Someone went to all the trouble of surveying one thousand American consumers. Why?

In order to produce the Hunter Public Relations 2015 Food News Study. It must have taken hundreds or even thousands of man-hours to survey, collate, and assemble this data into a colorful PowerPoint presentation, then write a press release about it and send it to Ad Age. And for what? To gain what knowledge, exactly?

  • Thirty percent of Americans believe food and nutrition stories are “very important,” and 45 percent of Americans believe food and nutritions stories are more important than other news stories, meaning that 15 percent of Americans do not believe that food and nutrition stories are very important but do believe that they are more important than other news stories, implying that they believe no news stories at all are very important. Okay.
  • “‘Millennials want information about food, the good, the bad, the ugly. They’re voracious. Why? Because food is a part of their culture,’ said Grace Leong, Hunter’s CEO and leader of its food practice.’” Get a real job, hippie.

Could the time that went into assembling and promoting the Hunter Public Relations 2015 Food News Study have been better spent doing any number of other activities, including but not limited to volunteering in support of a worthy cause, knitting, building a deck out back, getting a massage, and/ or composing a poem that could add every so subtly to the world’s total supply of beauty? Do these sorts of pseudo-news items not, in fact, serve as mere thoughtless trifles that serve to distract the public from real news while even, in extreme cases, making the public dumber by convincing them that such flimsy artificial premises amount to a useful increase in knowledge? You be the judge.

Some might say, “Hey, if the ‘studies’ that are regularly released by PR firms are so bad, why are you writing about one, then?” To point out that the world is bad. That’s why.

[Image via Hunter PR]