Last week I attended Expo East, one of the country’s largest natural food shows. It was my third time attending, and this year was smaller (and also, the last one ever!). They also have an Expo West convention in the winter in LA, which is much bigger and kind of the disney world of health food. I was supposed to go in 2020, but… we all know the rest of that story.
Anyway, back to this year. I struggle with Expo East because I LOVE food, snacks, herbs, and healthy-ish things of all varieties. And I even love working with food brands as a writer and strategist! And, at the same time, it’s all kind of ridiculous. The sea moss drinks, healthifying everything (and often making it just taste like shit), and even adding herbs to everything in ways that aren’t effective.
I found a lot of BS amongst the fun, and I am reconciling it all in my brain.
But it all led me to wonder: what are we even optimizing for?
I’ve written several times before about how wellness without community care is just self-optimization. And I think we see self-optimization more and more these days disguised as wellness. Don’t get me wrong, I love having tools to help improve your health and feel good in your body. That, in it itself, is a noble endeavor. Being well and feeling well enables you to go and practice community care, be a better friend/parent/child/neighbor/volunteer, etc. etc.
But I am not sure a brownie that tastes like garbage is really doing that for us just because it uses coconut sugar instead of cane sugar.
Walking around Expo East feels like you’re right in all the wellness memes: “clean” eating, “adaptogens,” “refined-sugar-free,” “functional,” and so many buzz words on repeat. It’s like a game of who can shove as many buzzwords into the description of their products. Vegan crabcakes! Keto candy! Pills that make you less hungover! Protein cookies! We can do anything!
(FWIW, the vegan crabcakes were delicious)
What are we even doing? I can break so much of this down from using my herbalist hat, too, for being a load of B.S. We don’t need adaptogens in our candy and there’s so much being marketed that’s incorrect. Not all functional mushrooms are adaptogens, neither are half the herbs people label. I wrote a 25+ page guide on adaptogens that barely scrapes the surface and some random venture capital-backed bro is trying to convince me that lion’s mane is an adaptogen.
It’s not.
It’s like we’ve collectively lost our minds… or got so sucked so deep into capitalism that we need to produce more and more because there’s always more about our health we can optimize. We can always find a healthier seltzer or donut or candy. We can always do better.
We can’t just enjoy things for what they are, we have to always be optimizing.
Don’t get me wrong, I try to eat relatively “healthy” foods. I am a sucker for great branding, and I appreciate brands out there making that more delicious and fun for folks. It also helps those with serious dietary needs for health reasons. Not everything is problematic, and I love seeing the brands started by women, and/or folks of color, and/or people celebrating their heritage. There were a lot of products I genuinely enjoyed and would buy again. And there are some foods or formats of food that make it easier for people to get the benefits of herbs that might taste bad or be unenjoyable to take otherwise, for example.
I love that I have healthier soda options, for example, after cutting out soda years ago because it just wasn’t aligned with the way I like to eat and what makes me feel good. I love a fun snack and products that are made with simpler, healthier ingredients than some of the others out there.
But the sheer amount of brands coming out with health products is untenable. They’re constantly trying to one-up each other by adding more herbs, more “function,” less seed oils, blah blah blah. And so many of the brands who succeed do so because they are venture-backed and founded by white dudes with access to lots of money and power. They aren’t making the health and wellness world more accessible, they’re just making money.
It’s, frankly, getting boring. And who knows if it’s even necessary.
Who’s actually evaluating if all the things these brands claim are true? (Spoiler alert: no one, unless they’re making outrageous health claims, and then maybe the FDA).
I know I am just that weirdo anti-capitalist dreamer, but I wish some of the millions of dollars put into funding yet another functional mushroom seltzer could be redirected to community care and to feeding food-insecure people. That won’t happen because it’s an investment without any return… so it’s a donation. And the rich want to get richer, so that doesn’t work.
I am still unpacking my thoughts on the event but I continue to wonder if there’s ever an end to the pursuit of optimization. Do we always need to be 1% healthier? When do we take a break and say… this is enough? And that’s not to say you should settle if you feel like shit all the time, but if we feel good in our bodies and have the energy to do the things we want to do and take care of one another, do we need to ensure every single thing we put in our body constantly leads to further micro-optimizations (if they are even doing anything at all)?
I’ll be thinking about that for a while as I eat through my samples.
