A Big Fat Crisis (12 page)

In the United States, technological advances in food processing lowered the cost of transforming cheaper corn, potatoes, and wheat into snacks like chips and pastries. Improvements in food chemistry
and packaging made it possible to maintain crispness and taste for months after preparation, increasing the shelf life of snack foods.

The downside, however, is that the increase in food availability has made overeating affordable to most of us. Consider the facts: in the 1920s, the average American family spent 25 percent of its income on food. In 2011, we spent only 9.8 percent.
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And because we spend relatively less on food, more people can afford the convenience of having others cook it for us. In 1966, 24 percent of total food expenses went toward food prepared away from home; in 2011 that number was 49 percent.
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And even though we are spending less of our overall budget on food, we are consuming more calories. According to Dr. Barry Popkin, Professor of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina, in 1977–1978 the average American consumed 1,803 calories per day. From 2003 to 2006 we ate 2,374 calories per day, a daily increase of 571 calories.

Still, a common refrain many of us hear is that healthy food is too expensive. Dr. Adam Drewnowski of the University of Washington points to the relatively high prices of fruits, vegetables, and lean meats compared to the cheap prices of foods like hot dogs, sodas, and other fast foods as the reason people with low incomes tend to have higher rates of obesity than do wealthier individuals.
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Yet if high costs were the main problem rather than hardwired automatic behaviors and environmental triggers that interfere with self-control, people with limited resources could save money by eating less. To the contrary, the problem is that we can afford to eat too many calories—and are often incapable of resisting the opportunity.

Yet if only the cost of the ingredients is considered, it is still cheaper to eat at home than to go to a fast food restaurant, especially for a family with many mouths to feed. To save money, one must purchase quantities larger than needed for one person, and items have to be prepared from scratch. But with a freezer and refrigerator, nothing should go to waste. Although we commonly hear that it is cheaper to eat fast food than to cook at home, going out is about convenience and/or the desire to be taken care of, not price.

The following table itemizes the cost of a fast food meal and compares it to the cost of a similar home-prepared meal. The home-cooked meal is both healthier and cheaper.

* Price on Oct. 6, 2012, at McDonald’s in Wal-Mart, Riverside, CA

F
IGURE
4
.
The Cost of Fast Food vs. a Similar Meal at Home

My RAND colleague Jill Luoto, an economist, argues that this is an unfair comparison, because I haven’t accounted for the time it takes to prepare the food—and time is money. But I would argue back that it takes me more time to go out to eat than to prepare food at home. To go out, I have to either walk at least fifteen minutes to get to a fast food outlet or restaurant or get in a car, navigate through traffic, find parking or wait in a drive-through line to be served, place my order, wait for it to be prepared and served, pay the bill, and then retrace my steps to get back home. Not including ordering, waiting for the food, and eating, the round-trip transportation alone takes at least thirty minutes—as long as or longer than it would take me to put a burger in a pan, a potato in the microwave or oven, cook, and even clean the pan afterward and put the dishes in the dishwasher.

What about the time it takes to shop for the food? Considering that it is possible to buy in bulk and store food in the refrigerator or freezer, and that the haul from an hour’s shopping can provide meals for a week or two, shopping time does not add much to the calculation, maybe two to three minutes per meal.

So why do fewer people cook at home than they did thirty years ago? It’s because the costs to eat out are not that high. If we couldn’t afford to eat out, we would make the effort to master cooking at home.

Greater Accessibility of Food

Along with the real decrease in food cost, in the 1980s the amount of calories available per person increased by about 15 percent compared to 1970, with a disproportionate increase in grain-based foods (per capita carbohydrate availability increased by 27 percent).
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Although a common belief is that agricultural subsidies are responsible for the low price of ingredients used in grain-based snack foods, processed foods, and drinks with added sugars, like high-fructose corn syrup, there is little hard evidence to support that. In fact, the reason that crop subsidies were introduced in the first place was to keep the cost of grains high, rather than make them cheap. When farmers had a bumper crop and there was abundant grain to sell, the price kept going down, so a crop ended up costing the farmers more to grow than they could sell it for.
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Government subsidies persuaded many farmers to grow less so the market would not be flooded with grain, keeping the price at a level where farmers wouldn’t go bankrupt.

Although the economics of farming have changed substantially since subsidies were first introduced, recent analyses suggest that even if subsidies were removed, the change in the price of commodities might have an impact of less than 0.5 percent in the average calories consumed.
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This is because the cost of the products sold has little to do with the cost of the raw ingredients—often packaging, marketing, and labor cost many times more than the ingredients. It has also been argued that removing all subsidies, including barriers to imports of sugar and dairy products, might lead to greater levels of food consumption, as people might shift to foods that have even higher calories than what they consume now.
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In my view, the most important force behind the increase in consumption of calories and nutrients like carbohydrates is the aggressive nature of the food industry and its highly forceful snack sector.

When I was a child in the early 1960s, my family seldom had snack foods in the house. Only on special occasions, like for birthday parties or entertaining, did foods like soda or potato chips appear. One of my earliest memories of our local grocery store, the A&P, was when my
mother sent me there to buy a bag of potato chips to serve company she was expecting. I loved being asked to do these types of errands, because my mom would give me some money and I could show off my newly gained arithmetic skills at the register, figuring out exactly what the change would be before the cashier did. I remember skipping to the store and looking up and down all the aisles trying to find the potato chips. I didn’t know where they were, because this was not an item we usually bought.

Finally, I asked the store manager where they were. He led me to the back of the store and pointed to the last aisle. There, on the bottom shelf, were a few bags of Wise potato chips. Not too many people bought them, so they were not in the most convenient spot.

Those days are long gone, and making appealing, crunchy snack foods highly visible and accessible is now the name of the game. Indeed, companies pay substantial “slotting fees” or “trade promotion fees” to ensure that their goods are front and center, on special floor displays, or at the end of an aisle where people can notice them right away. Not only have snack foods gained increasing prominence in supermarkets, but they are almost everywhere we go.

Moreover, a large percentage of retail outlets that do not sell food as their primary business now have food available as “impulse buys” at the cash register, as an add-on to their other merchandise, or in vending machines. The types of food sold in nonfood establishments like gas stations, hardware stores, bookstores, car washes, office buildings, and clothing stores are largely cookies, candies, chips, and sodas.

Today, larger supermarkets and warehouse stores are becoming more prevalent. Just twenty years ago, nearly 90 percent of purchases of food for the home were made in traditional grocery stores. Today, grocery store purchases account for 69 percent of at-home food purchases, and 21 percent are obtained from nontraditional food stores like Costco, Target, and Wal-Mart, where people can buy more food in bulk quantities.
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Despite all the new types of outlets and the changes in products, packaging, and access, the quality of the American diet has not improved over the past thirty years.
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Increasing Cues to Eat

As obesity has climbed over the past thirty years, the time devoted to television commercials has also grown considerably, while the length of the typical commercial has shrunk. The typical ad length has decreased from sixty to fifteen seconds. Recently, with more people using ad-skipping technology like TiVo, ads are being made as short as five seconds, so people using the ad-skipping device will still see the five-second spot when they bounce back to the program.

This means that we are being exposed to more products and more information packed into smaller amounts of time. As we are asked to absorb more, our cognitive systems may become overwhelmed, leading us to process more information with our noncognitive system. Thus, we may be reacting more automatically and less deliberately, without understanding why.

Beyond the different manipulations of commercial time, advertisers are increasingly using “product placements,” integrating a particular branded product into television programs and movies, for example, by having the actors drinking Coke, like the judges on
American Idol
. A watershed moment in the use of product placement in American cinema was Steven Spielberg’s use of Reese’s Pieces as a prop in the movie
E.T
.—which gave the candies a 65 percent spike in sales.

Advertisers have increasingly targeted children, who now view about sixty-five messages from television advertising each day (about half are for food), along with many additional marketing messages from websites and in retail stores.
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In 2005, the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine found that food advertising affects children’s food choices, food purchase requests, diets, and health.
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In a study of children’s exposure to food advertising, Sarah Speers and colleagues from Yale’s Rudd Center, an institute devoted to reversing the global spread of obesity, analyzed Nielsen data on television programming in 2008.
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Food, beverage, and restaurant brands appeared a total of thirty-five thousand times within primetime. Regular soft drinks, traditional restaurants (i.e., not quick-serve), and energy/sports drinks made up 60 percent of all brand appearances. Coca-Cola products were seen 198 times by the average child and 269 times by
the average adolescent during primetime shows over the year, accounting for 70 percent of child exposure and 61 percent of adolescent exposure to brand appearances, with
American Idol
accounting for more than 95 percent of these exposures.

Unhealthy food ads are also targeted more heavily toward minorities. Researchers compared the number of food-related commercials shown on primetime shows with African American characters to those on primetime shows with predominantly white characters.
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Not only did the shows targeting African Americans air 66 percent more commercials about food (4.8 spots for a thirty-minute show versus 2.9 ads for white audiences), but 30 percent of the food commercials for African Americans were about candy and chocolate versus only 14 percent for white audiences; 13 percent advertised soda during primetime targeting blacks versus only 2 percent for shows targeting white audiences.
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Overall, the food industry spent a staggering $9.65 billion on food advertising in 2009, and nearly $1.8 billion of that was directed at children and teens.
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Over the past decade, companies have moved beyond traditional media and product placements and are increasingly shifting their advertising dollars to the Internet, digital marketing, advergames, advertising on video games and movie DVDs, cellphone and other mobile media, and word-of-mouth viral marketing.
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Internet and mobile media can attract substantial audiences. In one month alone, McDonald’s websites saw seven hundred thousand visitors, half of whom were under twelve. Cereal manufacturers like Kellogg’s have smartphone apps for their products; General Mills offers kids virtual adventures starring Lucky the Leprechaun, with 227,000 visitors per month.
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Everyone can recognize changes in food prices, increased food accessibility, and increased food advertising, but many fail to see the connection between these changes and why we are eating too much. These changes didn’t happen by accident, nor were they developed as a plot or conspiracy to make people fat. They are only about increasing profits.