CAN GOOD FOOD MOVEMENTS EAT, PRAY, PLAY AND LOVE?
By Wayne Roberts
I’m going to talk about some lessons I learned from studying social media posts by Good Food organizations during December 2019’s flurry of festivities. We can learn from their shortcomings about how to be more proactive and relevant during the rest of the year’s many special holidays and holy days.
The sheer number of holy days and holidays throughout a year is mind-boggling. If you count remembrance-type days (such as days for veterans) and celebration-type days (such as peanut butter day), and if you include all the world’s cultures, half the year is a holiday — just like half the year was holy days in Europe during the Middle Ages. That’s a lot of days to miss out on the opportunity of having something meaningful to say to someone interested in your issues. Somehow or other, too many food-related non-profits are doing just that.
This tells us that eat-pray-love is a combination that humans crave. We are a species of party animals who will make up any excuse to eat, drink and be merry together — while leaving time and space to reflect in awe at whatever forces brought us together.
These deep-going human needs may end up being our species’ saving grace!!
This human trait is a sleeping-giant of a gift for food organizations. Because there’s no such thing as a holiday that doesn’t have the sharing of a feast as its climax.
That’s the Good Food movement’s cue to say something relevant and meaningful!!
So get over your exhaustion from last month. Now is the time for good food organizations to skill up for upcoming opportunities.
Off the top of my head, I’m thinking Robbie Burns Day, Valentine’s Day, International Women’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, Passover, Easter, Cinco de Mayo, Mothers Day, St Patrick’s Day, Easter, Rosh Hashanah, Ramadan, Martin Luther King Day.
Almost all of them have some bearing on food’s links to personal meaning and group identity.
Do you wonder why I include Martin Luther King Day on this list? You haven’t heard of how the taste for freedom during the civil rights campaign was developed in main street diners? You never heard of the Greensboro restaurant sit-in of 1960?
Good Food enthusiasts can enjoy a buffet of opportunities for timely comment. We can burst heroically through an open door because the information is readily available, even though it’s been erased from popular memory.
’Tis always the season to raise curiosity, make a connection, attract attention, or stage a special event!
The holidays are not just for fundraising. They are also days for friend-raising and fun-raising.
Though human needs for convivial food-centered celebrations run deep, the understanding runs shallow in both food businesses and food movements.
I think that’s because people in both the food industry and food movements are equally stuck on thinking of food as a utilitarian commodity.
Neither food businesses nor good food organizations relate to food as a way to express personal, social and cultural needs for good cheer. Big Food wants consumers to buy more food. Good Food organizations want donors to donate for more food. When that’s all we appeal to, we miss the point of the exercise and the opportunity to resonate at a deeper level of personal and cultural meaning.
I’ve made that point in a semi-academic way in an article my wife and I did on the food movement’s neglect of food culture. I also tried to make a bit of a splash about the food potential of holiday time in my own hometown newspaper about chocolate.
I lost no time worrying about whether my article on chocolate was a top-of-mind issue. Christmas sales of chocolate in the US alone amount to almost $800 million dollars. Our challenge and opportunity are to food delights to deeper values associated with the season, as I tried to do in a feature article.
Failure to see food’s many links to holidays and popular culture lies behind our lack of skills for honing on seasonal messages that resonate and engage with people’s best selves.
TAKEAWAY LESSONS
Here are takeaway lessons for the future. Work at developing a people-centered food policy. Not just the tried and true food policy that centers on logistics of supply chains or mechanics of food as fuel or nutrients. Try developing a policy that does a singsong with the emotional and symbolic attachments and connections to food — as explained here and here. Forget about guilting people or scaring people. Let’s tug at the heart!!
(This has been adapted from a newsletter on skills needed by Good Food organizations and businesses, available free at https://wayneroberts.us12.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ab7cd2414816e2a28f3b35792&id=1373397df7)
