communication through consumption
the cult of the new fun drink
What is the perfect number of beverages to be consuming at any one time? One, you might think, if you’re anything like me. Probably tap water, possibly with a tea or coffee or large glass of wine on the side, depending on the time of day. But if you’re anything like me, you’d be wrong, because at least according to the internet, the answer is three. According to ‘three drinks theory’, which has been circulating in some form since 2019 at least, but went particularly viral last year, you should always have three drinks on the go at once: one for ‘hydration’, one for ‘energy’, and one for ‘fun’.
‘Three drinks theory’ is good news for drinks brands and marketers, especially those which situate their products as trendy, internet-savvy, and status-conscious. And such products abound at the moment. Over the summer, I began to feel as if I’d slipped down a single-use plastic straw into an alimentary conspiracy, fizzing with buoyant marketing jargon and wry hashtags. On billboards at train stations and posters on buses, on the adverts which popped up between Reels on my phone, and in the Reels themselves, the cult of the fun drink beckoned. This was a perpetual picnic, peopled by a smiling population of terminally happy consumers, brandishing a variety of canned beverages, eager to welcome you into the fold. Sometimes the snappy slogans fell flat, especially when they made reference to quickly-outdated viral trends (Jacob Elordi’s bathwater, seriously?), but that didn’t matter nearly as much as those smiling mouths, white-teethed and glistening to match equally bright eyes. From Dash Water to Served and MOTH canned cocktails, Bella Hadid-sponsored Kin Euphorics and cherry-red ‘Sleepy Girl Mocktails’, and the suddenly ubiquitous Stanley Cup, the cult of the fun drink was sweet, seductive, and suddenly everywhere. ‘Young people are drinking less alcohol’, blared the news, and that might have been right, but we were definitely drinking something.
In 1961, Roland Barthes wrote that food is not just ‘a collection of products that can be used for statistical or nutritional studies. It is also, and at the same time, a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behaviour.’1 The idea of food as a ‘system of communication’ is one with significant theoretical purchase. Food, that is to say, has meaning, meaning which goes beyond the impact of its caloric content and nutritional makeup on the human body. Food is of course cultural — think national dishes and local delicacies — but it is also communicative, encapsulating entire worldviews and social environments. It signifies something more than edible matter itself. As Barthes writes: ‘substances, techniques of preparation, habits, all become part of a system of differences in signification, and as soon as this happens, we have communication by way of food.’
And not just food, but drink, too. In ‘Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption’, Barthes discusses the shifting status of coffee, from a drink associated primarily with productivity to one of leisure, with the emergence of the ‘coffee break’ as a brief yet comforting respite from the working day. Beverages, like foodstuffs, are loaded signifiers. Take Coca Cola, which, as I’ve written in a previous essay, is the American drink par excellence, an ingestible locus of national values as well as a prime cultural export with geopolitical clout. And milk, as Millie Jacoby of
has recently written, is inextricably linked to American neo-fascism. Given this analytical tenet, that food operates as a kind of language, how can we better understand the emergence of the cult of the new fun drink? When we line up our chosen three, take an Instagram Story and a sip, what is it we’re really consuming?It’s worth taking a closer look at the advertising copy and campaigns used by the drinks industry. ‘Activate the power, energy, and peace that is already in you,’ reads a slogan for Kin Euphorics, Bella Hadid’s brand of adaptogenic canned drinks, a sentiment Trip CBD Drinks pares back to ‘canned calm’. It isn’t just non-alcoholic calm you can imbibe: ‘Take Us With You’, declared the in-your-face summer marketing campaign for MOTH canned cocktails, which featured festival-ready models beaming and dancing. MOTH could help you recreate that feeling ‘Whenever, Wherever’. Whatever their chemical composition, these drinks aren’t just drinks but a method of transformation. They nourish both the body and soul. Like Barthes’s coffee break, they enable the consumer to purchase a temporary reprieve from the workaday, but they go further than that, signifying the individual capacity for constant self-optimisation, even in moments of rest and most particularly through mundane acts of eating, drinking, and body-management.
We live in a culture where consumption and its control provide a means of transforming the self, as the multi-million dollar weight loss industry constantly reminds us. Restrictive eating and special diets, from veganism to keto to gluten free, promise to change our lives by changing our diets, whilst a renewed attention to the gut microbiome emphasises the way food connects our bodies and minds. The physical transformation these diets promise has a moral dimension, connected to the values of personal achievement, self-control, and discipline which dominate current cultural discourse. Within this discourse, the new drinks are framed as a means of self-optimisation, a way to ‘Rise to Pure Potential’ (Kin Euphorics), ‘Make Routines, Not Resolutions’ (Athletic Greens), and ‘Find Your Calm’ (Trip CBD). In framing themselves as the ‘good’ choice, these drinks implicitly frame their more traditional competitors as ‘bad’ choices. In one marketing stunt, Dash Water pasted their own advertisement, emblazoned ‘Finally, a drink to feel good about’, over a Coca-Cola billboard. Coca-Cola, here, is a drink to feel bad about; bad for the mind, body, and the planet, an anti-utilitarian expression of gratuitous, pleasurable consumption.
In offering not just pleasure but a means to an end, one which is easily connected to the maximisation of bodily health and potential (and thus economic contribution), the new drinks reflect what theorists as varied as Michel Foucault, Byung Chul Han, and Susan Bordo have identified as the internalisation of discipline within modern society. As Bordo writes, the contemporary mindset is obsessed with the body and its appearance, but ‘takes little pleasure in the experience of embodiment. Rather, the fundamental identification is with mind (or will), ideals of spiritual perfection, fantasies of absolute control’.2 We rarely interact with our bodies to enjoy their material physicality, but to try and change or control them.
Even if you don’t follow a special diet — and very few of us haven’t changed our eating habits in response to pressures over weight, health, and the environment — food and drink choices can signal sociopolitical as well as culinary allegiances. Choosing tofu over British-bred beef is clearly a decision loaded with meaning. It isn’t that long, after all, since Tory right-winger Suella Braverman derided her opponents as the ‘tofu-eating wokerati’, playing into the longstanding relationship between meat, strength, and virility, and associations of vegetarianism with both effeminate weakness and political radicalism. Food choices, then, are performative, helping to constitute and assert our multiple and intersecting identities, another means of communication in an increasingly interconnected world.
Always be performing; always be optimising. These are the tenets of contemporary Western culture, with its postmodern emphasis on the fragmentation of settled identities and the concomitant capacity for creative self-fashioning, its drive towards individual success, and its capacity for rampant consumption tempered only by an opposing drive towards self-discipline. They are also the tenets you buy into when you purchase and consume any number of the new drinks available in cafes and on supermarket shelves.
According to the French sociologist Claude Fischler, the notion of incorporation is one of the fundamental aspects defining humanity’s relationship to food. What Fischler terms the ‘incorporation principle’ states that the act of consumption ‘is both banal and fraught with potentially irreversible consequences. To incorporate a food is, in both real and imaginary terms, to incorporate all or some of its properties: we become what we eat. Incorporation is a basis of identity.’3 Thus, the adage ‘you are what you eat’ is true not only on a biological basis, but on the level of belief and representation.
The incorporation principle seems particularly pertinent to a society where food and drink are afforded immense power to alter bodily composition and optimise health, a locus of what Bordo calls ‘fantasies of absolute control’. Such fantasies appear in both the old-school discourse of weight loss (fat-free, reduced, low-calorie) and the new one of holistic health, wellness, and the gut microbiome (a discourse centred on the idea of attaining perfect ‘balance’). The new drinks, whether alcoholic, non-alcoholic, or ‘adaptogenic’, are almost entirely light, clear, and effervescent in composition. The very fact that these are trending drinks, liquids rather than solids, is not insignificant, and moreover their makeup and appearance differs from more commonplace caffeinated beverages such as coffee and Coca Cola, which are ‘heavy’ looking, viscous, and dark. Think about the contrast between a regular ‘cup of joe’ and and matcha, which is light, green and ‘natural’ in colour, and usually made with non-dairy milk. As in the case of matcha, touted as a healthier version of coffee, the marketing of the new drinks emphasises quality (organic, natural, and non-processed ingredients in short, legible lists, as well as environmentally-friendly packaging) over quantity, and indeed they’re often sold in single servings rather than large bottles or on tap in restaurants. The new ‘fun drinks’ — which, it has to be said, are looking increasingly less fun — therefore mirror the ideal body of twenty-first century society. A body which is light, bounded, disciplined in its pursuit of health and wellbeing, always on display, and subject to process of external self-management and internal self-control. A body for which consumption, self-optimisation, and performance are compounded together, like three different drinks mixing in the mouth.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To belabour an already drained metaphor, I’m drinking too quickly. Because the bodily incorporation of the fun drink is the last stage of its life story. These are also products sold, marketed, and purchased within the capitalist economy. Thinking back to the summer’s inescapable canned cocktail ads, but also to the pumpkin spice mania which strikes the high street every autumn, I want to briefly consider the fun drink as both commodity and experience.
The fun drink promises consumers both a material product (which can also be photographed and shared online), and an intangible, subjective experience. The fun drink both tastes good, looks good, and feels good. It’s a product which fulfils multiple needs, so it cultivates multiple markets. Some drinks, like the now ubiquitous pumpkin spice, offer an emotional experience, a multi-sensory moment which summons a particular season, place, or time, the same way Brits associate Fanta Limon with childhood summer holidays on the Continent. Others are more sophisticated in what they seek to evoke. What economists call the ‘Experience Economy’ has ballooned since lockdown, with young people its primary market. From concert tickets to trips abroad, consumers increasingly prefer to spend on experiences than traditional goods and services. These experiences offer a chance to make memories and connect with friends, as well as, a cynic might add, to share on social media. By marketing a physical product as a vehicle for making and sharing memories, the cult of the fun drink situates its products firmly within this Experience Economy. In a period of severe economic downturn, the fun drink, with its promise of both physical and spiritual fulfilment, purports to act as a substitute for otherwise expensive experiences. Who needs a meditation retreat, when you can achieve ‘canned calm’ with Trip or ‘balance’ with Aqua Libra (whose name joins the Latin for ‘water’ and ‘balance’, and which emerged during an earlier wave of wellness obsession in the 1980s)? And why go to a festival, when you can drink a tinned Cosmopolitan in a city park?
There’s something nice about this, the idea that you don’t have to splash out to make an occasion memorable, or to feel a bit better in your day-to-day life. And there’s a special delight in an M&S mojito on a London summer’s day, whatever Diane Abbot’s critics would have us believe. But at the same time I’m sceptical about the idea of buying happiness, or wellness, or — in the case of Dash Water’s eco-friendly ‘wonky fruit’ campaign — environmental politics. Buying Dash Water might be more sustainable than, say, Evian, but can purchasing a canned drink as part of your meal deal truly be framed as a radical act of saving the planet? Or is it just a means of easing an individual’s climate guilt with very little tangible impact? To be clear, I like Dash Water. But when I’m told that it’s ‘Finally a drink to feel good about’, both healthier and more eco-friendly than the alternatives, that feels like little more than a pat on the back from their marketing team. Look at you! You made the right choice.
The notion of a ‘right’ choice becomes all the more divorced from reality when these drinks or drink-holders become aestheticised accessories, part of a particular trending lifestyle, as has been the case with the Stanley Cup — a notable irony of overconsumption, given the supposedly environmentalist principles behind a reusable water bottle. You may not directly incorporate your water bottle of choice into your body (be it Stanley, Hydroflask, Chillys, Owala, or just a massive three litre gym bro jug), but these bottles still operate as identity props, signalling one’s identity, politics, and aesthetic allegiances to the world, whilst directly connecting that identity to one’s bodily consumption. Your choice of reusable water bottle is not just an environmentally friendly means of consuming water, but a means of adorning water with your entire worldview. And of course, if you’re of a certain political persuasion you can eschew the reusable bottle altogether and opt for the $11 Freedom2o brand, launched in 2023 and ‘made with liberal tears’.
Both the status-symbol water bottles and the vogue for trending drinks can be seen as products of the lipstick effect. Much discussed in the last few years, the lipstick effect refers to the theory that consumers are more likely to purchase smaller, affordable luxuries during economic downturn — a lipstick rather than a necklace, or a fancy water-bottle rather than a handbag. An upmarket canned cocktail rather than a girls’ night out. It might seem strange to discuss liquid as a luxury; after all, 60% of the human body is made up of water. The language we use to discuss our embodiment and our emotions often deploys a semantic field of liquidity, with roots in the premodern system of the four humours — our angers rise and boil, our stomachs churn like the ocean, desire flows swiftly through our veins and we freeze with fear. But the water within us might soon become our last liquid resource in a changing climate where the glaciers melt and seas rise yet global water shortages increase.
According to a recent report by the Global Commission on the Economies of Water, 61% of people globally live in water scarcity hotspots. We all intuitively know that liquid is a luxury, something denied to many which everyone will soon have to ration and reduce, including those of us in the West, currently secure in our cultural bubble. The ballooning market for trendy, affordable consumer goods — be they Stanley Cups, boob-shaped mugs, or canned cocktails — will eventually contract. In such conditions of scarcity, commodities become luxuries. The fun drink industry and the online trend for ornamented water, like the emergence of ‘prestige ice’, might just be an early sign of what’s to come.
For those of us who are lucky enough to live with access to clean drinking water, purified and enhanced by public health initiatives, with booming beverage markets at our fingertips, a world without water — like a world under water — seems far away. Yet as I drafted this essay, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, announced that the US would be removing fluoride from tap water. Like raw milk’s rabid fanbase, for whom pasteurisation is little more than liberal adulteration, RFK Jr. was staking a ideological claim founded on the symbolic power of incorporation — and throwing public health out the window. Under Trump’s second ascendancy, with its longstanding aim of ‘draining the swamp’, another liquid metaphor, the American people would now be drinking pure, natural water, unadulterated by both the state and by science.
As Barthes wrote in 1961, food is a system of communication. In a world obsessed with food and drink — their production, consumption, aesthetics, and regulation — it’s worth asking what, exactly, is being communicated. So why not add another drink to the table? One for hydration, one for energy, one for fun, and the fourth: a drink for thought.
This is also possibly the most ridiculous piece of over-analysis I’ve done for this blog, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the cult of the new fun drink for months. Anyway, what’s your favourite beverage? Let me know in the comments and Notes.
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Roland Barthes, ‘Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption’ (1961)
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (2003), p. 151
Claude Fischler, ‘Food, Self, and Identity’ (1988)
I’ve been really obsessed with the topic of consumption lately and what it signifies about us as people - this essay was exactly up that alley
loved this analysis! it reminded me of this book i read in my high school world history class called the world in 6 glasses which analyzed the role that different drinks played throughout different times