Authors: Deborah Cohen
A Big Fat Crisis (13 page)
The profit motive has infected even nonprofit and public institutions like hospitals, schools, colleges, universities, and our military—all presumably concerned about the health and well-being of their clients, enrollees, and personnel. Because they get a percentage of sales when
their captive audiences eat too much in company cafeterias or buy junk foods from on-site vending machines, these nonprofit institutions may be undermining the very people they want to help.
The food industry is not putting a gun to our heads to make us eat too much. It doesn’t have to. It is simply taking advantage of our natural interest in food and our innate instincts to survive.
Last fall, while speaking to a group of community leaders on the South Side of Chicago, Michelle Obama said, “In so many neighborhoods, if people want to buy a head of lettuce or salad or some fruit for their kid’s lunch, they have to take two or three buses, maybe pay for a taxicab, in order to do it.” As part of her anti-obesity campaign, Mrs. Obama was highlighting the much-trumpeted relationship between obesity and “food deserts”—communities or neighborhoods where healthy food is unavailable or prohibitively expensive.
Through the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, $400 million will be spent to bring grocery stores and other healthy food retailers to underresourced urban and rural communities across America where people live more than a mile from a supermarket and do not have access to a vehicle.
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The goal is to eliminate such food deserts within a seven-year period. Although a variety of solutions have been proposed, from farmers’ markets to street vendors, the one that has grabbed the popular imagination is to put large, full-service supermarkets in every neighborhood lacking one.
Supermarkets are considered places that provide the breadth and depth of options that people need to stay healthy, including large assortments of fresh fruits and vegetables. Moreover, a variety of studies
have found a strong correlation between distance to a supermarket and the prevalence of obesity.
Yet this correlation does not explain why 67 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, since only 4.1 percent of Americans live in food deserts.
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In my view, the problem is less about access to healthy food than it is about being inundated with too much unhealthy food.
In most communities, we can count on finding food 24/7. We all live in a food swamp. I use that term not only to refer to the proliferation of food outlets and the growth of big-box stores featuring bulk packaging, like Sam’s Club and Costco, but also to describe how outlets market their wares.
For example, take Kroger’s Food 4 Less, a large chain of 145 “price impact” warehouse stores in four US states, mostly concentrated in California. Although Food 4 Less has a substantial section of very reasonably priced fresh fruits and vegetables, much of the store is filled with aisles of junk food and prepared foods with too much salt, sugar, and fat. Right at the entrance one must run a gauntlet of cases and cases of juices, Chips Ahoy cookies, Coca-Cola, Sprite, Sunkist orange soda, Squirt, and 7Up stacked high on either side of the aisle, and guess what? They are always on sale. Three for $10. Four for $11. Fifty-count snack packs of thick and hearty tortilla chips for $10.98. A special floor display of Hostess Zingers at two for $5 dead-center in the middle of the pathway. “Save on Big Packs” is plastered on all the shelves, right over the deal on a twenty-four-pack of Instant Lunch noodles for $6.98.
As you move through the store, the end aisle displays contain more Coca-Cola and Chips Ahoy, along with Cup Noodles, BBQ chips, doughnuts, Cap’n Crunch, Pepsi, Orange Crush, Mountain Dew, and Doritos, not to mention aisles devoted exclusively to even more chips and sodas. In the front of the store, before you approach the area for checkout, there are special displays of M&M’s, single-serving packages of pastries, Reese’s candies, and Nestlé Crunch bars. And if your diet goals weren’t already hijacked, there is an extensive display of candy bars and smaller bags of chips right next to the cash register, at about eye level for a seven-year-old.
Today, the real estate in most supermarkets may be largely controlled by vendors who pay to have their goods displayed in specific cases in particular locations, like end aisle and floor displays or at the cash register. That’s because people are automatically attracted to special displays, and when they are, they buy more of the products. Research shows there is something about the arrangement of the goods and the way end aisle displays stand out that people cannot ignore. The effect is so powerful that an estimated 30 percent of all store sales are from these end aisle displays.
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In fact, supermarkets now make more money selling their shelf space to vendors than they do selling their products to customers. Although the emphasis on “junk food” is greater
in stores that serve low-income populations than in higher-income areas, higher-end outlets simply promote more expensive “gourmet” junk food.
This kind of store placement is such a successful strategy that nonfood establishments like gas stations, hardware stores, bookstores, car washes, and clothing stores—an estimated 41 percent of all retail businesses—now have junk food available at their cash registers too.
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At Macy’s you can find Godiva chocolates in the lingerie department and premium chocolate bars at the men’s department cash register. One clerk informed me that the candy bars sell very well, as many people add these $3 bars onto their purchases of $40 shirts or $60 jeans.
The food industry doesn’t need fancy scientific experiments to figure out that people are more likely to be tempted at the end of a shopping trip or to buy more from the end aisle displays. They can just look at their sales receipts.
Another common belief is that fast food is the primary cause of obesity. In line with that thinking, in 2008 the Los Angeles City Council passed a temporary ban on new fast food restaurants in South Central Los Angeles, a low-income area claimed to have too many fast food outlets and too few supermarkets.
To verify this claim, my colleague Dr. Roland Sturm and I studied the number of food retail outlets in Los Angeles. We counted all the food outlets based upon the total population, a per capita measure, as well as based upon the neighborhood’s miles of roadway, a measure of exposure. Our thinking was that opportunities to purchase food are dependent on whether we pass by grocery stores, supermarkets, and restaurants as we go about our daily routines, rather than how many people live in a neighborhood. Looking at South Central LA in this manner, we discovered that compared to wealthier areas like the west side of LA, there were a similar number of fast food outlets but nearly double the number of convenience stores and seven times the number of small groceries, where there are usually some fresh fruits and vegetables, but where foods like chips, soda, and candy tend to dominate.
The fact is, we are very seldom in a situation where there is nothing to eat. We would have to be pretty far out in the wild, perhaps in the middle of one of our national parks. This observation is not just anecdotal:
in a ten-year period, from 1986 to 1996, the number of commercial food establishments in the United States increased by 78 percent, fast food outlets by 85 percent, and restaurants and lunchrooms by 62 percent.
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And in the past forty years, the total number of restaurants in this country has tripled.
Restaurants, including fast food outlets, have also figured out how to get their customers to buy (and eat) more than they intend, not only by serving larger portion sizes but also by altering the way they present and bundle their products. The ubiquitous combo meal is no accident: it has been finely developed and bred for success.
Kathryn Sharpe from the University of Virginia and Richard Staelin from Duke University’s business school conducted a careful study to figure out why customers are so attracted to combo meals.
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They asked 215 adults from all over America who eat at a fast food restaurant at least once a month to participate in an experiment in which they had to indicate what they would buy if they stopped at nine different fast food outlets (all serving burgers, fries, and sodas on their menus) on a cross-country trip. At each of these outlets the menu was configured in different ways. In some of the restaurants the food was bundled as a “combo” meal; in other scenarios, if you wanted all three options, you would have to order them each à la carte. On some menus, the price of the combo meal was placed right next to the price of the entrée alone, so the customers could directly compare the two choices. Drink sizes and food prices were varied.
Sharpe and Staelin found that when meals were bundled, the number of people who bought fries increased by 15 percent and people ended up with larger quantities of soda, together resulting in an average increase of 110–130 calories per meal. Bundling was effective primarily because it lowered the number of decisions customers had to make and it made them more aware of prices, especially when the format of the menu presented the à la carte price right next to the bundled price. So getting the three items for less than when purchasing each separately may have been automatically perceived as a bargain that could not be missed, even though the customers would actually be spending more than if the combo wasn’t available.
“Combo meals” are only one of the many potential traps in our
modern food swamp. Just like a real swamp, the food swamp can be dazzling, its vastness overwhelming, its thoroughfares tricky to navigate, its inhabitants quite dangerous.
The next chapter describes how the variety of marketing techniques may influence you without your being able to recognize it.
On a blog for moms, Joyce Slaton described her horror when her young child began parroting a television commercial for Slushy Magic that claimed the machine turned drinks into slushies by using “snowflake science.” This event transformed her from a person who was against limiting advertising to kids to an advocate for greater advertising controls.
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Although it’s common to hear complaints like Slaton’s about how advertisers are unfairly targeting children, who are gullible and overly trusting, the reality is that we have to be just as worried about how advertising influences adults. Children may be more vulnerable to overt advertising messages, but adults are also highly impressionable; and like children, adults are often unable to protect themselves.
We don’t perceive adults as vulnerable, though, because they have well-developed cognitive abilities. We expect adults to be able to see through any glitzy subterfuge and to transcend appeals to glamour, in contrast to children, who usually cannot distinguish ads from programming until they are between ages four and eight. Nevertheless, even adults may have difficulty when the breaks between programming and the ads aren’t clearly defined or when infomercials look like talk shows.
Advertising encourages impulsive behaviors, which children work on mastering from birth. As anyone with a teenager knows, during
adolescence impulse control may regress and defense against advertising may be particularly difficult. At the same time, adolescence is the period when we first begin to have an understanding of complex concepts. But there is a huge variation in teens’ sophistication: some are able to analyze advertising mechanisms as early as twelve, while others still fail to see behind even the most superficial and transparent advertisements at eighteen.
What about adults? Our greatest vulnerability to advertising, regardless of age or development, is through our noncognitive processing, when we impulsively react to superficial appearances, gestures, and sounds, and fail to analyze the information carefully. We know that automatic responses to images, like brands and symbols, begin as early as age two. One study showed that children ages three to five, not old enough to read, recognized and understood the significance of brands and characters like Ronald McDonald.
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Both children and adults respond automatically to colors, variety, size, logos, and icons. Yet children may not respond as strongly as adults to symbols or brands because they are less exposed. Their lack of experience is a barrier that can initially protect them from advertising. But it is just a matter of time until they are sufficiently exposed and the brands become meaningful.
The ability to override automatic responses begins during the teen years. Despite having the theoretical capacity to inhibit noncognitive processing, teens and adults seldom do. Moreover, as discussed in Part I, everyone’s ability to make cognitive rather than automatic decisions is constrained by other demands on attention.