Pushing speed? The marketing of fast and convenience food

Abstract

The Menu: This paper explores the complex relationship between the marketing of fast and convenience food, and Western constructions and experiences of time in late Modernity, through a polemical analysis of a set of recent British television advertisements for a variety of brands in this sector. A cursory reading of these ads reveals some apparent contradictions in the deployment of time in fast/convenience food marketing: they seem to celebrate both speed (time as “sameness” and “continuity”) and nostalgia (time as “difference” and “discontinuity”). We go beyond a simple understanding of these alternative tropes as indices of competing brand strategies by interpreting their wider relations to the systemic and cultural vicissitudes of contemporary global capital. We conclude that the temporal articulation of fast and convenience foods presented in the ads is not in fact paradoxical, but dialectical. This dialectical relationship is an essential and continuing ideological structure of late Modernity.

Keywords:

• Speed
• Time
• Fast and Convenience Food
• Nostalgia
• Dialectical

Notes

Nonetheless, and although we do not place any empirically grounded store by our reading of the advertisements, it is perhaps worth pointing out that the fast food industry relies much more heavily on television advertising than it does on other media (Yoon and Kim 2001), and that the British consumer is also notable for their high consumption of convenience food especially as compared to their counterparts in mainland Europe ( Breakfast 2003). Even our quasi‐journalistic analysis of British television advertisements may therefore be instructive with regard to the marketing uses of time, and their wider implications, in this context.

There is perhaps an interesting connection to be made between fast food and food avoidance (fasting). If time‐consuming “traditional” meals are no longer routinely feasible in our fast‐moving world, then food is theoretically relegated from the position of sustenance for life to that of a distraction from or interruption of workaday life. Do we therefore seek to sideline it by using fast food, or indeed neglect it altogether by fasting?

However, and further to our point above about over‐relying on analyses such as Hall's, Hassard (1991, 1996) also reminds us that generalizations about prevailing constructions of time are not always helpful—for example, in his suggestion that sociology has a tendency to “gloss over the fact that the industrial world is not simply composed of machine‐paced work systems, but includes a wealth of processes based on self‐paced production” (Hassard 1996, 584).

Relatedly, Holt's empirical application of Bourdieu's discussion of the “social patterning of consumption” (Holt 2000, 213) to a group of American respondents suggests that those he identifies as possessing high levels of cultural capital—and thus who can also be considered to belong to the cultural “elite” in this context—tend to dismiss anything mass produced, “popular” or “routinized.” Instead they engage in a quest for “decommodified authenticity” in their consumption of “traditional” and “unique” household objects, clothes, films, holidays, and music (Holt 2000, 238–41).