Millennials' Food Values

I've given a couple presentations recently on food trends, and in each instance I was asked whether the so-called Millennial generation thinks differently about food issues than older generations.  I haven't spent a lot of time delving into this question because a lot of the willingness-to-pay research I've been involved with over the years suggests demographics don't tend to explain a lot of the variation in willingness-to-pay.

But, given the interest in the subject, I thought I'd take a quick look at some of the data from the monthly Food Demand Survey (FooDS) I've been running for over three years now.  In particular, I pulled the data we ask on so-called "food values."  The question shows respondents 12 issues (randomly ordered across surveys) and asks respondents which are most and least important when buying food.   Respondents have to click with their mouse and drag four (and only four) items in the “most important” box and then do the same for the “least important” box. 

A scale of importance is created by calculating the proportion of times (across the entire
sample) a food value appeared in the most important box minus the proportion of times it
appeared in the least important box. Thus, the range of possible values for a food value is from -1 to +1, where a higher number implies more importance (a +1 would mean the particular food value was placed in the most important box by 100% of respondents). This is a zero-sum scale, and it only reveals relative importance (e.g., how importance taste is compared to price) not overall importance.   

Ok, so here's a graphical illustration of the food values by age group (I've pulled the data over time, so each age group has several thousand observations, yielding margins of error of around +/- 0.025 importance points).

Except for the oldest group, there is agreement in ranking at the top: Taste>Safety>Price.  In the middle-range of importance, there is far less agreement.  Both the 18-24 year old group and the 25-34 year old group could be considered Millennials according to most definitions I've seen.  The Millennials place less relative importance on nutrition than the 55 and older crowd.  However, the top four issues (taste, safety, price, and nutrition) are way more important than the other issues regardless of the generation under consideration.

The Millennials place less importance on appearance but more relative importance on naturalness, animal welfare, convenience and environment than do older generations, particularly the 65 and older group, which compared to the other age groups, places the lowest importance on naturalness, animal welfare, and environment.  There is a big divide when it comes to the importance of origin: the 65 and older group places quite a bit more importance on origin than do people who are 24 years and younger.  

The biggest gap is for origin (there is a 0.30 spread on the -1 to +1 scale) between the youngest Millennials and the oldest group.  The next biggest gap is for naturalness (there is a 0.22 spread on the importance scale) between the oldest group and the 25-34 year old Millennials.  The most agreement is for "fairness."

It might also be instructive to compare all this along another demographic category: gender (margin of error here is +/- 0.014).  

Women place more relative importance on safety, animal welfare, and naturalness than men. Men place more importance on convenience and novelty than women.  The biggest gap is for animal welfare (a 0.19 point difference on the -1 to +1 scale) and then convenience (a 0.16 difference).  

A Plea for Culinary Modernism

This piece by Rachel Laudan is a masterful discussion of the ahistorical fascination with "natural" food.  She gives an interesting historical account of the evolution of cooking and eating, and make the case that industrialization was the great food equalizer - that the view that "natural" food was good for the poor is hogwash.

Here's one excerpt:

“As an historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by Culinary Luddism, a past sharply divided between good and bad, between the sunny rural days of yore and the gray industrial present. My enthusiasm for Luddite kitchen wisdom does not carry over to their history, any more than my response to a stirring political speech inclines me to accept the orator as scholar.

The Luddites’ fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast: artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated and fatty. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.”

She points out the condescension in the idea that other people should toil away to make their artisanal ethnic foods so that we can take pleasure in them.  Laudan concludes with some of the following thoughts:

“Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need.

What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it, an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labor, and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial.”

An Anthropologist Takes on the Paleo Diet

Interesting TEDx talk by the anthropologist Christina Warner on the accuracy of our beliefs that underlie the modern Paleo Diet.  I particularly enjoyed her discussion around the 11 to 12 minute mark about how many of our current fruits and veggies are modern,  human creations that were no where to be found in the Paleo era.

What's going on inside people's heads when they see controversial food technologies?

That was the question I attempted to answer with several colleagues (John Cresip, Brad Cherry, Brandon McFadden, Laura Martin, and Amanda Bruce) in research that was just published in the journal Food Quality and Preference.

We put people in an fMRI machine and recorded their neural activations when they saw pictures of (or made choices between) milk jugs that had different prices and were labeled as being produced with (or without) added growth hormones or cloning.  

What did we find?

“Our findings are consistent with the evidence that the dlPFC is involved in resolving tradeoffs among competing options in the process of making a choice. Because choices in the combined-tradeoff condition requires more working memory (as multiple attributes are compared) and because this condition explicitly required subjects to weigh the costs and benefits of the two alternatives, it is perhaps not surprising that greater activation was observed in the dlPFC than in the single-attribute choices in the price and technology conditions. Not only did we find differential dlPFC activations in different choice conditions, we also found that activation in this brain region predicted choice. Individuals who experienced greater activation in the right dlPFC in the technology condition, and who were thus perhaps weighing the benefits/costs of the technology, were less likely to choose the higher-priced non-hormone/non-cloned option in the combined-tradeoff condition.”

and

“Greater activation in the amygdala and insula when respondents were making choices in the price condition compared to choices in the combined-tradeoff condition might have resulted from adverse affective reactions to high prices and new technologies, although our present research cannot conclusively determine whether this is a causal relationship. In the price condition, the only difference between choice options was the price, and the prices ranged from $3.00 to $6.50, an increase of more than 100% from the lowest to the highest. Such a large price difference could be interpreted as a violation of a social norm or involve a fearful/painful/ threatening response, which, as just indicated, has been associated with activity in the amygdala and insula. Kahneman (2011, p. 296) argues that these particular brain responses to high prices are consistent with the behavioral-economic concept of loss aversion, in this case, a feeling that the seller is overcharging the buyer.”

The punchline:

“Estimates indicate that the best fitting model is one that included all types of data considered: demographics, psychometric scales, product attributes, and neural activations observed via fMRI. Overall, neuroimaging data adds significant predictive and explanatory power beyond the measures typically used in consumer research.”

What will the future of food look like?

Time.com recently asked a series of "experts" to opine about the future of food and predict how our plates will change.  The predictions are rather predictable as are the choice of experts.  

The selection of experts only included one scientists - nutritionist Marion Nestle - and her future look to me a lot like our past, as many of us: 

“will enjoy home gardens and locally and sustainably produced food, at greater cost. ”

It is implicitly assumed that home gardens and "local" are the same as "sustainable".

Indeed, many of the answers fell prey to a kind of romantic traditionalism.

The list of experts mainly included chefs, journalists, and food activists.  Aside from Nestle, not one active food scientist was interviewed.  There was one restaurant consultant and one investor in "companies dedicated to solving food problems" interviewed, but not one person currently engaged in farming for a living, no food microbiologists, no geneticist, no agronomists, no animal scientists, no food engineers, no one working for today's largest food and agricultural companies.  In short, few of the kinds of people who are most likely to have the most substantive impact on the way we eat and farm in the future were interviewed.  

Its like our thinking about the future of food has become stuck in some sort of retrogressive mindset.