Branding Food As Politics

by Natasha Chart

categories: Action, Community Development, Distribution, Farm Economics, Food Prices, Politics

Published May 12, 2009 @ 12:02AM PT

When I was at the Brooklyn Food Conference, one of the things that came up briefly was the importance of branding.

Think about going out of town and needing to buy something. Maybe food, maybe something else. You look for the name of a store or restaurant chain that you know. Say you don't find one you recognize, but you go into a place that looks like they'll have what you need. Do you find yourself looking first for a familiar brand or dish before you'll start evaluating the alternatives?

If you're like most people, including me, the answer is probably yes. And why?

First, it isn't anything to be ashamed of. We have a lot of things on our minds at any given time. The world is full of choices and interesting stimuli; so much of it in fact that our brains use up a good few neurons suppressing much of our conscious awareness of non-essential information.

An excess of choice actually being paralyzing, it's useful to have symbolic shortcuts that let us wade quickly through our options. Having once taken the time to find out what we like, or can at least tolerate, why redo that process every time?

This is where brands come in. A word, maybe associated with a symbol, color or particular font, does us the service of shortcutting all that new decision-making and experimentation.

We could even be talking about a person. You, like me, have probably decided to see at least one movie you didn't know anything about because you liked an actor in it, maybe read a book without knowing much at all about it besides the author.

Switch that around to an issue, say, abortion.

When you think about the word abortion, you probably aren't just thinking about a medical procedure. Not even if you're a woman who's had one, or personally know someone who's gone through it. I will not here go into that topic, except to point out that nearly everyone in the US understands that it's a topic that falls into the political category.

A hysterectomy or vasectomy might be on the level of abortion as regards invasiveness or conversational shynesses around discussing genitalia, but has anyone ever asked you if you have an opinion about the hysterectomy question? No. No, they haven't. Not unless you were talking with a doctor about a specific procedure to be performed on a specific person, probably you, probably if you were ill - so hardly anybody.

We talk to our friends and relatives and coworkers about all kinds of things during the course of our lives, and only a very few of those topics are classed as political. Food, mostly, isn't one of them.

Not for most people. Not unless they're thinking about food aid to poor families in the US and abroad.

Where it comes from, who grows it and how, who harvests it, who buys it, who processes it, who it's sold to, who gets the profits. These are the political issues surrounding food, and they need to be branded that way.

Otherwise, the only people who'll be thinking about food as politics are the lobbyists and industry enthusiasts who make money one way or another from cheering on our business as usual.