Luxury Groceries Have Replaced Luxury Fashion

Friends! Guess what? We got an episode for you and this one is about how influencers – feeling shy about showing off their luxury goods in a [not-yet-named-but-c'mon] recession have moved on to the contents of their fridge.

In this ep, Georgia chats with Ludwig Hurtado of MOLD Magazine's "Food Futures" podcast about luxury grocery brands and the Highsnobiety “Status Economy Report,” that says fashion is dead and food is in 🥗

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The Tyranny of Taste

• Highsnobiety’s Status Economy Report
• Highsnobiety’s report on groceries specifically
• In the status economy, even groceries are a flex

Find Ludwig:

• Twitter
• Instagram
• Food Futures
• Play zine

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

...spore print of mushroom in the retina, in my dreams
lens displacement in the multi-cellular dark
abyssal sound of leaves in the wind
rushing cloud dance before the sky closes in,

Excerpt of It Is Difficult to Exaggerate the Importance of Mushrooms as Food, by Chris Torrance

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta, and we have a scrumptious show for you this week. In this episode, Georgia chats with Ludwig Hurtado, writer, filmmaker, editor at The Nation, and host of Mold Magazine's Food Futures podcast about conspicuous consumption of food. Georgia looks at how luxury grocery brands are replacing luxury fashion brands and also at the high snobiety status economy report, all about what the cool kids online are into. And spoiler alert, it's protein bars.

But first, we're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. But when we return, Georgia Ludwig and the tyranny of taste.

Do you remember the first time that you noticed a food or a grocery store item being presented as cool?

I would say the one that stands out to me as something that you could get at the grocery store was Lunchables.

That's Ludwig Hurtado. He's the author of the forthcoming book titled Bad Foodies, which is a collection of reported essays about the relationship between food and culture in modern society. What was the thing that made Lunchables so desirable?

I mean, there was the branding of it all, like the commercials that you see on TV. We can help refuel them. We have the technology. With Lunchables' Fun Fuel Wraps and Bagels, you're

Fueled up and ready to go. I wanted to talk to Ludwig about quote, unquote, cool foods. What that term means now in our online lives, and what it says about our anxieties around what we consume, but also why we would want a food to be cool in the first place. When it comes to Ludwig's Lunchables example, the answer seems pretty straightforward. Kids love games and toys.

Why wouldn't they want a toy they can eat? It turns food, something that could be as boring as putting a nutrient slurry into your body, into something more than itself, something exciting and fun to participate in. New Lunchables fun fuel. Fuel up for fun. But Ludwig's point about Lunchables is honestly true about any food that is presented to us as cool.

It's more than just sustenance. But it's also not just about the product, of course. It's about you. There's an aspirational quality to buying something cool, and it has everything to do with money and means.

Like, okay. So it's crackers and ham slices? Like, yeah. We can do that for you. Oh, and cheese too?

Sure. We can do... Like, if you buy deli slices and cheese slices and a big box of crackers, even Ritz or, like, an off brand Ritz. Like, you could easily make a Lunchables type package for yourself at like half the price every day of the week. But there was something like embarrassing to me about having like homemade Lunchables.

To me it said to like my peers, you can't afford the name brand thing. It's now this game, this activity. And if you can afford the game, then you can't play. And no one wants to play with the off brand LEGO. Right?

Like, you wanna play with the LEGO brand LEGO.

The brand is the thing that makes the food cool, and it's the easiest way to signify your status to anyone who sees you buying or eating it.

I remember, as is always the case, as has long been the case, especially in America, the need to sort of signify to folks that you do have money. Like, you want to brag about being rich. And I think it's also something that's... It's still very prevalent today, but I think the idea of, like, telling people you're rich actually feels gauche and, like, not what you're supposed to do. But it's still very much a prevalent American phenomenon.

In our online lives, this is an issue that is specifically prevalent for influencers. Influencers act as the r and d department for the culture's most obscure questions of status. They figure out not just what things are worth promoting, but how to promote them well. And the questions around that are especially tricky right now. How do you signify your coolness without being explicit about it?

How do you moralize your status? And according to the fashion and culture website, Snobiety, the influencers finally cracked it. Earlier this year, High Snobiety published a report called The Status Economy, which argued that, quote, for the last decade, fashion has been the most direct way to communicate status, knowledge, and cultural credibility. Today, that concentration has broken apart. Everything is now a signal.

Every purchase, product, and experience functions as a marker of taste, knowledge, and cultural credibility regardless of category, According to High Snobiety, the cool kids are no longer showing up to dinner with a Louis V handbag as a status symbol. They're pulling a David protein bar out of that bag. The coolest thing about these people isn't their clothes or their car or their watch. It's their groceries. Some ground up gluten free pretzels.

I love cauliflower rice. I think it's so good. Shout out to one of my favorite brands ever, Simple Mills. I love you guys. And then I got Song vinegar chips because these are my favorite.

I don't know what they put in these, but I need two bags. This shift away from the runway and toward the pantry also has a lot to do with money and status. The report writes, quote, when fashion and conventional luxury goods become oversaturated and inaccessibly overpriced, consumers simply took what they've learned about cultural signaling and migrated this behavior into other categories. That same idea of cultural credibility is now found and purchased in small everyday products like groceries, unquote. Groceries aren't exactly cheap, certainly not in our current economic climate, but they are a much more accessible, comparatively affordable sector to treat yourself to the nicer version of something.

Most of us are pretty damn poor, and we we really can't afford very nice things. A lot of us will never own homes. A lot of us will never pay off our student loans, but we can spend $8 every once in a while on a cappuccino and we can spend $9 on a carton of eggs and that can make us feel like we're better off. And if we're lucky and we... If we have the audience, then we can at least, like, signal to someone else, if not signal to ourselves that we, you know, have the leisure.

And it's maybe just a fake it till you make it kind of thing. You know? Like, maybe we just wanna feel better about our financial position.

But who decides what signals what? Part of it is marketing, ad campaigns, packaging, but it's also the realm of a certain online community of consumers. The status economy refers to them as cultural pioneers, but that's just another way to describe influencers. The influencer's social positioning is not stereotypically one of financial precarity. Their business is frivolity, hipness, and wealth.

They are the people who can afford the name brand thing and post it out of it. They are the ones who, at least ostensibly, tell us what's cool. And when it came to food, a previous iteration of the influencer focused a lot on excess, of showing off just how expensive and luxurious food could be and luxuriating in it. This is where you saw people ordering one of everything.

I'm Alex Salini, and today I am standing outside of one of my favorite places in the world talking about JG Melt. I'm gonna hit every single menu I'd share. That's one of everything on the menu.

Or making the most expensive sandwich in the world.

The sandwich needs to be ordered forty eight hours in advance because all these ingredients are flown in especially for your sandwich.

Food and drink are a great place for influencers to blow a lot of money. And don't get me wrong. This kind of content still exists. There's just less of it now. In the last few years, the reality of our collective financial position made it a bad look to try to order a $214 grilled cheese just for the hell of it.

It's not cool to do that anymore. And if influencers wanna keep their cultural pioneer status online, then they have to pivot to a different way to convey that status. And according to the Status Economy Report, that means trading in the aspiration of wealth for the aspiration of knowledge. Being in the know has always kind of been a part of food's coolness factor. It's knowing the taste difference between regional varieties of oysters or knowing the best vintage of a certain bottle of wine.

And this has been true for all the domains under the influencer's purview. Knowing cool brands, cool shops, cool anything can be used to confirm one's status. But it's only recently that this process has very aggressively turned inward to the body and the food it consumes. In this contemporary wave of influencer driven food content, insider knowledge doesn't really have anything to do with more traditional forms of cuisine expertise. Now, it's about one thing and one thing only, wellness.

The Status Economy report includes in it a list of new rules that these influencers abide by. And the very first one is that rather than treating healthy as a category, now everything is wellness.

Holy. This

term isn't really defined in the study, but it's paired with other vague, buzzy terms like clean eating. Basically, wellness foods are any food item that purports to do something allegedly good for you. Stuff like fermented foods or probiotic soda, protein powder, adaptogens. Here in the world of buzzword laden dry goods promising all kinds of protections from disease or the terror of aging, the wealth it takes to live like this is obfuscated away. The broad declaration of wellness is the tagline.

Influencers may spend an exorbitant amount of money on these items, but an $18 bottle of Groceries olive oil is a lot easier to swallow, so to speak, than that $214 grilled cheese. Plus, the term wellness hints that the purpose of spending all this money is wrapped up in a sense of moral goodness. It's not trying a million dishes just to have fun. It's taking care of your body. And that sounds much more serious, much more adult, much more culturally informed.

It's more knowledgeable. And I do understand the desire to do this to a degree.

I think for a long time, like, in the two thousands, we we were getting told so often, like, there was, like, the super size me and, like, you guys are eating McDonald's out of ease, but it's actually destroying you. And, oh, actually, not only is it destroying you, you're destroying the planet by eating it. Just we were made to be so anxious and we used to not think so much about the stuff that we were eating. Anyone alive and old enough right now to just... To make decisions about their food have have existed in a world where we've have to know about the impacts of everything we're doing both on ourselves and on the world.

And I think there is just like this desire to escape that anxiety somehow. But you never... You can never escape the matrix, you know. So I don't know. There's like this there's like this food panopticon, pantry panopticon.

We are paying so much attention right now to what food we buy, what food our friends buy, and what food people online are buying. And part of that is kind of necessary. I'm writing this episode shortly after the summer of the diarrhea lettuce outbreak and the recalls on so many things that it started to feel like I couldn't eat anything without endangering myself. And it's online where I follow the latest recalls, look up brands that are affected, and try to figure out what I can eat. The idea that certain foods are good for you, that they're safe, is very comforting.

And more broadly, there is a very present conversation happening online and offline about the impact of food production on the planet. It is a worthy endeavor to try to pay attention to where our food comes from. So the idea that the influencers could be the ones pointing us to brands that tick all these boxes is kind of nice to imagine. But things aren't that straightforward in this new world of wellness. Making informed decisions about what groceries you buy is one thing.

Buying groceries that make you look like someone with that kind of moral compass, that's something else. The Status Economy report says very plainly that the term wellness can also be applied to foods that look good for you even if they actually aren't. Like, an iced matcha might have 900 calories of sugar in it, but it looks like it should be good for you. And that's the best case scenario here. There are multiple brands mentioned in this report.

David Protein Bars and Poppy Soda, to name a couple, that have been enmeshed in lawsuits that alleged they had falsely promised benefits that weren't accurate or hid the actual caloric makeup of their products. But in this report, none of that matters. Virtue isn't as important as a, quote, tasteful point of view, unquote. And as cultural pioneers, influencers are following the visual language of any grocery item above everything else. Packaging isn't meant to inform, it's meant to incur relevance.

If the label looks good, that's enough. So buy the protein powder. Never mind that earlier this year, consumer reports published findings saying that there are dangerous levels of lead in many popular protein powder brands. In fact, the focus here seems less and less about what any of these things actually taste like. For the modern day food influencer, the reward of buying a $9 carton of eggs is one of visibility, of posting about it, and being seen owning these things.

Not necessarily eating them, just having them. The more shelf stable they are, the better. High Snobiety's report writes explicitly that any grocery item is chosen, quote, with an awareness that it may be seen, shared, or recognized, and therefore say something about you, whether in a kitchen, at a table, or online, unquote.

Really, think it's like, do we really care about the quality? Are we saying that so that we can, like, justify the the purchases we're making that are really about telling people what kind of people we are versus what we actually are?

The brand is the thing that makes the food cool. When it came to Lunchables, the brand was Lunchables. And the cool thing about Lunchables was that they were fun. Now, the brand is wellness. But that doesn't even mean anything.

If I'm being very generous here, I could say that I understand a messy attempt at trying to find food that's good for us in a moment in The United States where food regulation sort of doesn't exist anymore.

We are so tired, and we are so busy, and we've just been flooded with information at all times. And it's hard to know what's even true anymore with that information. It's hard to know what images we see are real. You know, it's so easy to want to just say, you know what? I don't know.

Just just whatever I've seen the most of, I guess, is what I'm gonna pick off the shelves. The thing about food is it is like our most ancient way of coming together and and like being part of a tribe. And this idea, it's known as commonality, which is, you know, the coming together around a meal. It is it is so so intrinsic in like the human active community. And I think if there are any small ways you can consume something to feel like you're a part of a group, then then you're going to reach for it whether you whether you're doing so consciously or not.

You know, I do think there is a way of like, well, at least I can... At least I have this optionality. Right? I'm able to make this choice and say, here's who I'm a part of. Whether you're really voting with your wallet or, you know, just kind of wanting to say, I'm generally aligned or like, yeah, I'm part of the in group or I know what's cool right now.

But if I'm being less generous and more honest, I think the celebration of so called wellness is unbelievably ironic when I don't even know what food is safe to eat right now. It is insane to watch a host of videos talking about how Chicago has its own dupe of the Erewhon smoothie. It has banana, strawberry, keeper, beet root powder. To then see

This is a public service announcement. You might wanna think twice about eating frozen strawberries this summer because there is a large voluntary recall of frozen strawberries across The United States due to concerns for a potential contamination of the hepatitis a virus.

I guess all I can say is that I hope that high snobiety's so called cultural pioneers are also regularly checking the CDC's food recall list.

Oh. A

huge, huge thank you to Ludwig Hurtado for his incredible insights. There was so much more in our conversation that didn't make the cut, but touched on really interesting topics that are going to be in his book. So in late twenty twenty seven, please check out Bad Foodies when it comes out. I'll include more information about Ludwig and his work in the show notes.

That is the show we have for you this week. We are gonna be back here in the main feed on or around 10/15/2026. Right now, a button awaits. It awaits you at neverpo.st, and it is a button that opens a door, a threshold, fully a portal into the future, your future where you are already a Never Post member. For the low, low, low price of $4 a month, enjoying in your car at the beach while your partner watches that show you hate, they love it so much.

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Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. Spore print of mushroom in the retina. In my dreams lens displacement in the multicellular dark abyssal sound of leaves in the wind rushing cloud dance before the sky closes in. Excerpt of, it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of mushrooms as a food by Chris Torrance.

Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure, and it's distributed by Radiotopia.