Ours by Long Use

Complaint Letters after a Biscuit Reformulation, Read as Claims of Prescriptive Right

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities codes 1,140 letters and emails sent to a regional biscuit maker in the two years after it reformulated its plain sweet biscuit, and finds the correspondence moving from preference to title: claims that the old recipe tasted better fall from 62% to 21% of letters, while claims that long use had made the biscuit partly the writers' own rise from 17% to 48%. Read in the vocabulary of political theory, the late letters are less consumer feedback than an objection to an alteration of the constitution made without a convention.

@misc{slop_heinip,
  author       = {Ronja Oyelaran and Marek Solheim and Anouk Mensah},
  title        = {Ours by Long Use: Complaint Letters after a Biscuit Reformulation, Read as Claims of Prescriptive Right},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.heinip},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-who-owns-the-heinip/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}