¹It will not surprise readers of this report that Americans think very little about where their food comes from. There are a variety of straight forward reasons why this should be the case; for the majority of living Americans, food has always been available and acceptably healthy. Furthermore, fewer and fewer Americans participate in food production, or even witness it. It is partly due to American exceptionalism in such matters that the U.S. stands in such historical contrast with most other cultures in the world, when it comes to interest in how food is produced.

Besides these most obvious reasons, though, there are other powerful factors that prevent Americans from thinking about and engaging with the topic of food systems. The importance of these factors is that they have the power to derail productive thinking even when experts try to focus the public’s attention on this usually-ignored issue area. This report focuses on two default modes of thinking about food, both of which obscure and distort the “Big Picture.” The first and more dominant of these modes is based on people’s own Lived Experience – providing “little picture” perspectives, along with emotional incentives not to think about food systems. The other is a mode that allows for a “big picture” of a sort, but is too generic (and misleading) to be very helpful.

The dominance of lived experience

Most of the time, for most Americans, thinking about food is dominated by default understandings and emotional stances that are based on the lived experience of eating, shopping, cooking, being served, and so forth. Various aspects of people’s thinking about food make it much harder for them to think about food systems.

• The big picture is essentially “crowded out.”

The more familiar and natural patterns of thinking associated with the experiential domain of food are so rich, complete and cognitively satisfying that people typically have no sense that there is something more to know, and they are not asking the questions experts want to answer for them. It is difficult for new information to find its way into the established, little-picture ways of thinking.

• New information is translated into new (and less productive) terms by the dominant models.

The default patterns of thinking are so powerful that new information (presented by advocates, for example) can become confirmation of existing understandings, rather than helping people achieve new understandings. Warnings about food risks, for instance, are interpreted as confirmation that individuals need to make smarter choices, and that individual foods should be avoided, since “healthy food” and “healthy eating” are understood in these comfortable, little-picture terms – as opposed to having anything to do with sys-
tems of production, marketing or cultural patterns.

• There is emotional pressure to ignore problems in the food system.

When Americans are induced to move outside their comfortable patterns of reasoning about food, and to think about food production in broader terms, their thinking reflects a generic sense of how the “modern” world works – incorporating fragmentary information about food systems, but not adding up to a fuller picture that could help people understand the importance of the changes advocated by experts.

Members of the public can, when pressed, offer simple sketches of some of the basic elements of the American food system, including large, corporate farms (which may be relatively high-tech); distribution to restaurants and stores (especially including supermarkets); extensive processing of basic foodstuffs into ready-made products; and government guarantees of food quality. At first glance, this sketch seems to correspond well (if very incompletely) to expert models. Upon closer examination, though, it is clear that rather than asimplified food system model, people are operating from a generic model of Modernization, and plugging in their smattering of factual knowledge about food and food production. While this public model overlaps with expert understandings, it also entails significant distortions, unfortunate assumptions and cognitive “blind spots” such as the following:

• The degree of modernization is exaggerated.

• Modernization is seen as unstoppable.

• Problems are the “price of progress.”

• Certain kinds of information have no place and are filtered out.

If people’s thinking about food is shaped by a “modernization” schema – rather than by a (missing) food system model – then information that doesn’t fit that schema is harder to focus on and remember. This helps explain why people don’t understand sustainability (preserving things as they are sounds like a contradiction of modernization), diversity (of crops or of farmers – modernization is largely “about” standardization), agricultural subsidies (which can seem like Quixotic bulwarks against modernization), or organic farming (which can seem like an irrelevant side current, or another attempt to resist modernization).

More generally, the lack of a specific model of food systems means that certain kinds of information has no place to “stick” in people’s minds. (It is a well-established principle in the cognitive sciences that facts are not stored like isolated objects in the mind, but as parts of broader organizing “schemas,” “models,” or “frames.”)

The limited educational value of food scares

Food scares have some power to raise awareness about larger issues related to food produc- tion, but their effects are severely limited by the powerful default patterns of thinking described above.

• Food scares may serve simply to confirm the generic Modernization narrative.

Rather than adding new understandings to people’s repertoire, food scares are just as likely to simply confirm familiar ideas about the inevitable costs and risks of progress. Since people are generally passive and complacent about progress, a particular food scare is not likely to lead them in productive directions.

• Familiar little-picture models reassert themselves quickly in people’s thinking.

Even if people catch a brief glimpse of a systems perspective on food, they are likely to return to a more natural mode of reasoning focused on lived experience and the “little picture.” Food safety issues become questions about smart individual choicesat the store, or disappear altogether as people’s Consumer and Food Receiver models take over, allowing them to forget the uncomfortable information and resume their enjoyment of the products of the food system. The news media’s brief, episodic discussion of food safety “incidents” makes it especially easy for people to take in information without learning anything of substance.

¹Not While I'm Eating: How and Why Americans Don't think about Food Systems, Axel Aubrun, Andrew Brown and Joseph Grady, Commissioned by the W.K.Kellogg Foundation