-By Harvey Hartman

Consumers are feeling the pinch at the gas pump, at the grocery store checkout, and on health care statements. There's little cheer on the overall home front as housing values decline in many markets across the nation. So, with a less than rosy economic outlook for the coming months, we should assume that consumers will curb their spending on quality foods, right? Not really.

Embracing the culture of food

Despite all the punditry and press reports predicting major lifestyle disruptions associated with the looming recession, what actual data tells us is that events such as rising prices of gasoline or food won't in and of themselves cause consumers to behave differently.
This isn't like the stock market crash of 1929, which is associated with the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States, when millions of people lost their jobs literally overnight. Food then was truly scarce, and people did all they could just to survive. This was a critically important institutional shock that altered the nature of everyday life and, by extension, consumer habits, for generations to come.

Today's consumers lead incredibly complex, frenetic, complicated lives, and because of rising food and gas prices they might feel differently, think differently, and believe they should act differently. But at the end of the day, life for most consumers continues pretty much in the same manner as it did prior to the price hikes.

On the other hand, for some time now, and long before current economic fears set in, consumers have been moving toward food products rich with soulful elements, and with experiential signs and symbols attached to that food at the site of its everyday consumption.

Our countless approaches to eating in the United States are interwoven with our family lives, our celebrations with friends and work colleagues, our life pace, our various culinary experiences at home and abroad, and much more. This is what we mean by the culture of food: the panoply of cultural forces affecting the everyday production and consumption of food by ordinary consumers.

Since the ways we work, raise our children, play, seek out new taste experiences, and grow old are all undergoing titanic, rapid change, the everyday culture of food is also shifting. This is why, even with or despite current economic pressures, American consumers won't abandon their pursuit of higher-quality foods and food experiences.

The key lesson here then, is that to better weather tough times, industry players need to keep a close eye on consumers' actual behavior -- not anecdotal consumer responses to the press, or answers to survey questions.

Begin with the larger cultural shifts driving the way we live; how and where we shop, and what we shop for; when we shop; and why we shop. Remember, people aren't just buying products; they're buying higher-quality experiences.

--Examine data on consumer buying and shopping trends to separate changing behaviors already underway from those supposed to have changed in response to the current economic situation. Many experts use extreme events to "predict" or "explain" large shifts in consumer behavior that were, in fact, already occurring long before the events in question.

We've seen, for example, small segments of consumers seeking greater simplicity in their lives. The events of the past few months may have reinforced their decision to simplify, but they didn't cause it.

--Stratify the population into groups that should be differentially affected by the current economic situation, and then look for evidence that the expected behavioral change hits across these groups. We would expect to see lower-income consumers making more and larger changes than wealthy consumers. This is just economic reality; but it's important to distinguish between short-term belt-tightening and a genuine reorientation of consumption.

--Compare currently hypothesized behavioral changes with known behavioral changes from similar periods in the past. Again, other than the predictable changes in consumption we expect when household budget constraints change, we don't see anything suggestive of real consumer changes.

--Separate attitudinal expressions from actual behaviors, and idiosyncratic, knee-jerk behaviors from more sustained, substantial changes. Many in the media, as well as analysts and industry experts, rely on expressions of anticipated or intended behavior rather than on careful observation of actual behavior.