Wayne’s Weekly Hacks: Developing People-Centered Food Policy

Happy New Year,  and thanks for opening my 9th skills-building newsletter.  

If you give me five minutes, I guarantee you at least one New Year’s Resolution on a skill you can use to double your influence during one of multiple holiday occasions this coming year.

My focus this week is on how to use popular holidays to promote the Good Food agenda. 

 GOT SKILLS?

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.”

— Mark Twain

WAYNESTORM THE HOLIDAY FOODORTUNITY

I’m tempting fate, but I’m going to take some lessons from last month on how good food organizations can better prepare for all the coming months of holy days and holidays.

The sheer number of holy days and holidays in any season is mind-boggling. Human needs for eat-pray-love combinations have made us into a species of holiday-lovers who enjoy group experiences of eating, drinking, partying and reflection. 

These needs may end up being our species’s saving grace!! 

It certainly is a sleeping-giant of a gift for food organizations because it’s not yet possible to digitize holidays. There’s no such thing as a holiday that doesn’t have the sharing of a feast as its climax. That’s our cue to say something meaningful!!

So get over your exhaustion from last month. Now is the time for Good Food organizations to skill up for upcoming opportunities. 

Off the top of my head, I’m thinking Robbie Burns Day, Valentine’s Day, International Women’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, Passover, Easter, Cinco de Mayo, Mothers Day, St Patrick’s Day, Easter, Rosh Hashanah,  Ramadan, Martin Luther King Day. Almost all of them have some obvious or potential relationship with central themes related to food links to meaning and identity.

What, you wonder why I mention Martin Luther King Day? You haven’t heard of how the taste for freedom during his civil rights campaign was developed in main street diners? You never heard of the Greensboro restaurant sit-in of 1960?

Not only do food enthusiasts face a feast of opportunities for attention-catching comment.  We can burst heroically through an open door because the information is readily available, even though it’s been erased from popular memory. All the easier to open a mind, attract attention, or stage a special event! 

Holidays are not just for fundraising. They are also days for friend-raising and fun-raising. 

Though human needs for convivial food gatherings and sociable celebrations run deep, the understanding runs shallow in both food businesses and food movements. 

I think that’s because both the food industry and food movements are so stuck on thinking of food as a utilitarian commodity. 

Neither food businesses nor Good Food organizations relate to food as a case of expressive personal, social and cultural needs for good cheer. Big Food wants consumers to buy more food. Good Food organizations want donors to donate for more food. When that’s all we appeal to, we miss the point of the exercise and the opportunity to resonate at a deeper level of personal and cultural meaning.

I’ve made that point in a semi-academic way in an article my wife and I did on the food movement’s neglect of food culture. I also tried to make a bit of a splash about the food potential of holiday time in my own hometown newspaper, with a feature on that classic holiday food – chocolate.

I lost no time worrying about whether this article on chocolate was a top-of-mind issue. Christmas sales of chocolate in the US alone amount to almost $800 million dollars. Our challenge and opportunity is to link that to deeper values associated with the season, as I tried to do in my article.

Failure to see food’s many links to holidays and popular culture lies behind out lack of skills for honing in with messages and experiences that resonate and engage with people’s best selves. 

People doing food causes can make much better use of the human holidaying habit than we do now — to engage with people in a timely and evocative way about how food causes resonate with deep currents of human sensibility and meaning.

So my takeaway lessons are these: work at developing people-centered food policy, not just food policy that centres on supply chains or nutrients; work at developing the emotional and symbolic attachments and connections to food – as explained here and here.

Forget about guilting people or scaring people. Let’s tug at the heart!!

Holiday Best

There are many ways to share holiday goodwill by tapping into the curiosity, wondering and need-to-know tips that holidays arouse. No need to be a one-trick pony. 

Here are some ways that high performers linked their specific messages with universal messages linked to the season: 

New Years is a great time for “listicles” – the ten best, ten worst, ten funniest, ten tastiest… kind of thing. Mother Jones scored with a list of best multicultural recipe books of the last year.  

Hospitality and guests dropping over are always a feature of the holidays. Ruth Klahsen, one of southern Ontario’s leading artisan cheesemakers, helped out her Facebook friends by posting different daily how-to’s for an eye-pleasing, tasty and easy-to-assemble cheeseboard. 

Everyone has an inner sentimentalist history buff in them during seasonal holidays. For short stories, the New Yorker resurfaced this nostalgic offering.

LinkedIn rates the Christmas season as primo for deepening connections with business-to-business relationships, and provides options for “holiday creative” – from survival guides to sample new year’s resolutions.

And the Salvation Army won top grades for knowing how to brand themselves as part of Christmas.

 A special shout-out goes to Lloyd Alter, editor of mass-distribution Treehugger, who makes the case for solutionary messages in his  December issue. “Perhaps we are too negative. I complained earlier about “green” aluminum and “sustainable” jet fuel, and Melissa was telling us what not to buy. Twenty times as many people were interested in how to care for houseplants in winter than in the three stories combined. From now on we are going to put on a smile and be cheerful! Uplifting! Positive! So ignore the headline. This story is about how to save money and reduce waste for the holidays!”

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

 Shout Out

Congrats to Living Architecture Monitor, published by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, for a special issue linking two critical and complementary issues — green infrastructure and social equity.

I learned most from Joyce McLean’s article on anti-gentrification policies that protect the social integrity of once-modest neighbourhoods that have been greened. 

McLean says that green infrastructure champions often overlook the missing link to successful mixed neighbourhoods – affordable housing. Government agencies and non-profits bear the costs of new green projects, but forget to use that leverage to insist on affordable housing initiatives. 

 Green infrastructure doesn’t happen without intervention by citizen groups and government leaders. Neither does equity. Social and plant diversity need to be seeded together.

 Take-Home Thought

Start the new year with a clear understanding of actions, goals and outcomes, as explained here. Think of how polishing skills can polish all three.

Request for Action