Desperately Seeking Data Points

I just finished reading an article about American consumer habits in food categories, which suggested that behavior was more “European.”?

Brief pause for an eye roll.

I roll my eyes because the collective American food industry regularly revisits this idea that as American food behaviors “evolve” (I was tempted to say, “progress”), it is straining to become more like the behaviors of the Europeans or the British. I’m not sure how far back this idea goes. I have seen multiple episodes in the past couple of decades where prognosticators hailed the revolutionary changes that were about to be visited on the American foodscape as we awakened to European models of behavior. I wonder if this worldview is a vestige of the history of European peoples in the New World who generally perceived themselves (and were perceived) as bumpkins. Questions for another day.

But within the past 20 years, we had Tesco Hysteria. It was vitally important for every executive above a certain rank in supplier companies and retailers to fly to Britain to visit stores to study products, packaging, and distribution because Tesco would bring that model to the US, and every American retailer would meet with disaster, catastrophe, Armageddon, or WORSE. I believe paleontologists have determined that failure to keep up with changing grocery trends is what wiped out the dinosaurs. Except for birds.?

It is one of the amazing functions of the human brain to scan through a dizzying amount of stimuli to recognize patterns that allow us to see forests and not just trees. It is the most natural thing in the world to look for correlations between two things that seem similar (American consumers, say, and British or European consumers). Considering that these groups of consumers share a certain amount of affluence, developed economies, access to certain infrastructure, and domestic conveniences, it seems like they should be more similar than dissimilar. What could be more natural than looking at where these two populations are dissimilar and expecting them to arrive at some mean??

Back to Tesco. So many people expected Americans to begin acting like their more advanced British counterparts that they overlooked a few things. The first, of course, was to overlook the fact that after a late-eighteenth-century spot of unpleasantness (a kerfuffle of some renown), the emerging Americans sort of went on a different path from the British. We chose to overlook a few facts that might have been worth recognizing: the size of American refrigerators vs. those found in England, the established shopping patterns of American and European consumers, population densities, and consumer reliance on automobiles for transportation. There are other factors as well, of course, but you might have thought some of these would give the prognosticators pause.

My point is not that the whole Tesco Hysteria was a waste of time and money, although it certainly was that). My point is that we keep looking for the great convergence of American and British (or European) food consumption patterns, which is stubbornly not happening. Why do we keep looking for it?

There’s a version of confirmation bias that goes something like this: if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. When we look at British and European food distribution and consumption, we see a lot of very interesting models. It’s tempting to point at some of these differences and say something like, “There’s no reason we couldn’t have that here!”

Winston Churchill said, “We shape our houses, and our houses shape us.” Behaviors around food are just so. Our societies, mores, and infrastructure shape our options, and our behaviors evolve accordingly; those habits and behaviors shape our culture, our mores, and our infrastructure. The fundamental flaw in looking for the Great Trans-Atlantic Food Convergence is that it isolates the variables and their inter-relationships. The British have a particular food distribution model because it has evolved according to their population densities and the habits and values of the British consumer. In trying to graft that model onto the United States, we totally ignore how and why that model evolved where it did.

Our most profound confirmation bias is that people make rational decisions—which, of course, they do. Sometimes. But because we try to impose a framework of rationality on consumer decisions, we start to imagine inputs and outputs in some very non-human mechanistic and deterministic flow: if THIS, then THAT. Logically, if THIS, then THAT is deductive. The problem is that the inputs are not often well known or understood, and rather than being a deductive argument, if THIS, then THAT is really inductive or probabilistic.?

Food is food, but it is not?just?food. Acquiring and consuming food is tied to love, hospitality, well-being, affluence, and flexibility. The food solutions that arose from one society's social history will have a different meaning or persuasive force than they have in a different culture in which all of these elements have different meanings.?

Confirmation bias is a tricky thing, and all of us fall victim to its siren call. But let’s make two commitments today: let’s try to force ourselves to consider more of the HUMAN content in the messiness of consumer behavior, and can we PLEASE stop trying to find data points to support a view that the American food market is yearning and striving to become European?