You Can’t Have It All: Embracing the Conflict in Food

I heard a sharp intake of breath, quickly stifled. It’s the kind of thing that being a parent has taught me not to ignore…but also not to let on that I’ve noticed. I slid a sidelong glance that direction. A knot of little nieces and nephews huddled over by the food table.

Whew. It wasn’t my kids up to something.

I drifted over, all casual, to see what was going on. They were debating something in heated whispers. The oldest of them, just six, seemed to be warning the three younger ones. They looked up at her with wide eyes.

“It’s a trick,” I heard her say, and the others nodded solemnly.

“What’s up,” I asked, my own voice hushed. As their ‘silly’ uncle who tells the ‘funny stories,’ I have special privileges. I’m on their team.

“Look at this,” the six-year-old said, voice heavy with suspicion. “Somebody put out vegetables AND candy.” She gestured to a festive tray. Sure enough, it brimmed with baby carrots, red pepper slices, broccoli florets and…

“M&Ms,” the littlest kid breathed. Her chubby fingers reached for them where they sat next to a pile of chocolate Santas and peanut butter cups. The six-year-old, her sister, blocked her.

“No,” she said. “It’s a trick. It must be.”

And then I remembered. They hardly ever have candy at her house. Her father has had type-one diabetes since he was a little kid, so they’re very sugar conscious. Sweets are rare treats for them in a household where dessert is fruit, at best.

“So…What do you think they’re up to?” I asked. She narrowed her eyes, glancing around the room.

“I don’t know,” she confided. “It must be some kind of a test, setting out candy right next to the good-for-you stuff.” And just like that, she had identified the conflict that shapes our interaction with almost every food brand.

Virtue versus pleasure is the central conflict of our relationship with food. You just have to think about the difference between vegetables and M&Ms to understand how this conflict works and how it impacts people every day, in every decision they make about anything they eat. Am I choosing to eat wholesome, healthy fuel for the body or delightful, pleasurable treats for the soul? While raw veggies hold one powerful pole-position and M&Ms hold the other, most foods live somewhere in the tension between good-for-me virtue and fun-for-me pleasure—just like most people do.

In the world of story a conflict like this—a struggle between two opposed but powerful benefits—will generally suggest one of three possible meanings. If the storyteller leans toward the virtue side of the struggle they might say, “Virtue is its own reward.” Saying that doesn’t eliminate or overlook the importance of pleasure; it suggests that there is a kind of pleasure to be derived from being virtuous. If, on the other hand, the storyteller leans toward the pleasure side of the struggle they might say, “Live in the moment.” That point of view doesn’t ignore virtue; it suggests that enjoying yourself and making the most of every second is its own kind of virtue. The third position is at the maximum conflict point between the two. Torn between virtue and pleasure, the storyteller might say, “All things in moderation,” suggesting that both virtue and pleasure are valuable and useful taken in the right dose and approached with control. The funny thing about these meanings is that, even though they are opposed, we can accept that all three are true.

Now think about food brands. You’ve got your Kashis and V8s, Green Giants and Cheerios on the one side, your Jack in the Boxes, Cokes, Cheetos and Snickers on the other and scads of brands in between. All of them fall somewhere on that virtue versus pleasure spectrum, and a few of them (generally the ones with the most compelling stories) manage to articulate their viewpoint about what they believe about how to live in the conflict.

Most food brands I’ve encountered in the twenty years we’ve been doing this work, however, are desperate for people to believe that the brand can make the virtue versus pleasure conflict go away. Seeing that people have a hard time figuring out what to eat, the brand pretends to solve that problem for them. Instead of saying, “Virtue is its own reward,” or “Live in the moment,” or even “All things in moderation,” the brand says, “You can have it all.” The brand claims to perfectly satisfy both needs without sacrificing either.

But how consistent is that with your experience of life? When is the last time you actually had it all? “You can have it all” isn’t a truth—it’s a wish. It seems too good to be true because it’s too good to be true. In reality, everything you eat will require navigating the tension between virtue and pleasure.

Brands that embrace the conflict and suggest a point of view about how to cope with it come across as more authentic than brands that pretend that they have solved a problem that will never go away. The M&M characters, for example, wind up embarrassed, endangered or on the verge of literally being eaten because they can’t control their passions. Although the brand never says the word “moderation,” it tells a moderation story illustrated comically by negative example. That story reinforces the message that M&Ms communicates with their product. The candy-coated chocolate, while firmly anchored on the pleasure side of the spectrum, offers pleasure in tiny little morsels. When you hold one in your hand, it feels like moderation.

Back at the holiday party, my little nieces stared sadly at the candy. The two-year-old looked like she was about to cry.

“Do you think it’s maybe ok to have a little of both this one time because it’s a party?” I suggested. The six-year-old’s eyes widened, shifting this way and that as the gears turned in her head.

“They are very small,” she said, eyes now back on the M&Ms.

“Especially if you have some veggies, too,” I told her.

Half an hour later, the kids literally bounced off a wall next to me in a shrieking pack, their faces smeared with chocolate all the way to their eyebrows. Getting your kids to eat right—it’s a constant struggle. Fortunately, I’m only their uncle.

The Island of Misfit Foods

Over the holidays, my partner Jim heard a story likely to disturb the sleep of a lot of food marketers:

A friend of mine told me that his New Year’s celebration included a trip to the grocery store with his two kids (8 and 10) so that each could pick out their own once-a-year box of sugary cereal. He told me that, although each of them had a different strategy for how to ration the box to make it last as long as possible, both wound up picking Lucky Charms as their annual treat. When he finished his story, the two of us dads reminisced about the good old days when our parents gave us Lucky Charms for breakfast every morning. My friend’s kids will grow up never once considering that Lucky Charms is a meal. To them, it’s a dessert, a treat.

I know, I know, we live in Portlandia, where happy, free-running, self-actualized chickens eat only sustainable, organic feed. How seriously should any self-respecting mass marketer take one anecdote of such cultural extremism? But the funny thing is, Jim told me this story on the day I returned from a trip to the heartland, where I had met with the CMO of a major, iconic American food brand, whose products, once a staple of my healthy Midwestern upbringing, are now sold exclusively as treats—small indulgences to celebrate moments worth rewarding.

I sense an accelerating trend toward marketing products that were once offered as foods as if they are now treats. It is a way of sidestepping health concerns, based on the idea that most people don’t really want to eat better, but they do want permission to eat what they already like and feel that it’s okay to reward themselves with treats and small indulgences from time to time.

Marketing some foods as treats seems perfectly natural. M&M’s has had spectacular success with a campaign that, at least in its early years, was all about our relationship with treats. In most of the early spots, Red and Yellow want to be the center of attention, but when they succeed in attracting attention, people want to eat them, so they have to run away. From a story point of view, that’s a perfect metaphor for our relationships with treats: We are attracted to things that are bad for us.

M&M’s could capitalize on this story because their product form seems to suggest an answer to the story problem: moderation. M&M’s are such innocent-looking, bite-sized bits of chocolate that they seem to embody moderation, something the M&M’s characters can’t quite master. Unable to moderate their own desires, Red and Yellow face dire consequences and provide a hilarious negative example for the audience.

Over the past 16 years, the M&M’s characters have remained popular with audiences of all ages, while the brand has largely escaped criticism as the obesity crisis engulfed much of the food business like a tsunami. Clearly, you can tell a story about small indulgences, about food brands as occasional treats. The line between food and treat, however, is now shifting so fast that, as more and more former food brands straggle ashore onto Treat Island, there just won’t be room for all of them. How many products can you think of that were perfectly acceptable foods when you were a kid that are now considered indulgent treats? Marketers will struggle to differentiate their products when all the brands on the island are telling essentially the same story.

Of course, not every food brand is marketed as a treat. In the early part of the last decade, Cheerios—with its heart-healthy message and a side panel that literally asked, “Who are you eating them for?”—practically sold itself as medicine. General Mills successfully extended that food halo to Honey Nut Cheerios, which is understandable from a story point of view, even if nutritionists aren’t all on board. But Frosted Cheerios and Chocolate Cheerios were actually both in the running when Jim’s friend took his kids to pick out their annual treats.

Our story assessment of this trend suggests a couple of principles:

  • Foods with genuine treat credentials are positioned to do well (Oreo, Krispy Kreme, M&M’s, Haagen Dazs), but the island doesn’t seem to be getting significantly bigger just because a lot of brands are crowding on. SO…
  • It will be increasingly important to have a distinctive and authentic story to tell about your particular role in the drama of Treat Island. Think, for example, about the difference in story energy between Oreo and just about every other cookie.

There is a strong tipping-point dynamic to the way story evolves in the food business. A brand without a firmly grounded story can be cruising along, comfortably selling a slightly better-for-you version of a venerable food product, and wake up one day stranded on the island without the skills and resources it needs to survive.

If you know a food brand that has built a good life for itself on Treat Island, I would love to hear the story.