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06.17.2004

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

THE CULTURE OF FOOD
Why Commensality Matters

Importance of sharing food in human groups (e.g. tea time, family dinner)

Reinforces social bonds, values and norms (i.e. what is edible vs. inedible)

Stimulus to regular, routine gathering of the group

Provides reliable time for communication within the group

Importance of ritual disbursal of shared food (as opposed to a self-service model)

Natural method of portion control

Compulsive eating is impossible due to audience

Individual is accountable to the group for what they eat

Ideally, eating reinforces the social structure of the group through the division of labor involved in cooking and serving food.

For more Hartman Group articles on ORGANIZATION, click here...

OBESITY
July 29, 2003"The Magic of the Cultural Brand" - an interview with Harvey Hartman

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Addressing The Problem Of Obesity

We have already noted that consumers are in unanimous agreement that obesity is a serious social problem in need of a solution. Likewise, we're also quick to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the offending parties, often with scathing critiques of their lack of self-control or personal responsibility. So it only stands to reason that when it comes time to propose solutions, most are geared toward helping our fellow citizens "tinker" with their lives and habits, often in the form of work. CPG companies create lines of low-calorie snacks and diet sodas, the USDA crafts something called a "food pyramid," the Surgeon General tells us to exercise more often, the CDC creates a measure called a BMI and then promptly condemns 75% of the adult population for being overweight, and, lest we forget, we have Dr. Phil towering over us, intoning, "You need to get to work and quit sloughing off, or they're gonna be carrying your belly off in a piano crate." Whatever the solution, the form is always the same. Namely, how best to tweak the individual machine to achieve more optimum performance (i.e., a smaller waistline and only a single chin).

Here again, though, we must distinguish between the realm of the social and the everyday reality of consumers' lives. Insofar as obesity is viewed as a social problem, it's only logical that the currently proposed solutions are mostly concerned with tinkering with the individual - this a natural outgrowth of our rational, individualistic cultural orientation. But what happens when we implement these rhetorically derived solutions at the level of everyday practice and implementation?

The answer, we suggest, is staring us in the face - and it is not pretty.

In fact, our research on individual practice and sentiment tells us the ideal solutions to the obesity dilemma may have little at all to do with individual people and a heck of a lot more to do with the larger cultural framework within which we live our lives. Specifically, we believe significant shifts in important dimensions of our eating culture - increased snacking frequency, the tendency towards eating alone, and an overall decline in commensality (see sidebar) - have contributed to much of the current obesity problem.

We base these conclusions on a number of factors:

Our finding that an increase in knowledge and education regarding matters of weight, health and diet appears to have little impact on one's own weight. As an aside, while we've all watched the volume of "helpful" educational information designed to aid the individual consumer skyrocket, we've also seen a related rise in obesity rates. Strangely, government programs continue to produce ever-more elaborate informative brochures and educational materials, as if somehow these were going to magically begin producing results.
Means-end, product-solution scenarios (e.g., low-fat products) do not work. This observation rings true for a number of reasons, most important of which is the fact that eating is first and foremost a cultural activity. As such it resists efforts to transform the activity to meet the specific guidelines of particularistic ideological systems.
Diets simply do not work as a long-term, permanent weight-loss solution. Again, while individual consumers may encounter some short-term benefits from specific dietary regimens, these strategies fail as long-term, permanent solutions because they represent eating styles that are incompatible with culturally centered notions of eating.

Finally, at the most basic, fundamental level, I suggest it is worth taking a step back and reflecting. In one way or another, we have all, as a society, been preoccupied with the problem of obesity for the better part of 100 years. We have devoted significant percentages of our vast resources - natural as well as intellectual - to the study of this problem. Moreover, many of us have devoted much of our own lives to solving this problem. Yet, we continue to swell - by all scientific accounts, we appear to be fatter than at any previous point in U.S. history.

And herein lies the most significant and important challenge of all, namely, how to change not individual behavior but the parameters within which such behavior resides - how to change our culture.

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