The deep, dark secret of American agriculture is that there is way too much food available: 3,900 calories per day for every man, woman, and child in the country. The average adult needs barely over half that and children much less. And this substantial excess is at the high end compared to other industrialized countries.
Then why do we keep producing more? Most food companies are publicly traded companies, required to file quarterly reports with Wall Street, which not only demands profits, but also demands growth. It is not enough for Kraft foods to just earn $32 billion in sales. If they want stock prices to rise, they must increase sales by a sizable percentage nearly every 90 days. They must sell more, and then more, and then even more. (In this kind of investment economy, weight gain is just collateral damage.)
But how do they sell more (and more and more)? Food marketing strategists have literally changed social patterns. It is now socially acceptable to eat more food, to consume gigantic portions, to eat more often, to snack all day and eat at midnight, and to eat in more places like the car, or the mall, or the library. These are recent changes (which, not so coincidentally, exactly parallel the rise in obesity).
If you did not notice the changes in these social norms, or even welcomed them, that is because the marketing methods worked exactly as they were supposed to. Once you do start noticing, start thinking critically about what’s happened, the food scene looks quite different and making choices become easier. Your choices become informed.
Food marketing practices are unlikely to change (especially because money is involved), so it is entirely up to you to see through the propaganda and make intelligent choices about what you eat. In a society where an astonishing 60 percent of American adults weigh more than what is considered healthy, clearly this is not an easy thing to do.
How did this happen? They got us while we were young. Twenty-five years ago, only a few American companies marketed to children: Disney, McDonald’s, toys, candy, and cereal. Today, children are targeted by clothing stores, restaurant chains, cell phones companies, even automobile and oil companies. The explosion in children’s advertising happened during the 1980′s when working parents, who felt guilty about not spending enough time with their children, started spending more money on them instead. And marketers picked up on it, fast.
It is a brilliant marketing strategy that increases not only current, but future consumption. Nostalgic childhood purchases will lead to lifetime brand loyalty. Parents will purchase for their kids what they had as a kid, and the cycle continues. Research shows that a person’s brand loyalty can start as early as age 2 and market research has found that children often recognize brand logos before they can even recognize their own name.
In 1978, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) tried to ban all TV ads directed towards children under 7 years old because multiple studies found that young children often could not tell the difference between TV programming and TV advertising. They typical American child now spends 21 hours a week watching TV (that’s 1.5 months of TV per year, which does NOT include time spent watching DVDs, playing video games, or computer time). Outside of school, the typical American child spends more time watching TV than any other activity except sleeping. During the course of one year, a child watches more than 30,000 TV commercials.
Ok, so I sort-of digressed from the point, so my point is that the food marketers know what they’re doing and they’ve done it extremely well, creating a nation of obese, uninformed, eating machines. All in the name of profit.
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Breakfast: An apple
Lunch: Tofu stir-fry
Dinner: Cheese enchiladas and homemade guacamole
