In 1938, a psychologist named Gregory Razran used the scientific method to prove something we all knew was true anyway. Scientists love to do that.
Here’s what he discovered: People are happy when they’re eating. They’re at their most relaxed and open, and even a little vulnerable, when they’re tucking into a plate of food.
This insight led him to a series of related conclusions. If people are happy and unguarded while eating, then that’s the perfect time to get to know them and sell them something. Which is why ads on television are most effective when they’re on while you’re eating in front of the screen, and why people who want something from you are always asking to take you to lunch. It’s why politicians love pancake breakfasts and real estate timeshare presentations always involve steak.
Eating, Dr. Razran proved, makes people content. Makes them susceptible. Makes them, in other words, defenseless prey.
The Razran “luncheon technique,” as it came to be called by some, is a major piece of armament in the salesman’s arsenal. I have been convinced to do things, stupid things, things in retrospect I should not have done, over a turkey sandwich, and I once got a very talented young actor to agree to be in a terrible show I was producing over a plate of eggs and bacon at a coffee shop on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica.
So, it works. Food has some magical power over us. The act of sitting across from someone, in the communal (and weirdly personal) act of eating, is a celebratory and disarming experience. If you’re a salesperson, this is a good thing to know. And most of us, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, are selling something.
“Every job is a sales job, you idiot,” my father said to me years ago, when I insisted that whatever job I’d eventually have would not, under any circumstances, be in sales.
He was right (he was always right) because even if we’re not trying to pitch someone a specific product (“These knives never need sharpening, ma’am”), we’re still selling the most important product of all — ourselves. Sometimes, we’re marketing ourselves to an employer or romantic partner or people on Instagram, but often, we’re just selling ourselves to ourselves. “You’re a winner,” we say silently as we eat our Kind bar. “You’re going to get over this,” we whisper over our takeout pizza. And when we really need to close that particular deal, it’s often over a pint of expensive ice cream.
We don’t need science to tell us that ice cream hits the receptors in our brains just the right way and makes us feel like everything is going to be all right.
Everything, of course, is not going to be all right. Some things are going to be terrible. In my case, the show I convinced the actor to be in over breakfast didn’t end up moving forward and resulted in some bad blood between me and the studio involved. The project I agreed to do over a turkey sandwich ended up being troublesome and complicated and a real drain on my energies and abilities. The Razran lunch technique has made me feel really good and special in the moment, but it’s also let me down in the long run.
Or maybe it didn’t let me down. Maybe I let me down. Razran never said that the act of eating would make things great, or even okay. He just said that the act of eating would make things seem great and seem okay.
If the research proves that mealtimes are the best times to sell people something, because their defenses are down and their endorphins are up, it follows that meals are also the best times to tell someone a lie. On the other hand, mealtimes are the best times to tell someone the truth, as long as you remember to duck when the ice cream goes flying.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
