Incentives Corrupt Honesty

Let's talk about the root of all evil with food influencers. "Honesty" is a symptom but to cure, you must treat the disease.

Incentives are about carrots and sticks. Both are a messy business.

If Freakonomics taught me anything, it’s that incentives matter. To understand incentives is to understand human nature. To use the carrot or the stick. To play the person or the issue.¹

This post picks up where I left off. The current incentive culture strangles honesty with food influencers. Put simply, this is the root of all evil. The other factors are accelerators that perpetuate what incentives create.

Housekeeping

Let’s quickly get a few things out of the way.

1. There are earnest, transparent and honest food influencers out there. To suggest otherwise would be untrue and unfair.

2. I am NOT here to defend food influencers.

3. I am NOT here to uphold food writers and restaurant critics at large as superior. Writers too are fallible. More on that later.²

What’s the beef with food influencers?

Where do I start?

Many lack credibility. Why? They skirt over a places shortcomings or failures and present every experience as magnificent—a delight!—with performative gestures swaddled in lyrical joygasm.

“OMFG you guys, the BEST burger I’ve ever had!!!!”… since the one you harped on about last Thursday.

In theory, negative incentives exist but, candidly, this is not working.

Why does this happen?

Influencers are incentivized to publish favourable content about their subject. It preserves positive relationships and forges new ones that promote the subject and—importantly—accelerates the influencer’s popularity. Success leaves credibility at the starting block.

This favours both the restaurant and the influencer. The influencer wants a steady stream of subsidized, if not outright paid-for content and experiences that generate followers and popularity. Point blank: many just want freebies. They want to create future opportunities for themselves. This self-aggrandising, vapid cycle fuels the ‘influenzas’ culture.

Food influencers are about growing, driving exposure and gaining popularity, which leads to better opportunities and, ideally, monetization.

Why is this bankrupt?

Food influencers therefore pull punches as that risks:

1. Alienating the restaurant, its owners and chefs,

2. Breaking a rapid cycle of content,

3. Not getting a steady stream of invites,

4. Not being ‘part of the scene’, not ‘having a seat at the table’, being out of sight and out of mind, and

5. Biting the hand that feeds them, especially if their income is derived from paid content.

Competitiveness between influencers aggravates, causing them to double down.

So the perceived dishonesty is what the public sees, but the dangerous bit of this iceberg lies below the water line. It is this self-perpetuating incentive bubble that does not reward honesty and the risk/cost of breaking this cycle is clear and tangible. I have sat at media dinners where we agreed the duck was atrocious, and yet that is skated over in the influencers’ “reviews” because boats must not be rocked. A lot of this is to preserve relationships. In Dubai, vicious defamation lawsuits from owners are a constant threat.³

Charitably, some food influencers need the security of independence to be unshackled from this downward spiral. They need a balanced, incentive system that positively rewards them.

In theory, negative incentives exist but, candidly, they are not working, especially in Dubai. Food influencers must label their content as advertising or prominently disclose a paid partnership arrangement. That’s the law pretty much everywhere. In Dubai, this rarely happens, and Dubai is NOT alone.

Make no mistake, what most food influencers do is advertising, so they must follow their legal and moral obligations to clearly and unambiguously disclaim their adverts.

I’ll be blunt: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

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Food writing is not immune.

Conventional wisdom suggests journalists are the last bastion of “truth” regarding restaurant reviews.

I understand the logic. Journalism is a profession in the quest for truth above all else. Their professional reputation is their value, not likes, shares and follows. Publishers pay their salaries.

Salaried journalists with paid expenses are structurally the most resilient to adverse influence, in my opinion. These are storied, dwindling positions as written media limps wounded. Publishers face enormous cost pressures as audiences shift from long-form writing to social media and listicles, meaning a publisher’s incentive system is sharply focused on revenue, survival, and finding audiences where they are. Online publishing is a war for eyeballs and funding, which disrupts the writer’s candor as a wrecking ball above all else.⁴

Here are three focus areas: advertising, media invites, and advertorials, which, in my view, bludgeon independence (and therefore honesty) in food writing.

The stories are thinly researched regurgitations of tiresome press releases because who has time for research in a content economy?

Advertising is a corrupting force in modern food writing.

Your favourite website is probably funded by a paywall, a billionaire and/or advertising.⁵

Advertising rules the day, launching a war on eyeballs. Business models vary, but broadly, a publisher's earnings positively correlates with its website traffic. It’s about being on Google’s top 10 and keeping you on their website for as long as possible.

They also need content at a breathtaking pace—more news, fresh news, fast and furious. The notion that restaurant writers toil away for weeks on well-researched pieces submitted weekly is scarce.

Many modern food writers are caged battery hens pumping out 10, 12 or 14 stodgy, 600-word stories a day peppered with keywords because the editor needs content and traffic. The incentive is productivity, not journalism’s wrecking ball of honesty and candour.

The stories are regurgitations of tiresome press releases because who has time for research in a content economy? I also get those press releases. Have you ever wondered why online articles spout the same “hyperbollock” tropes about a restaurant, the same two to three “signature dishes”, or the sensational views?

Writers rely on relationships with PRs, chefs, and restaurants to keep the stream of stories alive, secure an exclusive or a ‘first look’.

Verbally mutilating a chef may go viral, but glory is short-lived as that roasted chef and PR won’t talk to you again. It’s a fact of life: people like working with people they like working with, so volume-content writers keep it cute and say less.

I published articles where the thin-skinned chefs (or their belligerent PR teams) complained to the publishers about my less flattering observations. The piece is re-written or removed altogether.

Conclusion: keeping a restaurant/PR happy is better than telling the reader too much. That incentive does not enable candid writing.

Media invites and press trips are incredible, and few writers will risk giving up that gravy train.

I could wax lyrical about this topic. I love a press trip. Simply put, most publishers don’t have the budget to send food or travel writers on expenses-paid excursions to top brass hotels and restaurants, especially in an age of listicles and ChatGPT.

Step forward media invites and press trips funded by tourism boards or restaurants. Many demand coverage as deliverables (social, writing etc). Favourable content is often more than implied.

I have sat next to many journalists or writers who agreed a place was screamingly average or style over substance, but punches are pulled because they want to ride this gravy train to the last stop. So, sure, they will write about the restaurant; they will not tell you it is all mouth and no trousers. I understand this problem as I, too, have faced this conundrum many times. I, too, I wish I said more.⁶

Advertorials are not about telling you everything; they are advocacy pieces built with what the sponsor wants you to know.

Advertorials are sponsored write-ups about restaurants, hotels, regions, wineries, and more—a portmanteau of advertising in an editorial form.

There are more of these than you think. Look for “Partner Content” and other euphemisms. I've written many advertorials. They pay my rates and create opportunities for publications to outsource writing to freelancers because there is a budget.

Advertorials are about the varnished truth. I can confirm anything that resembles less than (sycophantic) praise about a restaurant or hotel hits the cutting room floor with the quickness because editors do not want to risk the ire of the sponsor, and the article’s purpose is to sell positively.

In conclusion, incentives are the dark hand keeping honesty in a chokehold.

My motive is not to gossip or spill beans. There is so much more I could say. I deleted entire paragraphs in writing this essay because I found myself doing that thing people do: a cathartic but meaningless rattle of the fist at food influencers.

The real problems lie in the incentive culture that maligns candor and transparency as expendable or secondary. The incentive culture is what perpetuates this perceived ‘dishonesty’ cycle.

Daylight is the best disinfectant, moreover, I do not believe we can cure something without properly identifying it. I am bored with the [insert acerbic comments about food influencers]. It does not move the conversation forward. I welcome your thoughts, but we need to start the conversation from the right place.

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Liam is a restaurant critic and food and travel writer based in the Middle East. He owns EatGoSee and contributes to other publications. You can follow Liam on Substack, Instagram, Threads and Bluesky.

1. If you’re unfamiliar with the books and podcasts, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner explore “the hidden side of everything” with Freakonomics by using economic principles to examine social issues and human behaviour.

2. This essay is long enough, so I trust we don’t need to dive deep into what is a food influencer vs. a critic vs. a writer, but let me know.

3. In the final installment of this series, I will share the unique challenges of defamation claims and the dulling effect it has on written criticism.

4. In the third instalment of this series, I will consider the steady deterioration of long-form writing in the face of social media.

5. I encourage all to support long-form writing. I keep two paid newspaper subscriptions and a few Substack accounts. Society cannot be reduced to videos.

6. In the second instalment of this series, I will talk about integrity with food influencers. You have it or you don’t.