competing brewpubs and beer-centric restaurants.

America's food supply system is further complicated by the conviviality, entertainment, and the escape eating offers from daily life. Most eaters demand convenience over nutrition. Taste and texture over longevity. Amount and appearance over wellbeing. Indeed, culture, habit, mindless eating, and food marketing prowess too often overwhelm nutritional needs. In medicine it's said, "first do no harm" yet harmful food is our American norm. By design, food has become ever more irresistible with artificial flavorings and designer additives as well as through industrial processing wizardry.

Big Food science transforms technology into tastes that excite, stimulate, comfort, and linger. Food is designed to increase desire and craveability in ways that manipulate our eating behaviors. It's the result of industrial foods delivering calories, flavor hits, ease of eating, meltdown, bliss point, early hit, and much more.

Little about food is what it once seemed as flavorists, also known as food scientists, compete with drive-thru convenience to make pleasure-seeking eating a modern-day marvel. We the eaters, nonetheless, instinctively know which health-depletive foods are among the worst of the worst. What we don't know is what foods other eaters rank as extra ugly on this trail of tatters.

Yes, and food companies produce what we buy; farmers grow what we eat. They commit crimes of convenience on our behalf. It also bears repeating, decrying the bad guys is no more of an action than marching with the good guys. On top of which, while people occasionally talk about how America's food system is a problem of corporations, no one has a plan for affecting policy change among these corporations until now. Just as you love how and what you're brewing up, so do I.

B. Ray Helton
January, 2020

BEER & FOODNOTE: Work is also underway on two additional activities for your business to further profit in future years by poking back at the Big Food corporate cabal.