Foodies Clan

From paleo- and keto-friendly wine to CBD-spiked seltzer, booze companies are trying to court wellness-obsessed millennials

Last year, Emily Suzanne Lever tweeted a succinct thesis of the millennial behavior: “everything I want to do is self care and everything I don’t want to do is emotional labor.” Life is hard. We’re burning out. It’s easy to make the ethical and moral justification come after the desire.

Food brands are quick to embrace this line of thinking. Fast food, alcohol, candy and other snacks have often been thought of as vices, and it’s the vendor’s job to convince customers that it’s okay, even good, to eat whatever unhealthy thing they happen to be peddling. And among those most willing to exploit our most selfish, and self-serving philosophies is the alcohol industry, which is now trying to brand beer, wine and liquor as “wellness” products. Some companies have advertised their booze as replenishing post-workout substances, while others have reapproached “low-calorie” marketing, or have leaned hard into natural ingredients. But why does faux concept of wellness sell alcohol? Why does it sell anything?

Business Insider reports that the alcohol industry is having a hard time capturing the millennial and Gen Z market, who, though they love their rose, are also spending less on alcohol than previous generations. There’s been an explosion in “mocktails” at high-end bars, the proliferation of Dry January, and obsession with seltzer that’s about as intense as any over craft beer. Also, the spread of legal cannabis and CBD (which has questionable effects but is extremely profitable), has made a wider variety of buzz-inducing substances available at the grocery store. Alcohol is no longer the most (sometimes) fun legal drug in town.

Though there have been “lite” beers for decades, Corona and Dogfish Head have recently launched new low-calorie beers, and Heineken is leaning heavily into marketing their non-alcoholic beer. To lure back younger customers, alcohol brands are turning to “wellness,” arguing that their products are a natural part of any healthy, balanced diet. Alcohol brands are also marketing drinks not only as something to share with friends, but as an important tool of workout recovery. “We invite you to nix those post-sweat sugary sports drinks and have a beer,” writes Sufferfest in copy for their new beer, Fastest Known Time. Beer is also becoming something to drink while you run, as Beermile races spread.

As seltzer has risen as the more virtuous version of soda, spiked seltzers are becoming the virtuous alcopop, with White Claw’s tagline “made pure,” and Bon & Viv advertising up front they’re gluten-free, sugar-free, and only 90 calories a can. There’s also Gem&Bolt, a mezcal made with damiana, an herb used in some traditional Mexican liquors that’s supposedly an “anti-depressant, mood regulator, and organ tonic,” according to the company’s founder. Wild considering if there’s one thing we know about alcohol, it’s that it’s a depressant. And natural wines have seen a boom in business, partially because they have fewer additives and “cleaner” ingredients, but also as BI points out, because they’re compatible with both the Paleo and Keto diets. FitVine, which sponsors athletes and name-drops Crossfit, calls itself “wine that champions the way you want to live a healthier life.”

This makes sense from a business perspective. “Wellness” is for financially secure people with time to spare — on their skin, on their bodies, and on their diets. Millennials with enough disposable income to douse themselves in serums will surely pay a little more for a protein-packed beer or a natural wine that’s supposed to give them the buzz they want, but leave them hangover free.

But the push toward rebranding certain types and brands of alcohol as “health” food highlights one of the biggest issues of the wellness industry — namely, that it’s meaningless at best and a scam at worst. Body positivity activists have been trying to decouple morality from food choices for decades, as labeling certain foods as “good” and others as “bad” exacerbates disordered eating. Writer Marie Southard Ospina wrote that her eating disorder was greatly affected by the language around food, which transfers to the people who eat it. “Plenty of thin people ate ‘bad’ foods. Plenty of fat ones ate ‘good’ ones. In fact, a lot of people’s body size seemed wholly irrelevant to their caloric intake.” But it didn’t matter. Eating cake was still a “guilty pleasure.”

When it comes to alcohol, it feels like we’re on a familiar side of a swinging pendulum. Red wine is supposed to be good for your heart, after all, so claims that alcohol could be good for you are not new. But beer is not necessarily a health food, and it’s not necessarily a vice. It’s just beer. It’s good that, as a society, many of us are being pushed to reconsider how and why we’re drinking, and that there are more options for people who choose not to partake, no matter the reason. But positioning alcohol as a tool to build a better, cleaner body is just the flip side of positioning it as a cool potion necessary for any adult party--either narrative makes it harder to have a healthy relationship with it.

Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden are showing up to picket lines to support overworked and underpaid grocery store workers. When will the rest of the country care?

On April 11, over 31,000 workers at 240 Stop & Shop locations in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island went on strike. Represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, workers were protesting proposals from management that included increased health care costs, and reduced pension contributions for many part-time workers. Stop & Shop’s parent company Ahold Delhaize claimed the cuts were in order to stay competitive, though they made $2 billion in profits last year, so few bought the argument.

It should be obvious that better conditions for workers means better conditions for customers, but the through line isn’t always clear. If your waiter has the flu, your dining experience is going to be worse (even without the risk of spreading germs). If your Uber driver has been driving for 18 hours because that’s the only way he can make rent, he’s going to be a worse driver. But if you’re shopping at bigger, chain grocery stores, chances are you can do it with minimal employee interaction. Your meat is pre-packaged, your produce stacked, and sometimes your checkout is self-service. The toll bad conditions take on grocery employees is less obvious.

But looking at the things unions and employees are protesting reads like a page out of Ebeneezer Scrooge’s Guide to Management. Stop & Shop proposed eliminating premium pay on national holidays and eliminating raises. At Walmart, one pregnant employee had to continue heavy lifting or risk being put on unpaid leave. And organizing group Whole Worker says the store’s “order to shelf” inventory management system (the inter-store system that lets workers track what’s being bought and what needs to be replaced) is so punitive it regularly makes employees cry from stress.

Grocery workers, like workers in many industries, have reached a breaking point. Working conditions have deteriorated since the ’90s, taking a total nosedive after the recession of 2008. “The ’90s were really a period of transition for a lot of industries, and we saw a lot of consolidation in the grocery industry,” says Stephanie Luce, Chair and Professor of Labor Studies at CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. Between 1996 and 1999 there were 385 grocery mergers, according to one USDA report. Bigger companies began crushing unions, and traditional grocers now had to compete with mega-corporations like Walmart for customers. In order to keep operating within such tight margins, grocers cut costs in labor by cutting benefits and shifting full-time jobs to part-time ones.

The shift led to a lot of employee dissatisfaction, and organizing, especially in the last few years. Unions and union-backed groups like United For Respect, and Whole Worker are fighting back against diminishing wages and benefits, and “involuntary” part-time work. And it appears to be working. During the 10-day Stop & Shop strike, the longest in the history of the company, visits to the store went down by 75 percent the first weekend, meaning that a majority of shoppers were willing to stand with employees, sacrificing their convenient shopping to join the fight for better working conditions.

Union-busting management often relies on the assumption that these sorts of disputes are internal matters that, short of a strike, won’t affect how customers shop or perceive the store. But complaints from customers prove that’s not true. When certain Key Foods locations were striking, shoppers have noted that the new employees who crossed the picket line to run the meat department weren’t as good as the regular employees. “The meat is no good,” said one local of the replacement workers at the Sunset Park Key Foods. “They leave it out too long.” On top of the reasonable opinion that people deserve to be paid fairly and treated well at work, a lack of those things directly affects customer experience.

At Whole Foods, even customers have noted a decline in quality of life for employees since the company was bought by Amazon, though the store has always had a bad reputation with labor activists. Not only have the products gotten worse, but employees appear harried, and stores are in states of disarray. “Now the employees are overworked as shifts are understaffed, and the morale plummeted as the customers get less satisfied with products and service,” writes one customer on Consumer Affairs. “But, does anyone at the top care?” Whole Foods employees are also attempting to unionize, despite Amazon being notorious for union-busting.

Among the most guilty of exploiting workers is Walmart. Antonia (last name withheld) worked in the grocery department for a decade, in stores in Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas. In 2007, they paid less than what she had earned elsewhere, but “by that time, I didn’t have another option. I have three kids, and I have to take whatever I have,” she said. In 2014, she moved to Texas, and noticed conditions were worsening. “Mostly everybody, if they pay the rent, they don’t have no money to buy groceries. If they have car problems, they have to borrow money from everybody.”

According to Antonia, these conditions directly affected how she and her associates could do their jobs. In South Sioux City, Nebraska, she said there were at least three people working the produce department at any given time. But soon, the store started cutting workers, sometimes leaving her to unload 11 pallets of produce by herself, at wages she could barely support her family on.

”I think when the associates don’t feel comfortable, they don’t feel happy, I think that that reflects in the customer, because they don’t take care of the customer very well either,” she said. “How I can smile to somebody when your kid doesn’t have enough food in the house? When you are so behind on the rent?” When she was finally invited to a OUR/United For Respect meeting, an organization that has worked to raise wages and improve parental leave policy at Walmart, she said she felt a sense of relief. “It’s like, ‘Wow, I am not the only one. We are so many, and it’s not just at this store, it’s everywhere.’”

Though grocers unions have pressured management and gone on strike over the years, the recent push in the past few months has gained more attention, partially because of political campaigning. Four presidential candidates commented on the Stop & Shop strike: Elizabeth Warren showed up to a picket line with doughnuts, saying she would fight for the “dignity of working people;” Joe Biden joined a rally and told striking workers they are “fighting for what all New Englanders want — affordable health care, a better wage, and to be treated right by the company they made successful;” both Pete Buttigeig and Amy Klobuchar visited rallies, and Bernie Sanders picketed with striking McDonald’s employees. (Republicans are seemingly avoiding photo ops at the picket lines.)

That four Democratic candidates chose to stand with striking workers confirms that public opinion about labor organizing, at least on the left, is changing for the positive, and that it’s a big enough issue on voters’ minds for politicians to comment on it. According to Luce, the uptick in organizing among grocers is part of a larger trend. “I think there’s been a lot of unhappiness for a while, a lot of frustration,” she said. “But now we’re at a moment where… people are willing to take risks that maybe they weren’t willing to take.”