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DANCING WITH EXISTING TRENDS

Dance with Existing Social Trends— Learn to 'dance with the system' of society, power, politics and the economy (Source: Duncan Green).

Key Trends:

  1. Convenience and Time: Convenience proliferates yet free time continues to decline all while our attention wanes. Package delivery, pre-cooked food, and both digital and food mobility are now all social norms. Time pressure and food choice intertwine, often outside of conscious awareness. Indeed, time is culturally embedded as is convenience. Time is the most often used noun in the English language with year and day also making the top five. Americans, nevertheless, participate in food-provisioned holidays, events, rituals, and conviviality—even when inconvenient.
  2. Going Green: Gloom-and-doom-filled predictions abound around global climate change. This politicized and winter-is-coming scripting says that human misbehavior will wipe out everything in its path and, by extension, cause food shortages to become commonplace. Climate catastrophe would further catapult the deep-rooted going green movement, veganism, and environmental stewardship trends plus, in a worst-case scenario, make more nutritious food offerings crucial to survival and social stability.
  3. Social Justice: Activism and conflict are on the rise as is a wider sense of victimhood, perceptions of social differences, intersectionality, and health insecurities. Identity politics and an informal language-police influence around food continues to expand. The power of words grows as does outrage; particularly around social injustices. Examples range from the MeToo movement and language-driven political mass hysterias to nonviolent protests. One result is the emergence of newly invented, frequently conflicting norms of behavior and language on college campuses, inside the workplace, and within political and social circles.
  4. Corporate Governance: In August, the Business Roundtable redefined the purpose of a corporation as to promote "an economy that serves all Americans." 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, a new business ethos is emerging that balances purpose with profits and shareholder value. A counter trend is that big food corporations continue to gobble up smaller food companies; increasing their influence over government and endurance to the demands of consumer advocacy.
  5. Carnivalesque escape: As experiential activities grow in popularity Americans are seeking unique experiences and food ranks high in this Pantheon. Fun and frivolity will never go out of style. Modern day electronic gaming, festivals like Madre Gras, Day of the Dead, and Dragon Con, mythic gatherings like Burning Man, and performing arts ranging from national DCI band competitions to theater are on the upswing. Some call this the experience economy while others view these activities as part of America's pop culture.
  6. Socio-tech behaviorism: Quantified self, artificial intelligence, and surveillance capitalism increasingly guide individual, group, and population behaviors. Digital mechanisms and algorithms often know me better than I know myself. They range from fitbit-like wearables to digital therapeutic diabetic implants to dystopian Chinese social credit monitoring and management of its citizenship. The simplest example is driver behavioral changes underway due to real-time monitoring and just over the horizon, self-driving vehicles. Surveillance also takes many forms—voluntary, involuntary, and acquiescent—and has become a booming business-to-business product for social media companies and streaming services as well as an analytic to prod preferential consumer purchases.
  7. Clashing trends: Competing desires for health and food indulgence make for rising eater angst. Outside of nutritious smoothies this is an underdeveloped, indeed vast market opportunity across America's foodscape for healthier indulgences. At minimum, the argument for continual, wide-spread harm reduction in America's worst-of-the-worst foods will moderate this juxtaposition.
  8. Sensory Sensationalism: By design, food has become ever more irresistible with artificial flavorings and designer additives as well as through industrial processing wizardry. Little about food is what it once seemed as flavorists compete with drive-thru convenience to make pleasure-seeking eating a modern-day marvel. Food marketing and packaging are equal additives to this trend.
  9. Plant-based foods: Shunning animal products and by-products is more mainstreamed than ever, as all-vegan restaurant chains make this food more readily accessible. Plant-based burger sales are booming as are image-building vegan offerings even in restaurant chains like the decadent Cheesecake Factory, Mellow Mushroom, and TGI Fridays.
  10. Governmental intervention: Product Labeling—it used to be that all sugar was considered bad—even sugars naturally occurring in fruits and vegetables. Big-name food manufacturers must now, by FDA direction, label how much sugar has been added to each of their products. Nestle is aiming to decrease added sugar in its products, as are PepsiCo and General Mills. Governmental oversight remains uneven for the foreseeabl e future. Zero restaurant food waste ordinances are in their infancy while agricultural crop support and SNAP food assistance are established law.

Other overarching and growing trends include digital economies, social media and networking, demographic change and, above all, healthcare and health. We dipped deeper into the above ten trends because they bear directly on the creation of a more tastily nutritious American food supply. What's not covered in this arena includes, but is not limited to, cooking, home economics, food deserts and swamps, restaurants, groceries, farmer's markets, income disparity, and associated consumer trends.

A DISPUTE WITHIN THE SOUL OF THESE TEN TRENDS