Food Industry Demand Rhetoric

When an industry says it only gives people what they want, ask who, in the whole chain of human persons, ever wrote the request. Agribusiness mouthpieces say it is consumer demand, but no consumer asked that farmed Atlantic salmon be camouflaged to look like healthy wild-caught Pacific salmon—and the gap between those two assertions is exactly where the rhetoric of market sovereignty collapses. The claim of demand-driven production is supposed to function as a moral terminus: producers do what they do because the public asked for it, so any objection is an objection to the public itself. But the salmon case exposes the trick. Farmed Atlantic salmon flesh is gray. It is gray because the fish are not eating the krill and small crustaceans whose astaxanthin pigments wild Pacific flesh pink-orange. To sell the gray fish at the price the pink fish commands, the industry adds synthetic pigment to the feed and chooses the hue from a printed color fan—a SalmoFan—the way a paint store sells eggshell versus oyster. The output is a product engineered to mimic a different one. No customer wrote that requisition.

What the customer wrote, if anything, was a much older note: pink-fleshed salmon tastes a certain way, comes from a certain life, and is worth paying for. Pink was a signal—an honest one, in the technical sense. It tracked diet, habitat, and the fish having actually lived as a salmon. The dye severs the signal from its referent while preserving its surface. The buyer, scanning the case at the supermarket, reads pink and infers the things pink used to mean, and the inference is now wrong. To call this an act of consumer demand is to reverse cause and effect. The consumer learned to value pink because pink was wild; the producer then exploited that learned association to launder a substitute. The demand for pink, in the sense the industry invokes it, did not exist before the industry’s substitute required it.

The rhetorical move generalizes far past salmon. Tomatoes bred to survive trucks and then gassed with ethylene to redden in the warehouse. Chicken breast injected with brine to weigh more and feel plumper. Industrial bread doctored with conditioners that mimic, on the tongue, the structure of bread that was actually baked that morning. In each case the industry will say it is meeting consumer expectations, and in each case the expectation it meets was the expectation of an earlier, unmodified product whose qualities it is now imitating chemically. The pattern is the same: an honest signal evolves through long use, an industrial process produces something that lacks the underlying property, and the surface of the honest signal is reproduced on top of the dishonest substrate. Then the apparatus describes its own deception as service.

The argument turns on a clean separation between two things constantly conflated in market discourse: revealed preference and articulated request. People do buy pink salmon—revealed preference, undeniable. But no one ever articulated the request that lies behind the camouflage program. No focus group asked for fish that fails to redden naturally to be tinted on a numbered color scale to match the natural product it is being substituted for. The articulated request, were it ever solicited honestly, would almost certainly be the opposite: tell me which fish is which, price them accordingly, and let me choose. The dyeing exists precisely to prevent that choice from being legible at the point of sale. It is not a response to demand; it is an interference with the conditions under which demand could be coherently expressed.

The deeper claim, then, is about the structure of agency in late-industrial food systems. Producers make decisions. Producers market those decisions. Producers interpret subsequent purchases as ratification of those decisions and call the interpretation consumer demand. Within that loop, purchase under enforced information asymmetry counts as endorsement, and any product that sells is by definition what people wanted. The loop is closed and tautological, and it eats every objection. Breaking it requires holding up a specific industrial choice—not the existence of farmed salmon, which is contestable on other grounds, but the specific decision to dye it to mimic a wild fish’s color—and asking who, in the entire chain of human persons, would have asked for that. No one outside the boardroom, which is also the answer to most of what gets defended in the name of what consumers want.