While I am admittedly uninformed about the developmental progress of newborn babies, I do know this—learning to speak is one of the first successes in each of our lives. Communication is foundational to human society because it serves as the basis of how we relate to one another, the ways we warn and love one another. Food is another, even more necessary building block of the human experience, and it serves a similar sociocultural-relational purpose to communication. When sitting down at a table with another person, we are vulnerable. In this action, there is a mutual acknowledgment that, despite all our prejudices and opinions, we are just animals. By sharing a meal with another person, we share in a cultural, pleasurable (hopefully) experience that is inherently social and fosters positive feelings about our “meal-mates.” 

Romanticization aside, and to put it simply: without food, we die; without communication, we suffer. Nowhere is this dichotomy clearer than in the phenomenon of food deserts. While not a topic that is necessarily “in the news,” food deserts are an ongoing problem in the United States which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The implementation of a strategic communications plan by, for example, the nonprofit organization “Feeding America,” to increase the general public’s knowledge and level of awareness of food deserts has the potential to lessen those hunger rates. 

To clarify, food deserts are “neighborhoods without easy access to fresh, healthy food sources,” though this definition makes them sound like a “natural, inadvertent phenomenon and not a consequence of the federal policy of redlining,” an issue which I will address later (“The Activists Working to Remake the Food System,” 2021). At any given moment, approximately 40 million Americans are living in hunger (“Warner Introduces Bipartisan Bill to Increase Access to Nutritious Foods, Help Eliminate Food Deserts,” 2021). Despite their importance and societal relevancy, food deserts are not discussed in the news more because they lack glamour. By committing a fraction of the food industry's communications time and/or budget to raising awareness of food deserts, we would expect to see an uptick in food donations and the number of people wanting to work towards remedying the United States’ structurally-unequal food distribution. 

Food has, arguably, some of the best PR out there. A quick scan of any “for-you page” on TikTok or “Explore” page on Instagram for the frequency of “food porn” posts, and you will see what I mean. Social media posts upon videos upon TV programs advertising and salivating over ooey-gooey, melty cheese and chocolate, sizzling burgers and crackling, brewing coffee—even the descriptions sound pornographic. I admit that I probably watch upwards of 30 minutes a day consuming food content on my social media accounts. The mediascape surrounding food is so effective at getting and keeping humans’ attention that researchers are concerned about the opportunity for addiction to “food porn” content, calling the active pursuit of any of this type of content “inherently dysfunctional behavior,” (“Inside the Mind of a Food Porn Addict,” 2018). 

Our obsession with food makes sense—we need to eat to survive—but the internet’s exponential expansion of food-related content is consuming more of our lives than nature intended. For example, looking at Buzzfeed Tasty’s video and subscriber counts, I can only wonder how much collective time was spent watching others whisk, drizzle and bake that could have been spent more productively (like, say, lobbying for governmental food security measures). However, there is a communications opportunity in our global obsession with gastronomy.

The New York Times published an opinion piece at the height of the pandemic in 2020 about our need for a food secretary in the American federal government to address inequalities in our nutritional infrastructure, like food deserts. There have been many articles written on this subject matter across local, national and international publications, but infrastructure work has seldom been done. In the United States, the most recent step towards addressing food deserts comes from U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA), Sens. Jerry Moran (R-KS), Bob Casey (D-PA), and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) in the “Healthy Food Access for All Americans (HFAAA) Act,” which “aims to expand access to affordable and nutritious food in areas designated as “food deserts” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA),” (“Warner Introduces Bipartisan Bill to Increase Access to Nutritious Foods, Help Eliminate Food Deserts,” 2021). 

To be frank, the main issue with bills and acts like the HFAAA is that nobody outside the senate knows or seems to care all that much. Our attention is captivated by the drama and intrigue of political scandals, heinous crimes and partisan politics, rather than a bipartisan bill addressing depressing subjects like food scarcity and resource inequality. This is where PR and a solid communication plan can (and should) intervene. 

Because of the “food explosion” of the 20th and 21st centuries that resulted in “a rise in food-focused consumption, media, and culture… there is a heightened awareness of food‘s significance within contemporary society and culture,” (“Beyond Mere Sustenance: Food as Communication/ Communication as Food,” 2011). In human culture, food is often ritualized, and “through its absences and presences in everyday life, food and foodways highlight the moral, aesthetic, and ethical concerns of a given cultural milieu” in such a way that we can utilize its influence over us to create some very compelling messages (ibid., 2011). Just as I cannot stop scrolling through Emily Mariko’s TikToks, humans through the centuries have been mesmerized by the thought of food and have sought to immortalize it. 

The ways we marry our social and cultural identities to rituals surrounding food are almost pathological. To increase public awareness and knowledge of the issue of food scarcity and food deserts, I recommend nonprofits, like “Feeding America” and others like it, to infiltrate and utilize the rich food mediascape that already exists on both social and traditional media. My specific communications recommendations for this situation are as follows:

1. Identify and monitor the most popular food trends on social sharing apps like TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest.

2. Create content that mirrors the majority of content within those trends, indistinguishable at first glance, then flip the “food porn” content on its head by closing the video/post with messaging about food deserts and hunger statistics in the United States, for example.

3. Always include a call-to-action to volunteer or learn more in curated content. 

By first engaging audiences with content that is familiar and pleasing to them then flipping the narrative to reflect a related, but much more serious subject, you create something that is disrupting and powerful. This “mini-game plan” is a jumping-off point for how food activism and education can be woven into the pre-existing food media structures and is by no means complete or perfect. 

An overarching issue we see with political movements is their communications are dry or rely too heavily on traditional media forms like press releases, newspaper articles and broadcast news segments. We have spoken extensively in class this semester about Gen Z’s political involvement and desire to address inequality and dismantle oppressive systems. These qualities make Gen Zers a prime audience to “sell” food deserts and insecurity to; they are overall more passionate about social causes than the generations that came before them, and they have the greatest ratio of "free time" to "energy" of any living adult generation. 

To reach this prime audience, however, nonprofit and governmental PR practitioners need to meet Gen Z where they are at—TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. Another possible informational technique could be a collaboration between Snapchat and “Feeding America,” or another similar nonprofit, to show food deserts on Snapchat’s popular “Snap Map” feature. By confronting audiences with their proximity to the problem, they become more likely to mobilize. 

Communication is important because it helps us communicate who we are, what we care about and how we want to be perceived in society. Food is important because it keeps us alive, but also because it unites us, teaches us about each other, and allows us to communicate feelings of care, love and appreciation to one another. As Brillat-Savarin claimed in their 2000 work The Physiology of Taste, “tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are.” When a fundamental biological need such as food is lacking, social needs like communication fall to the wayside, leading to greater miscommunication and potential for harm—physically, emotionally, culturally, spiritually. 

Reflecting the above quote, hunger triggers dangerous thought patterns like “if I can’t eat, what kind of man am I?” which leads to greater rates of violence, crime and prejudice (“The Link Between Hunger and Violence,” 2016). By meeting more privileged audiences in a comfortable space, like “food porn” accounts or Food Network programs, we can gently encourage them to address the uncomfortable, hungry realities of many in our world, hopefully leading to change and a more equal distribution of the nourishment that keeps us going. 

References:

Andrés, José. “We Need a Secretary of Food.” The New York Times. The New York Times, December 8, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/opinion/covid-pandemic-food-crisis.html?searchResultPosition=1.

Cramer, Janet M., Carlnita P. Greene, and Lynn Walters. “Beyond Mere Sustenance: Food as Communication/ Communication as Food.” Introduction. In Food as Communication: Communication as Food, 1–18. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. 

(Image) Il Cuoco Segreto Di Papa Pio V (The Private Chef of Pope Pius V), by Bartolomeo Scappi, Venice, 1570.

Mishan, Ligaya. “The Activists Working to Remake the Food System.” The New York Times. The New York Times, February 19, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/t-magazine/food-security-activists.html?searchResultPosition=4.

Piquero, Alex R. “The Link between Hunger and Violence.” El Paso Times. El Paso Times, August 20, 2016. https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/opinion/columnists/2016/08/19/piquero-link-hunger-violence/89022948/.

Sor, Jennifer. “Inside the Mind of a Food Porn Addict: The Daily Nexus.” The Daily Nexus | The University of California, Santa Barbara's independent, student-run newspaper. The University of California, Santa Barbara, October 30, 2018. https://dailynexus.com/2018-10-30/inside-the-mind-of-a-food-porn-addict/.

Warner, Mark. “Warner Introduces Bipartisan Bill to Increase Access to Nutritious Foods, Help Eliminate Food Deserts.” Mark R. Warner, Senator of Virginia. Commonwealth of Virginia, February 3, 2021. https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/2/warner-introduces-bipartisan-bill-to-increase-access-to-nutritious-foods-help-eliminate-food-deserts.

Etching of a feast in Venice (Il Cuoco Segreto, 1570).