At a time when millions of young people are engaging with the issues that our ideas address so effectively, our own messaging lacks urgency and purpose. We need to rediscover our rebellious past, says Jim Manson
Teenagers are famously resistant to conventional advice on healthy eating, yet highly susceptible to food industry marketing designed to create positive emotional associations with junk food.
The reason the first approach fails is probably partly down to teenagers’ equally famous dislike of being told what to do. But what if you develop messaging that harnesses their innate rebelliousness? That was the question researchers at the University of Chicago wanted put to the test.
Thinking about teenagers’ developmentally heightened sense of fairness, the Chicago team wondered if they could counter the influence of junk food advertising by provoking teenagers’ natural impulse to “stick it to the man” – in this case, by making them angry about the way they are cynically targeted by food and drink multinationals.
So they created a study that looked at the eating habits of 350 students at a school in Texas. One group was asked to read a fact-based, exposé-style article on big food companies, that showed how Big Food spends billions hooking consumers on junk food to enrich investors. The effect of the intervention was striking, particularly among boys, who reduced their purchases of unhealthy snacks by about a third.
The Chicago study is unusual in that it deliberately set out to provoke a political response in young people about food choices. With rising levels of activism and political engagement among millennials and Gen-Zers, it could be that more rebellious messaging would resonate better with younger consumers on a range of health and sustainability issues. But perhaps a toughening up of our messaging more generally would achieve better cut through to all age groups and demographics and help bridge the ‘knowing-doing gap’ that holds back real progress.
Our industry has always been instinctively unorthodox. The natural food movement emerged directly from 1960s counterculture. The earliest manifestations of the vegetarian movement, from which sprang the modern health food trade, were founded on some quite radical thinking, both nutritionally and politically (many vegetarian women in the Victorian era identified as feminists, for example). Later, the fair trade movement pushed its way into the public consciousness by exposing the unfair practices of the food industry in developing countries, while offering practical alternatives based on the principle of ‘trade-not-aid’.
“But as we have borrowed increasingly from the language of modern consumerism – not just in product marketing, but campaigning too – we have we lost something. At a time when millions of young people are engaging in the issues that our ideas address so effectively, our own messaging lacks urgency and purpose”
Over time, many of our ideas have become mainstream (remarkable in itself, given how radical they were once thought). As part of that process, those ideas have been repackaged for a mainstream audience as marketing imperatives have replaced campaigning priorities. Edges have been smoothed, the combative tone softened (the modern natural products industry even jokes at the expense of its former self, invoking the ‘lentils and sandal’ stereotype, now commonly dismissed as “too worthy”).
But as we have borrowed increasingly from the language of modern consumerism – not just in product marketing, but campaigning too – we have we lost something. At a time when millions of young people are engaging in the issues that our ideas address so effectively, our own messaging lacks urgency and purpose.
In our efforts to ‘normalise’ our products and ideas for mainstream audiences we have become increasingly reluctant to articulate political points. We worry they would be too unpalatable, or abstruse. At the very moment the Extinction Rebellion movement and school pupil climate change protestors are sweeping up support across all age groups (Sir David Attenborough says their outrage is justified), we are going soft.
Rarely has how we farm, and what and how we eat, been so directly connected to all out futures. Never has the need been more urgent to confront those who conspire to protect the planet-trashing, health-destroying status quo. We need to act and sound like there’s a health and planetary emergency – and rediscover our rebellious past.