Blog Post #7
Over the past century, food has gone from being a source of sustenance to an extremely profitable industry. While this has certainly been good for the economy in many ways, this new view on food is very controversial, and potentially detrimental to our health.
Fast food now dominates our daily diet. You can’t go anywhere in public or even turn on the TV without seeing an advertisement for McDonald’s or Wendy’s or something of the sort. The worst part is, most of these advertisements are directed towards children. In fact, the food industry spends over $1.6 billion a year marketing its products to today’s youth. Experts suggest that this excessive marketing can create an “obesogenic” environment in which it is difficult to make healthy choices.The average child sees between 12-21 TV commercials related to food each day, and it is almost never healthy food being marketed towards them. The recent advancements in technology have exacerbated this situation further. While kids used to only see advertisements in newspapers and television commercials, they now encounter them in most places of their life. Ads are now in computer games, websites, movies, and even in schools. Their favorite TV shows are sponsored by Doritos or the like. Each day, they are bombarded with colorful, “happy” images of calorically dense and nutritionally lacking food. And each day, more and more children get diagnosed as obese.
So what does this mean? Many people would say nothing. I think it says a lot, and I think it raises a lot of questions. If the government is so anti-obesity and wants what’s best for the nation, why do they allow these advertisements to brainwash us and our children? Does it have anything to do with all the money they get from these corporations? Why does healthy food seem so unappealing? Why are we force-fed cravings for chicken nuggets and french fries and milkshakes, when those are the last things we need? What are food companies hiding behind this incessant marketing?
One thing that is very well masked by marketers is the current state of the meat industry. These “farm fresh”, “organically fed” animals often spend most if not all of their lives so caged up or close to other animals that they cannot move. They are fed the cheapest food supply that can be bought, corn, which is devoid of any of the nutrients that these animals need to be healthy. They are injected with dozens upon dozens of chemicals and antibiotics and growth hormones to make them the most marketable. They are stripped dry of all they have to offer; cows being milked incessantly, chickens being bred to lay as many eggs as possible. Then after all this they are slaughtered while awake, often by unskilled workers who don’t always get it right the first time. Then they are dissected by these same unskilled workers, who often mess up, and sent in for processing to make sure the meat looks high quality. I once watched a video of how chicken nuggets are made, and it wasn’t pretty; all the highest-selling parts of the chicken are taken off, and then the rest of the chicken is basically thrown into a blender and treated with bleach and chemicals to make it look like meat rather than the gross pink paste it really is. The worst part about this is, most of this is not a secret. Anyone can look on youtube or google and find all of this information, and so much more, and yet these industries still thrive. Why?
A marketing consultant of the food industry once said, “the willpower of ignorance cannot be understated”. She said that these products sell because people are willing to not ask the hard questions like where they came from and how healthy they really are. Why are we all okay with this?
I think what I want to explore most in this is what’s really going on, why people are ignoring it, and how it can be changed. I think I want to focus mostly on marketing, and how it leads us to accept or ignore certain things in a way that is profitable to the food industry, even if it’s not good for our health.
