I'm getting too many ads about MUD!

A rant about coffee alternatives and wellness drinks

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Does anyone else get an ungodly amount of Mud/Wtr ads? Or does my social media usage give me away so easily as anxious + tired + embarrassingly susceptible to the lures of a hot frothy beverage? 

I mean, it’s a fair assessment, one that I would probably let slide if I didn’t have to see (or hear) Shane fucking Heath on a daily basis (across all forms of social media, no less)! 

The bro-y co-founder of this adaptogenic coffee alternative may be a perfectly nice human but his whole “coffee causes sleep deprivation and is the problem facing our world today” has my eye rolling into my skull. 

There is this particularly infuriating video for Mud/Wtr’s “rest” blend where Shane “plots the rise of cafes and sleep deprivation” to locate a “concerning trajectory.” By this, I mean that he draws a fucking line on a hand-sketched graph where the vertical axis reads “cafes” and the horizontal, “sleep deprivation,” with zero acknowledgement of the social, political, economic, and environmental factors that might impact someone’s quality of sleep (or, like, any citations that support his claim). 

It’s not as if an ongoing pandemic, climate change, an impending recession, inflation, job insecurity, the threat of privatized healthcare (etc., etc.) would keep people up at night (in bed or at their second job). No, it’s those pesky coffee-pushing baristas trying to pay their bills on tips and minimum wage!

To posit one product or method as the solution to systemic problems while obscuring the workings of those systems is, unfortunately, a predictable move in the diet and wellness space. 

Promises to improve physical and mental performance, to enhance immunity, to cure cancer, to boost metabolism–to ultimately eradicate all forms of perceived malady– easily slides into eugenics territory without being named as such. There is a growing body of academic and public literature that critiques the eugenics logics in wellness culture and how the rise is symptomatic of neoliberal capitalism, privatized healthcare, and the culture of Silicon Valley. I think what I find especially infuriating about Mud/Wtr’s marketing is that Shane points out how the tech start-up “sleep when you’re dead” mentality feeds what he names as “hustle culture” …and then he just doesn’t do anything with that critique apart from market his product. The stress, poor sleep, and malady that may be associated with overwork become “pain points” to be remedied by mud. Instead of offering a smart critique of labour practices, for example, Mud/Wtr frames coffee and cafes as symbols of “the hustle,” and then pins capitalism’s toxic impacts to those symbols. 

This narrative makes way for an easy solution. That is, an alternative to coffee that also claims to increase mental clarity, boost immunity, and make you “less of a spazz” (I can’t find the ad where this language is used because I’ve seen so many, but it was said!!). With this kind of framing, Mud/Wtr positions itself as the better option to coffee while, predictably, offering absolutely zero critique of the harmful, ableist, and extractivist systems that underpin the coffee industry and the wellness industry respectively. 

Speaking of the extractive systems that underpin the wellness industry, I’d be remiss if I talked about Mud/Wtr without pointing out the predictable appropriation of culinary and healing traditions.

Wellness culture’s participation in colonial capitalism, through appropriation and other exploitative practices, is well established. Public-facing criticism of the wellness industrial complex, that is, the braiding of what we know as “wellness” and the exploitative market of capitalism, include the following:

“C is for Colonialism’s Effect on How and What We Eat” by Coral Lee

“Can We Fix America’s Food Appropriation Problem?” by Frankie Huang

“Lost in the Brine” by Dr. Miin Chan

Podcast Episode: “How Indian food became frustratingly hip,” from Bad Table Manners, hosted by Dr. Meher Varma

Like other wellness brands Mud/Wtr also participates in romanticizing BIPOC traditions while failing to provide historical or sociocultural context that centers people’s ongoing relationship to those traditions. This is evident in Shane’s story of his first encounter with Masala Chai (one of the many featured ingredients of mud), which took place when he was doing an art residency in India (while on leave from his tech job). He writes: 

“When I lived in India I fell in love with Chai. On every street corner you find the bearded man covered in rags working the various pots and kettles of the golden brown brew. There’s no to go cups. No grande, venti, or talls. He pours the piping hot tea consisting of cardamon, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, cloves and other spices into a small glass for you to enjoy in his presence.”

I copy and pasted the above right from the website– please note that cardamom is spelled cardamon in this excerpt. This could simply be a typo and usually I would let that slide but not this time!!!!!

To describe the person serving your drink as a “bearded man in rags” is a choice, as is evoking Starbucks’ cup sizing (does he know that they do, in fact, have Starbucks in India?). Here not only does Shane offer his variation on the wellness marketing formula that Chan outlines in “Lost in the Brine” – that is, positing “exotic” products and practices as new mystical discoveries from far off places– but his fetishizing of this man and the chai he brews turns both the man and the chai into symbols and relics of an imagined quaint humility. This narrative, which is zoological in tone, materializes in the form of mud as the antidote to “modern” life.

I’m picking on Mud/Wtr because of their aggressive marketing. I could write similar critiques of Raven Roast, Four Sigmatic, Everyday Dose, Moon Juice, etc. but I get a sly satisfaction knowing that the mud ads didn’t make me buy the products, but rather gave me an interesting, easily accessible, and broad set of texts to observe and critique!

Over time, I’ve noticed less focus on the artist residency/masala chai origin story. I wonder if this is in part because critiquing appropriation, specifically of South Asian traditions, in wellness spaces has rightly received more attention on larger platforms like Eater, Food52, Grub Street, even Bon Appetit. More often, these critiques are actually written by people who have a relationship to the traditions being appropriated. 

It is not that extraction and appropriation isn’t happening, though. Certain brands are just less likely to flaunt it at this particular moment. Mud is an example of this. 

The slipperiness of branding, advertising and marketing is one of the reasons why I think turning a critical eye to these texts is so important. Ad copy on packaging, in blog posts and online content are, perhaps, the texts that people in the Global North interact with most consistently. As such, they necessarily shape our (mis)understandings of food and drink. 

By saying that ads are texts I mean to point out that they are constructed. They direct our attention in certain ways and using certain methods. Sometimes, information is cropped beyond our view. Both actions shape our interpretation and perceptions of what we’re observing and we can read, interpret, challenge, complicate, and/or place these interactions into critical conversation with other texts, lived experiences, historical accounts, and cultural movements. 

While it seems Mud/Wtr has put to bed (at least for now) the masala chai story, they’ve been doubling down on the benefits of functional mushrooms, like lion's main, reishi, chaga, and cordyceps. 

Now, I love mushrooms and mycelium and the wonderful worlds they enable. I think they model care brilliantly and beautifully and I’ll write about this in the future. However, I’m not a mycologist, expert forager, or healer– I don’t know mushrooms on a molecular, ecological, or spiritual level to the same degree as people who have spent their lives with them. I won’t comment on whether or not there are enough mushrooms in Mud/Wtr’s blend to offer any benefits (but it’s not like they include quantities on their package, anyway). 

What I will note is how, at the same time that public discourse and interest surrounding mushrooms in North America has intensified, Mud/Wtr’s marketing has reflected the public’s interest in psychedelic and functional mushrooms. Netflix’s Fantastic Fungi came out in 2019, Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants in 2021 and the Netflix adaptation How to Change Your Mind earlier this year. Moreover, with the legalization of cannabis there have been more public conversations about both the possibilities of legalizing psilocybin as well as psilocybin’s medicinal properties and potential benefits. 

There is certainly something to say about the swing from orientalism into mycelium (Mud/Wtr takes a real global approach to appropriation). But the move from highlighting chai as part of Mud/Wtr’s origin story, to doubling down on the benefits of functional mushrooms, and at a moment when it is especially popular (and profitable) to do so, exposes the calculated mutability of wellness marketing. 

It is especially disconcerting to see functional mushrooms (of undisclosed quantities) being marketed as a convenient solution to exhaustion, to anxiety, to a compromised immune system in general but especially in the wake of an ongoing pandemic, which has exposed the necessity of labour reform as well as the limits of health care infrastructure.

By pointing this out I am not saying that Mud/Wtr, or any other wellness drink, is at the heart of these problems. Rather, I’m suggesting that Mud/Wtr offers an interesting case study, one that reaffirms the problem I cued earlier, that is, positing one product or method as the solution to systemic problems while obscuring the workings of those systems.  

As Emily Contois has pointed out in her work on “dude food,” advertisements play a critical role in priming people on how to interact with and understand certain foods and drinks at critical cultural junctures. Contois uses the 2008 recession and its impact on hegemonic masculinity as one juncture in her work. 

Thinking with Contois, I’d argue that the labour crises at the beginning of the twentieth century, in which Coca-Cola was marketed as a wellness drink, offers another critical juncture for consideration, one that is especially relevant to the conversation about Mud. Much like this wave of wellness beverages, Coke was once touted as “healthful” and an option for relieving fatigue and combating mental and physical exhaustion. The slogan in 1905 was “Coca-Cola revives and sustains.” 

This observation says less about any perceivable similarities between the properties of Coke and Mud, and more about how these products are slotted into discourses about labour, eliding any meaningful engagement with the idea of unionization and reform, especially within the (white) middle-class, to whom these products are marketed. 

And as disgruntled as I clearly am about Mud/Wtr’s marketing strategy, I also understand why it is so compelling in context. The promises of wellness drinks, and wellness products in general, can be alluring, particularly when the efficiency and longevity–and the other big claims that these products promise– is easier to imagine than a future where rest, and labour equity is actually possible. 

Well, that's all for today! Now I cannot browse social without seeing at least 3 ads a minute for Mud/Wtr! Please interact with this post so that I can at least try to convince myself that it was worth the research!!!

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Reading

This Mold piece about (De)colonizing Food Systems

This Civil Eats Labour Day roundup

Books I finished in August:

Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti 

Italian Folk Magic: Rue's Kitchen Witchery by Mary-Grace Fahrun

 

Podcast

Taste of Place with Dr. Anna Sulan Masing

Description: Taste of Place is a Whetstone Radio Collective podcast hosted by Dr. Anna Sulan Masing that explores colonialism, traces trade routes, meets pepper farmers, discovers spice molecules and delves into the mysteries of perfume. A narrative podcast that aims to untangle our understanding of the past and investigate our relationship with nostalgia, with the taste of pepper as the thread.

 

One of the guests in the first episode is food historian Julia Fine, who has a wonderful and thoughtful newsletter called Linking and Drinking!