What edible motif will you be today?

Food as a vehicle of soft power, accessory, and aesthetic

Dec 17, 2024

Hello! I’m Apoorva Sripathi, a writer, editor, and artist. If you think my work is valuable and would like to support me, follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram, share this post, and consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.

the inexhaustible food as accessory multiverse, tbc

If cookbooks are the self help manuals for those of us who worship at the altar of food, then it is art telling us how to live via transcension1. I become suspicious when brands do that, when they want us to consume what they are selling. Consider this ad for the haircare brand Bread: a hand swipes thick butter with a knife till it reveals a square bottle of hair oil buried underneath. It is like a treasure unearthed. And people are infuriated, just look at the comments. But the ad has effectively relayed its trick – over 7m views. I myself have watched many times to analyse it but also because I love butter!

Maybe sometimes you can taste design and it seems to be that brands have tapped into this multi-sensory experience that food can provide. In my inbox, I can count at least 10 such adverts but I’ll list two here for the sake of brevity: a lip balm with a cup of coffee and a plate of biscotti and face cream set next to a champagne couple filled with whipped cream. Outside my inbox, many more, including a shortbread carved into the logo of a fashion brand that begs to be eaten.

I loved the butter ad even though it visibly is such a waste of butter and was possibly influenced to almost buy that hair oil (I didn’t). This quality of food being aspirational and an aesthetic is more day to day than we can care to admit – how we shop for our meals, where we shop, and what we buy all factor into both aspiration and aesthetics. The provenance of what we eat; of where the carrots were harvested from; how local the eggs, the milk, and honey are from; the flavours of the clementines on my coffee table – all provide a shorthand of taste, origin, and value (and sensorial pleasures?).

Thinking about this essay, I came to the conclusion of food being used as a vehicle of soft power to push onto consumers what’s seen as desirable and not, whether it’s actual food rerouted through initiatives such as ‘relocalisation’, ‘artisanal’, and ‘heritage’ or through edible motifs. The world saw this play out in the 2000s with the food of Thailand2 because the government made a conscious effort to promote the cuisine globally. Or what we know now as gastrodiplomacy.

Today, this concept of ‘food as a vehicle of soft power’ extends to building brand identities like the Pantone colour of the year3 for example, which is the indulgently named ‘mocha mousse’, but it really isn’t what it seems. It never is. The website describes the colour as a “warming, brown hue imbued with richness. It nurtures us with its suggestion of the delectable qualities of chocolate and coffee, answering our desire for comfort.” The word choices are careful and considered, there is the comparison to chocolate and coffee, to the moralities of consumption around comfort, but also to an expression of ethical consumption which is often the case when talking about chocolate and coffee en masse to subvert the limits of solidarity, labour, and justice.

I wrote four years ago in an essay on comfort food for this newsletter that “we anoint unremarkable foods with the title of comfort. Maybe because when we’re looking for comfort, we tend to look around instead of ahead.” But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. This richness, comfort, and nourishment rather paints a different picture to what Pantone is doing, merchandising what

Viv Chen

called “the big business of sad beige”, that it’s a “highly calculated business decision above all else”. Starting out life as a small printing and ad agency, Pantone was refurbed into a corporation that is now best known for a proprietary colour order system used in graphic and product design, fashion, printing, and much more. The commercial viability of something like this is immense especially as the company sells a standardised library of colours as their intellectual property, i.e. their colours cannot be supported in open-source software for instance.

To gain access to mocha mousse, touted as sophisticated and which is the case for minimalism or quiet luxury today, you’d have to play into their consumerist designs from buying their merchandise such as mugs and keychains to perhaps staying at a very clinical hotel in Brussels where the rooms are strewn with products from their colour library. If you scroll down the webpage for the colour of the year, you can see the merchandise they recommend for a colour they dub as evoking “feelings of contentment” and “thoughtful indulgence”: a Motorola phone, a drab brown sofa that’s “aiming to redefine how neutrals are perceived”, brown headphones, makeup kits, web design, sticky notes, a mocha tea infusion, cashmere shawls, home decor, and limited edition collections that don’t seem quite so limited to me. This nefarious brand and marketing strategy is able to play up a mundane colour as luxurious simply through an association with food and especially coffee and chocolate, which are two products whose discussion of ethical consumption has entered the mainstream and has led to a range of ‘sustainability’ initiatives that aim re-moralise global trade. Market-based change seems definitive but what difference does it make when it doesn’t extend to agricultural justice for those who produce these foods?

Also: do I really want a fucking conglomerate that pretends to own colours to dictate my fashion choices and sensibilities? No.

I chanced upon the Instagram page for skincare brand rhode, which proclaims to be “a new philosophy on skincare” – but never mind that the commodification of gender and beauty routinely ends up being constantly bound in the acquisition of material things4 – and does the ‘food as accessory and aesthetic’ extremely well to market its stuff: for eg gingerbread biscuits in a 3x3 grid, icing cinnamon buns to promote a muddy brown colour scheme, dusting their logo in what seems like cocoa powder (tis the season I guess), raspberries and cream cake for fall(???), chilli margaritas for a terracotta blush in summer, whipped cream with sprinkles on their product (I simply cannot figure out what it is!!), a melting ice cream cone positioned carefully in front of a belly button, a burnt marshmallow supporting the weight of yet another blush… I am endlessly fascinated by this – companies using food to signify taste as well as context, cleverly tapping into our hunger for things we cannot consume. Why was the bottle of hair oil buried in butter before artfully scraping back thick ribbons of the stuff? Why is a chilli tucked under the bikini string of a skinny model who’s emerged from a swim along with a small rhode blush? Why is facial cleanser floating in a bowl of cereal?

The hair oil in butter says it’s luxurious, sexy and ephemeral, and signals pleasure. The Loewe tomato bag, inspired by a viral meme of a fat juicy heirloom tomato, banked on something that goes viral each year based on consumer knowledge just aware enough to know that summer is for tomatoes, tomato sandwich recipes and essays exhorting that all we need is mayo, salt, and pepper and nothing else, without having to dig deep into why seasonality has become a trend (and is not the norm) conferring social and cultural capital upon consumers. The raw milk movement, which is less about food and more about tapping into the fears and anxiety of consumers in an ever-more complex global food system that villifies ultra processed food without considering where the responsibility for the safety of food ultimately lies. This riveting piece on the River Cafe podcast where the chef-patron Ruth Rogers uses “the great leveller of food to consolidate an elite brand” is too a great example of food as soft power.

Food is a palatable vehicle to drive consumerism (“Mocha Mousse may be a classic exemplar of enshittification", writes Michelle Ogundehin). I touched upon this in an earlier essay5, the one about the pantry being a place of performance, commodity, and aesthetic. If the overconsumption aesthetic is literal in the pantry and the kitchen, then in the other rooms of the house it’s burgeoning indulgence. You could argue that Dutch still life paintings featuring food were the harbinger of this trend – lobsters and lemons piled up high, wheels of cheese and baskets of fruit, spears of asparagus bound tightly together, and them signifying status, power, money, death, desire, love – with it evolving into actual food being taped as art.

But I’m no saint, I’m certainly guilty of this too, looking out for that one perfect bauble6 that both encapsulates who I am and what I like to eat, foolishly trying to fixate my fluctuating identity through time, feeling the weight of my self through my dietary choices, which what Elizabeth Goodspeed notes as food choices being able to “broadcast specific social signals and preferences” but that the meanings attached to these foods “evolve alongside shifts in societal values and priorities”. This aspiration to own a piece of indulgence – signified through butter, tomato, cherries, or raspberries – becomes synonymous with identity. If you can afford a gourmand perfume, what does that say about you? The making of oneself in a material world not only exposes the moralities in consumption but is also a constant negotiation in identity formation. If food becomes central to one’s sense of self, how does it affect consumption with respect to identity? And I ask myself this as well, if not often, particularly when I’m at the precipice of an important purchase. Have I been influenced and should I have been? Do I really need this right now? Or at all?

I tend to go back to Bourdieu on this because he’s abridged this better than I can, that food is incorporated into the body in highly class specific ways making the body the most indisputable materialisation of class taste. There’s no denying that food is central to consumer culture: we go to restaurants to eat; markets and supermarkets to shop at; buy food themed merchandise and Christmas ornaments; lovingly spray gourmand perfumes; buy cookbooks; watch TV shows centered around food, buy trendy olive oil, flaky salt, and tinned fish; listen to food podcasts; wear pasta puffers and carry tomato clutches; and essentially develop a personality that’s intertwined with food.

Food as an accessory, as a marketing tool, as soft power, as aesthetic works time and again because it is aspirational: there is now a choice to wear it than consume it, like a kind of puritanism surrounding food, nutrition, and eventually leading to the pursuit of thinness as a cultural ideal, which completes the vicious circle of brands making clothes only for a small range of sizes. Fresh food, meanwhile, is a luxury only some can afford – so even if fruits are expensive, an association to them via a cherry lip tint signals chic and being fashionable; you have the cultural capital through it even if you can eschew yourself from eating it. As what we eat is becoming more globalised, more industrially produced while undermining traditional cooking skills and knowledge transmission and homogenising local and regional culinary cultures, to escape any polarised views of consumption of food it may perhaps be easier to just buy its theoretical counterpart.

This is where brands are being deviously clever, pushing out their products as both necessities and luxuries like the food we eat (“buy our beauty/haircare/skincare products; we’re just as vital as bread and butter”), thereby trying to be relatable even as all our lived experiences of consumption are shades of grey. Food is sensorial, it helps forge intimate connections between people and place, people and identities. Now, it’s being employed to forge connections with people and their preferred brands through oversaturated food microtrends on a supersaturated internet. I wonder what the next one is in our atlas of aspirations.

What edible motif will you be today?

Food as a vehicle of soft power, accessory, and aesthetic

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