Diet Wars: Obesity rates fed by massive marketing of cheap food

[Guest guest]

http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2004-05-06/news_story6.php

NOW | MAY 6 - 12, 2004 | VOL. 23 NO. 36

 

Super-selling Fat Frenzy

Obesity Rates Fed By Massive Marketing Of An Endlessly Exploitable Surplus

Of Cheap Food

 

BY WAYNE ROBERTS

 

Durham, New Hampshire – leading nutritionist and anti-obesity expert Marion

Nestle doesn't bother with the controversy surrounding low-carb diets. It's

the heft of food-industry marketing budgets that has her worried. Chair of

New York University's nutrition, food studies and public health department,

Nestle used her years as an insider in the Washington food scene – she

edited the 1988 surgeon general's landmark report on nutrition – to write

the award-winning Food Politics: How The Food Industry Influences Nutrition

And Health.

 

I'm watching her here at the University of New Hampshire at a conference

called Eating As A Moral Act, as she dispenses smart rejoinders to the

usual clichés about the fat crisis.

 

" I didn't want to see a public discussion about obesity without a

discussion about marketing, " says Nestle. Diet crazes don't interest her –

her message is Just Eat Less.

 

The reason why so many North Americans have ballooned so badly over the

last decade has to do with eating so many more calories, not a sudden shift

in genetics or even a sudden decline in exercise levels. And they've eaten

more because they were suckers for the marketing campaign behind Super-size

It And They Will Come.

 

" You don't have to go any further than larger portions, " she says. There's

little use obsessing about the sociology of consumers – their education,

age, income, foibles or culture. The answer lies in the economics of the

food system, " the elephant under the living room rug that no one wants to

talk about, " she says.

 

The $1.3-trillion-a-year North American food industry spends $34 billion a

year on advertising. The ad budget for Altoid mints alone is five times

more than the U.S. government spends to promote vegetables and fruit,

Nestle says. (The global food industry ad budget is $40 billion, greater

than the GNP of 70 per cent of the world's nations, according to the report

Broadcasting Bad Health.)

 

The North American food industry creates 10,000 new products a year to join

the 320,000 already existing products on supermarket shelves (there are now

27 varieties of Oreo cookies instead of the mere six that existed in 1990),

since surpluses drive compulsive innovation and spin-offs. This food

juggernaut produces twice as much food as North American consumers need, so

whatever isn't exported becomes Unidentifiable Food Objects, concocted

edibles often aimed at kids.

 

Since the food industry needs to show continual growth to survive on the

stock market – " That's the way capitalism works, " says Nestle – it can't

stomach any reference to eating limits or eating less.

 

Atkins, South Beach, low fat diets – the food industry can deal with all of

them, adjusting products and marketing strategies, as long as it's the kind

of calories, not the number of calories, that gets the attention.

 

" Eat less " are fighting words for the pop and food industry, as their

current campaign against the World Health Organization report calling for

limits to sugar consumption indicates. That campaign follows a successful

10-year effort to reframe U.S. government warnings on sugar. In 1980 and

85, the food guide urged people to " avoid too much sugar. " By 2000 the

advice was " Choose beverages and foods to moderate your intake of sugar. "

 

But Nestle's focus on marketing drivers in the food industry may reflect

her training in nutrition rather than the even more dismal science of

economics. There's more involved in this weighty matter of obesity than the

gross ethics of super-size marketing.

 

When I studied economics way back when, there was always a lecture on how

the demand for food is " inelastic. " No matter how much more money people

make, there is only so much food they can jam down into their stomachs, so

the demand is inelastic, the lecture went. That's why food couldn't be a

growth industry, the conventional wisdom had it.

 

Economic theory about inelasticity of demand for food didn't reckon with

the elasticity of skin and the ability of the human body to swell into

obesity, or the ability of the food industry to market to people already

full-to-busting. But super-sizing actually exposes a crisis in the food

system more profound than marketing ethics or the mania for growth on the

stock market.

 

It's another unintended outcome of subsidies designed to make food so

cheap. When food out of the farm gate accounts for only 20 cents on the

food dollar spent by consumers, and 80 cents goes to processors, packagers,

advertisers and retailers, then super-sizing is almost inevitable. All

those 80 cents' worth of overhead costs stay fixed, no matter what size

portion the customer buys, so it only costs pennies to double the size and

charge an extra quarter, quintupling the rate of profit.

 

The only way to control that trend would be to find a way to reward food

producers or retailers for quality of food and health outcomes rather than

quantity of food. This is something the designers of our food system or

health system can't wrap their heads around, probably because, as eco

theorist Wendell Berry puts it, the people who make food care nothing about

health, while the people who do health care little about food, and never

the twain shall meet.

 

That is the system problem behind obesity, and it is bigger than the

super-sized elephant under the rug.