“We sell pornographic food,” - former Chief Marketing Officer of a major fast food chain.
“We surf recipes to eat, not cook,” - an astute former colleague
Wegovy and Zoloft have one thing in common, which few recognize. Scientists devised both drugs to manage legitimate, severe chronic illnesses occurring in tiny percentages of the population—tiny.
Some severely depressed adults depend on anti-depressants like Zoloft (or stronger) to avoid suicidal ideation and function as working adults. However, these severely depressed users only represent 5.7% of adults, far fewer than the 18% of adults claiming to experience depression or undergoing treatment for it.1 Yet, the profit explodes when you grow daily usage from 6 to 18% of the population. [Please read Johann Hari’s brilliant book - Lost Connections - for more details on how over-prescription of anti-depressants masks the fundamental problem of social alienation in modern life.]
There are also children with genetically caused hunger hormone signaling problems who do not experience normal sensations of satiety (which most of us use to stop eating). They become obese very quickly during the ages of 2 through 6 and remain so. Most die very young. Prader-Willi is the name given to one of these rare conditions.2 PWS affects only 5/1000th of one percent of the population. Whereas 12% of U.S. households, as of the end of last year, have someone taking Wegovy, Mounjaro, or similar GLP-1 hormone drugs to boost satiety signaling! 3
In the cases of both obesity and depression, we have tens of millions of adults taking medications not designed for them because they are not experiencing rare, medical disease states so damaging (e.g., Prader-Willi Syndrome) that virtually no intervention they pursue without these medications offers any relief.
Tens of millions of Americans are choosing medical intervention when other interventions not only work but are available to them.
As one scientist wrote recently,
Genes may co-determine who becomes obese, but our environment determines how many become obese. With the current state of technology, apart from bariatric surgery, the only solution for the obesity epidemic lies in changes to the environment so that it promotes physical activity and a healthy diet. A focus on individual genetic traits is a mere distraction and reinforces the popular view of obesity as a problem that individuals have to deal with, rather than one that requires societal action. [my emphasis]
How did we get to the point in America where the collective mania to lose weight with a simple injection has caused 12% of the population to suddenly adopt a medicine that tricks their brain and gut into experiencing satiety?4
How did we get so desperate to lose weight that we onboard chemicals to trick our brains?
Over the next few posts, I’m going to try to answer these questions succinctly by exploring the social laws whereby so many Americans become obese and the media laws by which they are told they have personally failed in doing so. This material expands on arguments made in my new book.
How We Devalued Cooking and Became Aristocratic Eaters
Our relationship with food is tragically similar to our relationship with media. Food is ultra-cheap, requires minimal effort to consume, and features no social gatekeepers or mandatory rituals to pace consumption. These factors do not cause weight gain directly. Rather, they form a tragi-magical combo that creates the perfect conditions of possibility for mass obesity in a sedentary society. And they all relate to a mega trend in American life - the devaluation of group cooking as a sacred, collective ritual.
Minimal Effort Eating
For most of my business career, I have worked in and around the packaged food industry. I have analyzed the nuances of American food consumption like few have (and would ever want to). I’ve done this in American pantries, refrigerators, living room re-tellings of weight management struggles, large national datasets, and in thousands of meetings with startup founders, brand managers, innovation teams, general managers, and public company CEOs. I’ve seen this industry from every possible angle.
What is the single biggest takeaway that we have mostly forgotten?
Convenience is the foundation of packaged food as an industry and a broader cultural approach to eating. Convenience is so inbuilt as a ‘benefit’ that it rarely surfaces in the consciousness of either brand managers or consumers unless either one experiences a formal usage survey. Most of us are focused on this or that trendy attribute (e.g., keto, paleo, plant-based, etc.)
Every day, though, millions of Americans quietly trade cash for time, time spent turning raw ingredients into finished, edible food and beverage. It is as if we all walk in the door to grocery stores and sigh,
Mr. Supermarket, sir, please do the work for me. I’ll pay a premium, gladly.
This easy-to-trigger desire to outsource food production is why restaurant spending is now 56% of American household food spending, accelerating its share of food spending as we come out of the pandemic. 5
We are eaters, not cooks.
Almost twenty years ago, during some in-depth embedded fieldwork in middle-class homes, I uncovered the primary reason we cancel dinner and head to a restaurant, which is stunning - mental fatigue at the end of the day. The cognitive effort required to even think through a meal is all it takes for people today to say - ‘f*ck it,’ we’re going out to Panda (Express). This defeatist sentiment reaches its peak among dual-income parents with kids at home.
Fun Fact! I once met the CEO and founder of Panda Express at his son’s trade show booth in Anaheim, CA. I immediately grabbed both his hands and said, “I love Panda! Panda Express saved my marriage! We took our little kids there all the time! Thank you, sir!”
He just laughed.
It’s easy to understand how canceling dinner at home for fast food is about convenience (saving stressed-out marriages).
But what if I said the following packaged food categories at your local supermarket are also all about convenience?
trail mix
butter
yogurt
soup
cookies
pasta sauce
mustard
salsa
hummus
pasta
sandwich bread
cereal
I’ll stop there if you are confused. All of the above foods used to be things that Americans simply made from scratch at home whenever we wanted them (or, like pasta, we just didn’t eat them at home). I refer you to your great-grandparents for further details.
Packaged food took off in America in the 1950s by making home cooking less time-consuming and less annoying for an exploding middle class. Our current obsession with fast food is simply a natural extension of the same basic logic. It’s the latest evolution in our mass obsession with not cooking.
Americans, dear readers, are here to eat, not make, food. This is the built-in aristocratic sentiment of our very privileged middle-class consumer society.
Not only is convenience the master variable in American foodways but it is also divided into two pillars: speed and technical ease. These two variables create a continuum of convenience modalities in packaged food consumption.
From No-Cooking to Assisted Cooking, they are:
Ready-to-eat (rotisserie chicken)
Ready-to-heat/bake (frozen meals)
‘Dinner’ mixes (Kraft Mac and Cheese/ramen kits)
Meal kits (Home Chef) - where we cook without ANY cognitive burden at all
The rise of frozen meals in the 1970s and 1980s, including Stouffers’ famous Family Size lasagna in a black oven-ready tray, coincided with two demographic trends - the dramatic increase in women performing out-of-home work (returning home too exhausted to think about devising or preparing a meal every night) and the rise of single older adults due to enhanced longevity of women (why would I bother cooking just for myself?).
Only a culture that flippantly devalues cooking would develop such a continuum of food-for-cash and continuously, happily feed the industrial machine that provides it. I chuckle when my hard-left friends attack the ‘industry’ as if we’re not utterly collaborating with it every day. We may argue about the required level of ingredient purity, but most of us do not challenge the idea of processed food (only on surveys).
The entire American food ecosystem today, from 4,000,000 vending machines to 250,000 convenience stores to tens of thousands of fast food locations at most major arterial intersections to 45,000+ grocery stores full of heat-n-eat options, all of this combines to signal to you, dear reader, that COOKING FOOD IS NOT IMPORTANT.
Even if you are an avid foodie home chef, certainly, you can recognize that cooking is now merely an option.
You and I prioritize our time for other things, like consuming media, scrolling on our phones, texting our friends instead of visiting them, stroking our pets’ bellies, and, oh yes, working. Anything else trumps cooking, except for rare occasions (i.e., in a 365-day cycle).
Ultra-Cheap Eating
We don’t spend much time cooking every week or spend much disposable income on groceries either. Americans only spend 8.4% of their annual expenditures on groceries (food at home) in 2022.6 This percentage bottomed out at around 6% in the 2010s after declining for decades. Now it is rising, so we’re complaining briefly as we adapt.
The correlation between what we spend our money on and what we prioritize culturally is very revealing to any outside observer. In the case of food, it is stunningly so.
In 1901, Americans spent (have a seat if you’re standing) 42% of their disposable income on food (virtually all at home). This was due to lower average per capita earnings in a low GDP world AND the much higher cost of inefficient, non-industrial food production. It’s easy to romanticize local food sourcing, but I guarantee you that spreading milk production back to tens of thousands of local dairies, for example, would make your milk explode in price. A dairy with only fifty or 100 cows would have to charge an insane price to cover the fixed production costs.
I doubt that Americans relished the massive amount of their budget that went to food back in 1901. To them, it was intractable. But, as with housing today, when you spend a large percentage of your disposable income on one essential category, you will fixate on what you’re getting for your money. You will value it more daily than we value food today. As a result, you will happily take the time to cook your expensive food and infuse it with soul and heart.
Today, in America, our cheapened view of food means we buy a measurable amount of it on impulse (like we consume media), even when we’re not that hungry or could just wait until lunch or dinner. The modern Starbucks or coffee shop bakery case is a perfect example. We even buy meal ingredients for meals we cancel for a restaurant outing three days later, letting them rot in the fridge.
We devalue food so much that Americans waste $1,500 of food a year, roughly 322 cups of food, enough to fill 360 take-out containers (and serve 360 meals by extrapolation). Leftovers are a huge component of this food waste (i.e., overconsumption from our restaurant wanderings). 7
Ironically, we have forgotten the built-in price premium we’re paying for restaurant, C-store, and supermarket convenience because the industrial efficiency of the upstream value chain is so incredible that the net cost to us is only 8% of our spending. It’s an invisible, buried markup of +50% (for produce), +100% (for packaged food), and +200-400% (for restaurant food) over what retailers pay.
We pay an invisible premium to skip over food production like wealthy aristocrats did for centuries.
And, in doing this so frequently, we eliminate or radically reduce the ancient temporal barrier to excess food consumption - preparation time.
In a way, we treat many meals like snacks. And that makes most of our eating occasions snack-like. The focus is on eating. And more eating.
Next time…I’ll dive into the role that un-gatekeeped snacking plays in our obesity problem.
In 2021, an estimated 14.5 million U.S. adults aged 18 or older had at least one major depressive episode with severe impairment in the past year. This number represented 5.7% of all U.S. adults. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/well/mind/antidepressants-effects-alternatives.html https://www.statista.com/statistics/1391260/us-adults-currently-have-or-being-treated-for-depression-by-gender/
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/prader-willi-syndrome/#expand-collapse-start
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-16/ozempic-users-cut-grocery-spending-by-up-to-9-survey-finds
https://www.mitre.org/news-insights/news-release/mitre-gallup-survey-finds-us-households-waste-62-cups-edible-food-every
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=58364
2022 data cited, because 2023 dats has not been released quite yet. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/consumer-expenditures/2022/home.htmSupermarkets mark up raw produce about 50% off their cost. The markup from apple to apple sauce, though, is more like 150-200%. Because industrialize agriculture is so wildly efficient, you don’t realize that you’re being ‘taken.’ But you are paying for convenience.
https://www.mitre.org/news-insights/news-release/mitre-gallup-survey-finds-us-households-waste-62-cups-edible-food-every#:~:text=Week%20on%20Average-,MITRE%2DGallup%20Survey%20Finds%20U.S.%20Households%20Waste%206.2%20Cups%20of,Food%20Every%20Week%20on%20Average&text=McLean%2C%20Va.%2C%20and%20Bedford,more%20than%209%2C000%20households%20nationally.