Creating lifetime customers

Here is something that gets me all riled up: advertising. We've touched on this briefly in class, but most of the true cost of food is wrapped up in marketing costs (how it's packaged, presented, and purchased). External costs, too, such as human and ecological health, are often ignored, but I'll save that rant for some other time.

Mainly, I wanted to focus on children. I feel like they often get the short end of the nutritional stick in this country. Aside from being brought up in a toxic food environment, which subsidizes low quality foods and essentially conditions kids to expect the refuse that is available, they are also the biggest targets of advertising. This is a huge ethical concern, in my opinion. Essentially, the strategy behind child-oriented marketing is that children are young consumers. If they like a product, they will become a lifetime customer, continuing to trust and buy that brand (in a similar vein, food is literally engineered to be “hyperpalatable,” that is to contain proportions of sugar, fat, and salt that are almost irresistible, acting similar to crack cocaine in how they stimulate the brain's reward centers). Since most comparable products are made from the same ingredients, all that separates them is how they are advertised. Based on content alone, false health claims, medical “sponsorship,” self-endorsements, and claims of intelligence and beauty are all used to improve sales of products based on perceived gains and not true quality. Packaging tends to separate food into “kid” and “adult” food, rendering the latter undesirable and undermining parental authority at the same time. There is – I kid you not – something called the “pester factor” that is basically what it sounds like. Kids pressure their parents into purchasing food they interpret as desirable. Food companies imbue products with certain positive qualities using bright colors, stirring words, and appealing images.

On a larger scale, I see this as the US protecting corporations over consumers (but more importantly, its citizens). The power that transnational corporations and food lobbyists hold in this country is being used to make its people sick! I want that dialogue to change. With the 2012 reevaluation of the US Farm Bill coming up, I think that this topic is more important than ever.

If you feel, like I do, that this is an issue that should be addressed and resolved, I highly recommend extra educational materials such as Marion Nestle's food blog, foodpolitics.com (which outlines exactly that) [editor's note: Nestle's blog has also been linked in the blogroll section.]. I also like Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals, which takes a good look at the US livestock industry http://www.eatinganimals.com/.

CONTRIBUTED BY ELENA STELZNER

photo credit