Why don't we do more food-based activism?
In the past few months I have been reading a lot about historical food culture. It's kind of amazing how much things have changed here in the US. Over the last century or so we have basically eliminated communal eating and massively changed the economics of prepared meals. At one point we had automats and cafeterias which skipped out on most of the "front of house" service and focused on serving large volumes of people to keep prices low. There were also diners, which are much different from what we consider to be a diner today; they were very small places that only prepared simple things that needed very little labor to prepare; things like hash browns, sandwiches, or pancakes, so the food was still very cheap. But because they were small, they were able to serve smaller markets that other restaurants were not able to capitalize on. Compare that to today, where diners are just restaurants that have 50s style decor.
But the thing I think is much more unusual is how rare we see food used in service of a message. It's something that has a long history across the globe. Most notably, religions operate food kitchens that help to bring poor people into their folds. Some religions actually have a built-in food culture that includes feeding your neighbors. It's really effective too; there's a small chain of restaurants where I live that has inexpensive food which has some bhuddist texts at the dining tables, and honestly it had me considering joining a religion for the first time. If I spoke Chinese they might have got me! Eating food requires a baseline of trust, so if you can get someone to eat at your restaurant you will bypass a lot of the caution that people approach the world with.
With that being said, why isn't food-based activism a lot more popular? I'm sure that it would work for much more than religion. A restaurant that acts as a messaging platform doesn't necessarily need to be funded by food sales, so they can undercut the competition on price and reach an even greater audience. Given the ways I have seen religions use food to further their means, I think that it could even go farther than changing people's minds about topics and actually motivate people to take action and join communities who are actually making real change. Food is both relatively inexpensive and it's something that everyone needs to survive, so it seems to me that food-based activism is the single largest missed opportunity for community organization.
I assume you mean in developed nations. Ultimately, food scarcity just isn't as much an issue in developed countries. Yes, there are people who are food-insecure in every developed country, but as a whole, calorie excess is more of an issue than a calorie shortage.
Food preparation is hard business. There's a lot that goes into it, from regulatory licenses, to the labor required, which is very expensive in developed countries. When much of the audience isn't particularly going to be moved to begin with due to not being food-insecure, that's not much of a winning proposition.
Or for a hypothetical: let's say you're part of the Babylonian Forest Protection Collective and you want to rouse people up to protect the (fictional) Babylonian forests in Missouri. You go through all the steps to starting a restaurant, and spend every last drop of your money, because starting a restaurant is very expensive. You now face the second challenge: that 60% of restaurants fail in the first year.
You aren't trying to make a profit, sure, but this is below that on the hierarchy: 60% of restaurants are horrifically in the red, let alone talking about profitability. Better hope that your other income streams are quite strong at this point.
The third challenge: that the people going really just care about the food, and that food is a brutally competitive business, and that taste > price in many cases. In the end, you're burning money in a money pit for worse outreach than other methods.
It's not something we see much of, but food scarcity is a problem in the U.S. and other parts of the developed world. Food deserts are areas where people lack convenient access to grocery stores. A disparity in "coverage" disproportionately impacts people with disabilities, the elderly, the poor, and also people without cars (which covers a broader economic demographic). Food deserts overlap with lack of public transit and also the ability to travel safely (i.e. you have to travel more than 1 mile (1.6km) to reach even a convenience store selling produce/groceries, whether or not that 1 mile crosses a highway or has bike lanes, much less a sidewalk). The USDA has an interactive atlas and guide.
Despite the prosperity of "develop countries," in the U.S. a large number of people visit food banks due to food insecurity. And food insecurity is not limited to "does food exist?," but is also about food variety -- such as being able to access baby formula or fruits and vegetables.
That said, providing fresh foods to low-income areas doesn't seem to correlate to improved health in those individuals. So the immediate consequences of small grocers improving food availability might not be materially felt in some ways, but in other ways improving food availability probably plays a role in long-term financial outcomes of affected persons and families.
I just wanted to mention that food scarcity is a real problem even in developed countries, and it's not always about the amount of food per person, or simplified metrics like that. Transportation is a major component that's often overlooked, yet something that we could very much solve. I'd like to talk about OP's actual discussion topic, because there's a lot of interesting food activism going on that people should be talking about, but I'll have to get to that later.
Yes, I am talking about developed nations.
You're falling into a trap that I think a lot of modern organized activism tends to fall into; focusing too much on financial statistics and not enough on the actual movement of people. A soup kitchen will not have the reach of a social media advertising campaign, sure, but it can be a heck of a lot more effective at actually changing peoples minds and getting them to act, which can have much more actual effect.
I also don't think that food insecurity is an important aspect of this kind of activist organizing technique. The only benefit you get from that is a captive audience, and that brings it's own set of pitfalls.
This wouldn't be a soup kitchen, though. You proposed a restaurant that's just cheaper. I think that changes a lot: once you exchange money for a product, even if it's subsidized, it is now a transaction - money has been exchanged for goods.
A lot of the good will from food donations is that the food is free - you didn't pay anything, and thus you feel obligated to give back goodwill in return. If it's merely cheaper, then none of that exists.
On a real soup-kitchen, the issue is that it's extremely expensive, comes into a lot of regulatory trouble in developed countries, and to be crass, mainly gets you people that don't really help that much towards the cause. If you're trying to protect Babylonia Forest, it's probably not the starving people that are destroying it.
So it's mainly relegated to charity work by extremely well funded institutions (e.g Churches) that are trying to get as many believers as possible, not necessarily cause some kind of movement or change.
Finally, I'd add that there's some survivorship bias to why so many activist organizations care so much about money and efficiency: because they're the ones that survive. It's not that their all spreadsheet nerds, it's that the spreadsheet nerds are the ones that make it to the next year.
I would think food insecurity would matter a little in terms of what and where people are willing to eat at. What is stopping me from eating at a soup kitchen right now, other than I don't want to because I have other places I'd prefer to eat from? As far as I know, they don't run background checks or anything to determine my eligibility. I'm sure there's some places that do ask for proof of income but if I tell them I have no income at all, are they going to turn me away because I don't have proof of income? Or are they going to require to see a SNAP card or such? So you couldn't necessarily just run a soup kitchen and expect to have broad appeal or reach because not everyone is just going to choose to eat there. If you run a soup kitchen type service, presumably you'll get the reach of a soup kitchen, which is to say not very much.
I know you said they are focusing too much on financial statistics, but one does need to consider that because what you are proposing isn't necessarily going to have the same costs as a soup kitchen and won't be held to the same standards as a soup kitchen, depending on what you're trying to accomplish or who you're trying to reach. If you want the reach of a soup kitchen with the costs of a soup kitchen, you need the same support a traditional soup kitchen would get. Soup kitchens probably get a lot of donated food, and if it's a soup kitchen operated by a religious institution then it's likely donated food from people of that faith that go to that church. For any other type of activist setup you're proposing, is it going to have that same support or is the parent organization going to have to fully fund the cost of the food? Likewise for the labor to prepare that food for others. Are we saying that if PETA wanted to operate a vegan soup kitchen as part of their cause to convert people to veganism, that PETA members are going to volunteer to work at this soup kitchen every day? Maybe they would, but I'm skeptical of this being a consistent model. To me the costs seem like they're going to align closer to a restaurant than they are to a soup kitchen. I think that means financial statistics matter a lot, even if you don't expect the service itself to generate revenue to sustain itself but rather expect the overarching mission of the activism to get a return on that investment through converting people to the cause.
So I think the cost is important. To me the cost is something we should be able to easily determine why this doesn't happen. What does it cost to operate a restaurant? Now of course there's tons of variables to that, but I just picked something simple to start with.
What's a simple restaurant that almost everyone in America has probably been to? McDonalds.
So of course there's more costs in there than just the operating costs, since there's franchise fees and real estate cost etc., but let's just say it costs significantly lower that to just $1 million per year to operate a restaurant like McDonalds to reach the same amount of customers. Let's say you're giving all this food away for free so you're not making a single penny off this venture. Mind you, this is ONE restaurant in ONE single location that has a limited capacity to serve so many people, how many organizations spend $1 million to reach that amount of customers?
I don't know how best to determine the reach of the restaurant, I'm sure you could figure that by amount of locations already made that those franchises determined they met the demand of any given region roughly speaking. You can't really look at daily customers or such because many of them are probably repeat customers throughout the year, which past a certain point is probably not super useful for an activist type of situation you're describing since once you've converted someone to your cause you really don't have as much to gain from them unless it's required that your ongoing subsidized food is what keeps them aligned with your cause.
There are more than 13,000 McDonalds in the US, so if you want the national reach of McDonalds, it would seemingly cost 13,000 x 1 million. If I'm not using some bad logic here (which I'm sure is quite possible), I think that is $13 billion per year. How many organizations can just spend $13 billion per year to fund an activist side project that makes no money on its own? Even if you could somehow reduce the amount of restaurants and still get the same reach, you're still in the billions.
If you significantly reduce the restaurants and reduce the reach, then yes your costs come down greatly, but it reduces the overall effectiveness of your activism if quantity of people converted or aligned to your cause is considered as part of the effectiveness. Presumably somewhere in here, the costs scale relative to the effectiveness, meaning if it's not feasible or worth it to spend billions per year to try to reach everyone in the US, how is it any better to spend millions to reach significantly fewer people?
The next step would be to look into some activist type of organizations similar to what you're imagining and look at their finances and see what kind of things they are doing now and what kind of reach they are getting out of the money they are spending now. I would imagine that it's much better than what we're talking about above with food.
At least in my experience if an org runs a soup kitchen (serves hot meals for at least one meal a day, every day) they're being provided food by a food bank, getting grants and such. Some are operated by employees, others by volunteers, but it would be rare to be able to cook from the donations of members without some sort of centralized food ordering. Just the same as frontline food pantries don't run fully off of canned food donation drives but from food bank deliveries.
Sikh gurdwaras may be an exception to this general rule. I'm not sure if the food is purchased by the gurdwara or donated by members. But otherwise at least in the US that's generally how they work.
Just wanted to provide a bit of clarity there for folks.
I think there are a few factors that prevent this from working on a larger scale than it currently does. This sort of thing does exist in pockets, though. There's one of those restaurants near me that has a "pay what you can" model that has suggested prices, and you can pay more or less than that depending on your financial situation. There are also restaurants that have programs where they'll hire disabled workers. But at the end of the day, it's kind a niche thing and there is only so much room in the restaurant industry to sustain that model. Restaurants are difficult and expensive to run. Food costs are a generally only about 1/4-1/3 of a restaurant's expenses, so having cheap/simple ingredients doesn't make a huge financial difference. The rest of the expenses (rent, labor, utilities, marketing, etc) don't change all that much if you're trying to prepare simple foods. Yeah, maybe you need less equipment and a less-talented chef to make simple foods, but you're still overall on the hook for running a very expensive and labor-intensive enterprise.
Now, is it possible? Sure. There's a place near our cabin in Western NC that has an old-time Pharmacy / Drug Store diner that's been there forever and has very simple, inexpensive food. But it's in a rural area where rent and labor (and therefore cost of living) costs are lower than metropolitan areas.
Activism can also be divisive. When you take any kind of activist claim, no matter how morally right it might be, you risk alienating a significant portion of your potential customer base. For a low cost restaurant, which would rely on volume instead of average ticket price to survive, it can be a death sentence for the business.
The last thing I can think about is the reason that people go out to eat. For most people, they go for amazing food that they can't make at home, for great service because they don't want to do it themselves, or just to be social with whoever they're dining with. Most diners aren't going to care about activism stuff while they're dining. They just want to spend time with their friends/family and be served yummy food.
Activist food projects don't have to be profitable, though. Food is being used as a medium for a message rather than a means of profit or even sustainability.
The exact form this would take would have to depend on the community it is deployed in. It probably won't work in high income neighborhoods where the word "restaurant" is synonymous with $50 plates, but it would work in places where people are looking for a convenient meal during their short lunch breaks during work, or for overworked people who want an easy meal but don't have the time or energy to cook. Or for more time sensitive things you could do an event in a park (which is something I have seen before for multiple causes).
They don't, but you have to at least cover 100% of their expenses. They can't lose money. Unless you're going to find staff to work for you for you for free/less (good luck finding a kitchen staff), a building that will allow you to operate rent-free and utility-free, vendors that will give you significant discounts on supplies and equipment, you have no choice but to consider the financials. I think you are overestimating the amount of money that most restaurants make, especially a small standalone one compared to a corporation who can operate with economies of scale. It's an expensive endeavor.
I serve on the Board of Directors for a large nonprofit 501(c)(3) in my city. We, by definition, do not turn a profit. We spend every dollar that we bring in. We're either funding our programs, or paying down debt that we accrued during COVID when we had almost no income but still had to make payroll. We have to pay for our buildings, staff, insurance, and all of our vendors (our biggest expense due to the nature of our work). Our vendors give us a minuscule discount for being a well-known nonprofit. Our staff takes a lower-than-industry (but still livable) wage in exchange for working on a mission that they're passionate about, but our turnover is significantly higher than our for-profit counterparts (this is very common in NP vs FP). Our vendors and our people expect to get paid. No payment, no vendors or people. Nonprofit doesn't mean you have no bills. I see in this reply and the other reply that you're trying to ignore the economics, but that's just not the reality. It's the very reason that you're not finding what you're looking for.
Now, if this is something you're so passionate about, what's stopping you from organizing people and assets to make it happen in your community? I got involved in a community organization that I'm passionate about - as I mentioned, I serve on their board and also go out and volunteer with the organization hands-on. There are plenty of groups who would love to engage with someone who is willing to help make projects like this come to life.
For a certain "we", I think we did already.
If you look at mcdonald's (and other American fast food chains), they spearheaded capitalism in closed off economies.
Maybe it's not a cause you personally care for, but I'd argue that it has increased American culture and values abroad, with a healthy profit on the side.
I think you've gotten a number of good responses about food activism and economics. As a separate post, I want to take a bit more of a literal segue on food activism and mention that there are groups and people who are actual activists about food, though we may dismiss it or see it as a fringe thing, that can't become mainstream. But by dismissing some of these alternatives out of hand, we're doing ourselves a disservice (and it's costing us more money).
Veganism is probably the most immediate example of food activism that comes to people's minds -- and a belief-cultural practice that is often discounted by the mainstream. It's also a good example of a pretty low-drag, yet slow-moving cultural movement without a forced religious tint.
Another food activist movement revolves around soy/almond/cashew/oat milk (although almond milk is perhaps the fraud here). I don't know which came first, the search for an environmentally-friendly alternative to milk, or alternatives for the lactose intolerant, but either way everyone now has some decent alternatives here and it's very mainstream. And the interesting thing about this, is that this food activism has scaled to industrial levels. In a different direction are the folks into unpasteurized milk, and also forgoing industry by buying local.
There's also a trend away from animal-based protein. This is a really interesting and important undertaking that goes beyond the plant-based proteins that are advertised in so many products recently. Food activists are approaching "unusual" non-animal protein from two sides: people who want to normalize (mainstream-ify?) protein sources from insects and "bugs," and people who want to solve food insecurity by using protein sources already common to traditional cultures and people in remote regions.
The nice part of some of the alternative protein sources, like meal worms or crickets, are that they can come in forms that don't resemble the source creature, which reduces the yuck-factor. People are using cricket flour to make common dishes involving flour. They're also inventing ways to package cricket-breeding to send to regions of the world suffering from limited protein sources or food insecurity in general. And there was/is a company incorporating crickets into fallout shelters.
But perhaps the best part is that these alternative proteins don't have to be pushed on the western world as the inevitable soylent green of the future. We can still have meat from animals, if we choose. They're just one alternative and one that might be a viable way to support remote populations suffering from severe food insecurity, whether that's caused by war, drought, or a severe economic downturn. These alternative proteins also reduce pressure on animal stocks (especially fisheries), which is something that should concern anyone who wants to eat meat in the future, because as fisheries deplete, food prices and availability are going to change dramatically and so will the health of our oceans.
So this is a long-winded way of pointing out that if we see soy milk and veganism as the forms of food activism that they are, we'll start to see other food activism as well. Like people who run a food truck and just want to share their culture through food. Or people who are pioneering insect-based protein, which means less competition for people who want a good steak.
I know what you mean, but I do wonder if Denny's, IHOP, and Waffle House essentially fit your definition of a diner, but with modern trappings. With respect to the "restaurants that have 50s style decor," I wouldn't call those diners either. And Johnny Rockets has always been a theme-restaurant, which I'd imagine puts it in the same category as the 50s style not-diners.
But what you're looking for in this definition is now called a gastropub or a bistro. Two different clienteles I'd imagine, but both fitting the criteria you set out of being on the less expensive side and serving smaller markets. And yes, largely these aren't common enough in the U.S. because of population densities and the prevalence of fast food as the default choice for "cheap" and "easy" meals crowding out competition. I wouldn't call what the average gastropub or bristro does as "food activism," though there are celebrity chefs who are selling a message in their bougie bistros.
Food as a message. So foodways is sort of the direction this is going? Connecting food with people, or using food to connect people with ideas. I don't know if you listen to NPR segments or other media about people sharing their cultural heritage with others through food, but this is kind of a thing and something that has become an easier vector to introduce people to the nuance of culture (e.g. Thailand vs Vietnam). Maybe not to the extent of pushing a religion with it, but I think there's enough proof that if you want to push a religion, write a book.
Foodways and culinary experimentation via food truck, pop-up restaurant, and authentic dining experiences cater to people who travel/explore through food, which seems like a largely positive way to capitalize on that particular desire to be adventurous. I would imagine that there are shows on this topic in particular, as people like Anthony Bourdain began to focus on travel documentaries focused on food, but it's very relevant that they went to these lengths because they first experienced elements of the foodways more locally and then went in search of the origins and traditions to understand and iterate from a more basic level. To a larger extent, I think it's the messenger's intention as much as the message that gained Bourdain such a devout following -- and it's not just about food, but seeing people as who they are. To that extent, Bourdain and others weren't preaching a doctrinal set of beliefs, but they did become messengers of a perspective/belief in the process, which is proselytizing in the modern way (I hope Bourdain would find the humor in what I just said; I think he would, but he'd swear at me, haha).
Waffle House is the only of those examples that I think still fits the niche of a diner, with their smaller dining rooms and very basic menu. I've only been there once but to my memory they were advertising on the menu the regular consumer brand food they used for things like sausage and syrup, and the entire deal was very low-rent. Denny's and IHOP are very much not the same because they have relatively elaborate menus and a focus on table service as well as large dining rooms.
I'm sure it depends on where in the world you are, but in my corner of the world, gastropubs are expensive and pretentious places and bistros are moderately expensive places to get very small meals.
Another hypothesis I'd like to throw out there — though I cannot say whether it is actually a factor or not — is that there are fewer unemployed people now.
Historically, it was pretty common for married women to quit their jobs in order to handle errands, housework, and childcare. As these tasks became less onerous in the 20th century due to technological and economic advances, a large fraction of the population — and a fraction that was very well-practiced at cooking — had a lot of free time to dedicate to charitable causes.
Today, there are fewer people with that kind of free time. My experience is that modern charity work is now dominated by students and retirees, but there may just not be enough of them to go around or they may prefer different types of charity than middle-aged housewives did historically.
I feel it is also worth noting that people used to rely much more heavily on fresh food, which tends to be highly seasonal. Today, most foods can be preserved cheaply and enjoyed year-round, but this was not the case historically. From personal experience living on a farm, there are times of year that we are so overwhelmed with fresh produce that we are practically forcing it on friends and neighbors (and, even then, much of it winds up going to waste). It's very easy to be charitable with food when there is more than your family can eat before it spoils.
I have trouble visualising what you're asking for.
Say I want to advance the cause of werewolves ('cause discussing real life politics is messy), what would you envision? Sell a brand of wolf themed cookies? Open a werewolf chain restaurant? Ask for a werewolf friendly label (cannot be too sure about all the trace silver there can be in the magical food industry)?
As other mentionned, food as a form of soft power is definitely a thing. Other have mentionned McDonald's, but it's not the only example. On the of my head, there Thai cuisine (spearheaded by pad Thai in the 2000s, there's a nice episode by Andong on it), the French registering the concept of Gastronomic meal as a French intangible cultural heritage at UNESCO, and the whole concept of Protected Designation of Origin (Champagne is not any sparking wine, Parmesan is not any hard cheese, etc).
I'm asking about a very broad thing. It could be something as simple as giving out a brownie with a pamphlet about lycanthropy, or it could be about bringing people into a dining hall to more thouroghly proselytize them. I knew a salesperson once who recommended giving out pints of ice cream because it made the person take it home before it thawed out, and then when they'd go to eat it they'd think about them and the products they were selling.