The Splintering of the American Diet

On purity spirals, creator armies, and where dietary tribalism goes from here

This is the latest in a thread I’ve been pulling on for years on a topic that has had a remarkable effect on the state of food and nutrition: food tribalism.

I’ve written about how America’s fractured political landscape produced an equally fractured food culture. About how the attention economy swallowed Big Food whole and turned small brands into attention-mining operations.

About how algorithms manufacture consensus around trends nobody asked for, and how your feed shapes what you eat before you’ve consciously decided you’re hungry.

About how AI will deepen every one of these dynamics by giving each food tribe its own personalized echo chamber.

I still believe in those past writings but this space continues to evolve, so I want to pull the thread forward. The shift away from mass-brand food keeps accelerating, and the industry is starting to look as divided as the country itself.

The Creator Industrial Complex

In February, Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez told investors at CAGNY that “the times of big corporate big brand messages are gone.” Mass marketing isn’t dead yet, but you can see where this is heading. The $60-billion company was shifting half its media budget to creators and influencers, up from 30 percent. By late 2025, Unilever was already working with close to 300,000 of them. Fernandez’s ambition was granular: one influencer in each of India’s 19,000 zip codes, one in each of Brazil’s 5,764 municipalities.

He’s not alone. PepsiCo builds “creator ecosystems” around Doritos, Lay’s, and Mountain Dew. Earnings calls from General Mills, Gap, and Bath & Body Works all echo the same pivot. The influencer marketing industry hit an estimated $32.5 billion in 2025.

This matters for food culture because of what creators actually do at a structural level: they speak to specific communities in those communities’ own language. They penetrate niches that mass advertising can’t reach. In a food landscape where identity and ideology are increasingly inseparable from what people eat, Unilever’s announcement amounts to the industrialization of tribal marketing.

Big Food has always been in the attention aggregation business. What’s changed is the method. Over the past two decades, established food companies have been buying up new, modern food brands for their ability to convert cultural relevance into revenue. The creator pivot takes that logic further. You don’t even need to buy the brand anymore. You rent the creator, who already lives inside the tribe.

The carnivore community, the seed-oil skeptics, the raw vegans, the biohackers: each has its own creators, its own vernacular, its own information ecosystem. And now the world’s largest food companies are building infrastructure to reach every single one of them, separately, simultaneously, with tailored messages that feel native to each tribe.

The fragmentation we’ve been witnessing isn’t just happening organically anymore. It’s being fueled with marketing dollars.

The Life Cycle of a Food Movement

Many modern food movements follow a similar arc: A small group coalesces around a genuine insight. The movement grows, attracts money, and builds a cottage industry. Wanting to reach a wider audience, some players in that movement end up adapting and diluting the original idea for mass appeal. The purists revolt. The movement splinters into factions that resent each other.

Paleo is useful as a case study because its entire lifecycle is visible. It began in 1985, when S. Boyd Eaton published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine arguing that human genetics were mismatched with modern agricultural diets. The movement coalesced around evolutionary emulation: eat what a caveman ate.

By the early 2010s, Paleo had bureaucratized. Certified products, conferences, influencer networks. Then science complicated the founding narrative. Researchers found starch residue on stone tools showing humans ate grains and tubers for at least 100,000 years. The rigid meat-centric caveman story was, at minimum, incomplete. Simultaneously, “Paleo-friendly” packaged brownies flooded grocery shelves, technically compliant but spiritually bankrupt.

The splintering is confirmed by people inside the movement. Robb Wolf, one of Paleo’s most prominent voices, has described the commercialization candidly: somebody would create “a brandable flavor of paleo” with “arbitrary lane lines,” which is “largely what Whole30 ended up being.” Some adherents went full carnivore, rejecting all plant matter. Others pivoted to biohacking. The moderate middle got absorbed into mainstream “clean eating.”

Veganism is running a version of this playbook a decade behind. What began as radical animal rights activism became a multi-billion-dollar retail market. Biotech companies began engineering plant-based alternatives at industrial scale. Food geographers now call the result “Big Veganism,” and the tension is visible from within. Miyoko Schinner, who built one of the movement’s flagship brands, took venture capital to scale nationally, lost control of her own company, and watched the new owners cheapen the products until the brand entered liquidation.

She now describes herself as fighting “the system that has been hurling headlong toward consolidated control for decades,” trying to “return control of the food system to ordinary people, farmers, small producers, more entrepreneurs.” The vanguard retreated into raw veganism and community-supported agriculture. The mainstream settled into flexitarianism. The movement didn’t die, it just fractured.

Then, enter Unilever or someone like them. When Fernandez deploys 300,000 creators, he’s building infrastructure that can reach each food tribe fragment individually. A creator who already lives inside a carnivore forum or a raw vegan subreddit can penetrate communities that mass advertising never could. Big Food isn’t trying to reverse the fragmentation. It’s monetizing the shards.

When Diet Becomes Religion

The deeper concern with dietary tribalism isn’t commercial. It’s psychological.

Traditional dietary laws (Kosher, Halal) served specific sociological functions: they defined group boundaries, demonstrated shared values, maintained communal identity. In a secularized America where religious affiliation and civic participation have dropped sharply, food morality appears to have filled some of that vacancy.

The pursuit of healthy eating has taken on a religious quality where certain foods are sinful and eating a certain rigid way is godly. The clinical extreme is orthorexia nervosa: an obsessive fixation on food purity that leads to severe restriction and social isolation. The body becomes a site of relentless moral surveillance. And there’s a striking finding in the research: higher levels of traditional religiosity correlate with lower rates of orthorexic behavior. When people have a stable source of moral identity and community, they seem less compelled to construct it through extreme dietary restriction. The food tribe fills a void that other institutions used to occupy.

Once diet functions as religion, any challenge to your dietary choices stops being data. It becomes blasphemy. And that’s where the wellness-to-extremism pipeline begins. During COVID, researchers tracked what they called “Pastel QAnon”: conspiracy content repackaged by wellness influencers with soft aesthetics, yoga poses, and organic food photography. Same ideology as the dark-web original, delivered like a lifestyle brand.

The bridge between wellness communities and conspiracy movements is a shared distrust of centralized authority. If you’ve already decided that the USDA dietary guidelines are shaped by industry lobbyists (they are), that sugar companies funded research to blame fat for heart disease (they did), and that regulators approved additives banned in other countries (true), then the person telling you that vaccines are a pharmaceutical cash grab is speaking a language you already understand. The facts change. The grammar of suspicion stays the same.

Where This Goes

Imagine the current trajectory continuing for twenty years. Unilever’s 300,000 creators become 3 million. Every major food company deploys AI-matched creator networks. The algorithmic sorting tightens. The tribal identities harden.

The American grocery store starts to look less like a shared public space and more like a collection of embassies for competing dietary nations. The carnivore section sells identity as much as meat, curated by creators speaking the language of ancestral health and anti-establishment defiance.

Two aisles over, the regenerative-organic section speaks a different dialect entirely, one of soil health and planetary stewardship and carbon sequestration. The products sit on the same shelves, but the consumers buying them inhabit different information universes, watching different creators, reading different studies, operating from different first principles about what food is for.

The optimistic version of this future is real personalization. People with celiac disease, metabolic disorders, and genuine food allergies have more options than ever. The explosion of cuisines available to ordinary Americans is a real gain. I don’t want to return to the monoculture of meat, potatoes, and Wonder Bread.

The pessimistic version is permanent fracture. A food system where nobody shares a common understanding of basic nutrition because every tribe has its own version of reality. We’re already closer to this than most people realize. Seed oils are either a metabolic poison or a perfectly healthy cooking fat, depending on who you follow. Raw milk is either a living food full of beneficial enzymes or a vector for listeria. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sits atop federal health policy while promoting the claim that vaccines cause autism. A not-insignificant number of parents now believe Tylenol is more dangerous than measles. Two people can look at the same peer-reviewed meta-analysis and reach opposite conclusions, each citing the studies that confirm their priors, each accusing the other of cherry-picking.

Algorithms don’t reward the person saying “it’s complicated.” They reward the person saying “they’re lying to you.”

The concept of a “healthy diet” is as contested as the concept of a “fair election.” And once that happens, we lose the shared basis for collective decisions about school lunches, dietary guidelines, food labeling, public health campaigns. Every nutritional recommendation becomes a political statement. Every food label becomes a tribal flag.

Fragmentation can be profitable. Every new tribal identity generates new products, new creators, new certifications. Nobody in the supply chain has a financial incentive to tell a carnivore devotee and a raw vegan that they actually agree on most nutritional principles: eat whole foods, avoid ultra-processed junk, cook at home more often. Agreement doesn’t generate content. Agreement doesn’t sell supplements.

My read: the only force strong enough to counteract this is either a shared crisis severe enough to make the tribal distinctions feel petty, or a new generation of food leaders willing to build businesses around nutritional common ground rather than tribal identity. I’ve seen glimmers of the latter in companies that focus on soil health and flavor across all foods, rather than a more narrowly focused dietary ideology. But they’re outnumbered and outspent.

Expo West, a.k.a. the Superbowl of the “supposedly better-for-you food products sold in plastic packages industry,” kicks off in Anaheim this week, with thousands of exhibitors packed into the convention center. It has become something like a large hadron collider for modern food brands and those who love them: every food tribe, every dietary ideology, every brand built on a nutritional conviction smashing into each other at high speed, ejecting new deals, ideas, partnerships, and products in every direction. If you want to see what all the food tribes actually look like, walk that floor.

The food industry has always been good at giving people what they want. And it doesn’t need you to agree on what’s right. It just needs you to keep buying whatever you’ve decided “right” means.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.