Tight Brands In the Chaos of Loose Cultures

The one thing humans can’t handle is chaos. It’s why the Soviet Union fell only to install Putin, and the brief moment of hope that was the Arab Spring led to a familiar regime of autocrats.

It’s also why when there is a decrease in government stability, there is an increase in religiosity in both Eastern and Western cultures. In a 1978 Gallup poll it was found that 80% of people who leave their religion ultimately come back to it, and although researchers are only just beginning to study this phenomenon, I can tell you from my own work with both religious and atheistic brands, people who leave organized religion quickly become eager to replace the void with another system of meaning — a dimension most atheist groups have failed to consider.

In all of these instances, people swung from an extremely tight culture to an extremely loose one, and then curiously, back to a tight culture once again.

No matter the magnitude, sudden freedom brings a normlessness (and in some cases, disorder) so uncomfortable that we would rather subscribe to clear rules than to wade into the unknown without any at all.

It’s a facet of human nature that cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand has studied extensively. Every culture falls on the spectrum from tight to loose: from highly structured and normative to loosely held and evolving. When a culture veers too far in one direction, there is often a reaction in the opposite direction.

When it comes to branding in today’s world, however, we’re seeing an emerging trend where tightness is especially effective in loose places.

It’s easy to see the value of tightness in hindsight. Tight brands like Greenpeace, Trumpism or the modern Académie Française may appear like anomalies, but they are in fact deeply human — and highly predictable — reactions to loose cultures. The people in these groups felt destabilized by evaporating social codes, and in that mental state, welcomed in the strong voice of certainty. Where there is chaos, there is someone promising a new order.

But sometimes the most destabilizing chaos isn’t on the world stage. Nor is it a public outrage or even a shared experience.

It’s found instead in the quiet chaos of our everyday lives: making a home, raising a family, putting a meal on the table. These mundane corners of the human experience are also where we find the loosest pockets of culture today: places where there is a glut of information but few steadfast rules. Where despite incredible progress and empowerment, normlessness has taken over.

And it’s in these well-traveled but chaotic spaces that a new generation of brands has stepped in to tighten the vice.

The Religion of Food and Nutrition
In America, we don’t know what to eat, where to eat or how to eat, and the more one tries to figure it out, the more confused they can become.

A favorite anecdote of mine is a note hidden in the comments section of a 2017 New York Times article about clean eating. A reader named Ellen, below, describes the chaos of having to cook Thanksgiving dinner for a family that has one person who is gluten free, another who is dairy free, one who is keto, and another who is low fat.

As journalist Julia Belluz has pointed out, we’ve entered the “United States of Divided Dinner Tables. We’ve shifted from a culture where everyone eats the same thing at supper to a hyper-individualized one, where guests almost certainly won’t be willing to break the same bread, or eat any bread at all.”

Generally speaking, the American diet looked much simpler up until the 1940s, when dinner tables across the country had more in common than not.

Social propaganda films streamed into homes, telling women not only what to cook at dinnertime, but daughters how to set a table, sons how to greet their fathers before the meal, what was appropriate to talk about, and so on. Programs like this continued to proliferate onto colored screens in the early 1950s.

But after WWI, and with an influx of GIs coming home with expanded palates, things began to change.

Soldiers had developed a taste for things like pizza, french wine and oregano (to give you an idea of how intense the appetite for new flavors was, sales of oregano in the U.S. rose by a remarkable 5,200% from 1948 to 1956). Meanwhile, post-war Americans had more wealth and began to travel, taking in the smells, tastes and methods of new cuisines.

Suddenly, America’s new foodie culture was born and for the first time we began to see food less as sustenance and more as experience. The rules of food were breaking and an outgrowth of exploration began. Food was now an “aesthetic choice”, a decision mired in context.

Today, grocery stores carry an average of 50,000 items, but in the 90’s, there were a mere 7,000 SKUs on store shelves. That means in the past 30 years alone, we have had to navigate a shopping experience with over 40,000 more options than before. Consider the fact that in 2014 there were already 12 flavors of Thomas’ English Muffins and 19 different varieties of Cheerios, each one promising a slightly different experience.

The problem here is not the paradox of choice. Choice can be a wonderful thing if people know how to navigate it.

The real problem is the lack of norms around what foods are good or right to eat.

Despite growing mountains of research, we still don’t know what the ideal diet is, we don’t know why adult onset food allergies have skyrocketed, and of all the lies that hurt any American generation, the food pyramid was probably one of the biggest. It is a plight on American health that will take decades upon decades to undo.

Even something as simple as bread can surface how normless American food culture is. French bread is baked with limited unprocessed ingredients, with most French people living within 5 minutes of a bakery, and 50 times more bread bakeries per capita than in America.

French norms around baking bread also inform their social norms around eating it. There are strong codes around how to buy it, how to eat it, and how it relates to the larger meal that is understood among all.

American bread, on the other hand, has been industrialized, contains many ingredients that are banned and considered carcinogenic in other countries, and is only found aging on grocery store shelves for the large majority of people.

It’s inspired a cottage industry of food activists like alittlelesstoxic and thefoodbabe who make it their job to decode food labels and expose dangerous American food regulations and policies. Yet the irony of many wellness influencers in the larger community is that in the process of dispelling food falsehoods, they often propagate other falsehoods around medicine, politics and conspiracy theories.

In France, food norms are powerful and cohesive forces, while in the US food is simply a whirlwind of chaos.

But the chaos begins even before our meals get to the table are served. In 2019, before Covid forced us to bake sourdough and throw together whipped coffees, people were already migrating away from eating at the dinner table.

In a survey of 1,000 adults, it was found that 30% of people were eating dinner on the couch, and 17% of people were eating it in their bedrooms — two places where there is likely a screen and likely no conversation or interpersonal gathering. Remember that rooms have rules, and when we change the room, we create a vacuum of norms.

Scholars have also noted how fewer and fewer people are eating together, and only about half of families who live together have dinner together. As food and screens got closer to one another, it makes sense that open plan kitchens began to blend meals and entertainment even more. #Mukbang, #feederism and #foodporn made eating and watching the same thing, and the room itself disappeared.

Despite progress and an abundance of information, there is an anxiety-inducing looseness all around us when it comes to food.

Food culture has become chaotic and normlessness has taken over.

But what is interesting is the way in which some brands have created cultural tightness by leveraging our deepest beliefs.

Between 2016 and 2018, three lawsuits were lodged against Whole Foods and Lacroix collectively. All of them were concerned with the use of the word “natural” in their food labeling. In all cases, the plaintiffs had felt duped — that the “natural” branded language and imagery were in fact lies once they interrogated the ingredients list, where they found confusing (at times questionable) chemicals.

Whole Foods settled two of those claims, while La Croix was able to dodge theirs when the plaintiff publicly retracted her statements. But controversy over the word “natural” is nothing new.

In 2009, there was a spate of lawsuits aimed at food makers using the same term, including Snapple, Ben & Jerry’s, Häagen-Dazs, and Nature Valley. In fact, the FTC had tried to come up with a definition for the word “natural” as early as 1974, and the FDA has been trying (and failing) since 1991.

These cases have been hard to navigate because the word “natural” is so much more than just a word. Author and religious scholar Alan Levinovitz has written extensively about food and language, and he reveals the larger complexity hiding under such a simple term.

According to him, the word “natural” has become a “sort of a secular stand-in for a generalized understanding of goodness, which in religion you’d call holiness, or purity, or something like that. “Nature,” with a capital N, [has taken] the place of God. In a secular society, we don’t look to religions to tell us what to eat or how to heal ourselves, so you need a secular substitute when it comes to generalized guidance for what you can eat, and that secularized substitute is nature.”

Levinovitz has observed that many of the public comments on the FDA case to define the word “natural” take a religious tone, hundreds going so far as to refer to Mother Nature or God directly, with arguments such as, “Natural is as Mother Nature intended. No manipulation or addition by man” and “If it has anything other than what God intended then it is NOT natural”.

It seems that defining what “natural” means, then, would be the same as understanding God’s own will.

Knowing what to eat has indeed become a godly quest. When we talk about food, we talk about “good” and “evil” foods, “clean” and “dirty” foods, “pure” and “impure” foods, and so on. (Even the Q Shaman refuses to eat non-organic food in jail, citing his religious beliefs.)

Whole Foods, La Croix and Snapple didn’t misuse the word “natural”. They leveraged it to tighten the vice in a very loose culture. They understood and surfaced what people were already starting to believe — that food is not about sustenance. It is about righteousness.

Today, highly popular brands like Lesser Evil snacks, Ezekiel 4:9 and Genesis 1:29 breads, and Garden of Life food supplements do the same thing, starting with their thinly veiled biblical brand names. True, their products may be great, but they have done the incredible task of creating a signal in the noise. They broadcast tight norms in the normless world of food, saying “Eat what is Godly.” And there are few cultures tighter than that of godliness.

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