Tag Archives: junk food

When Junk Science Meets Junk Food

Laurie and Debbie say:

eating in a settlement house kitchen

Scientists at the University of Toronto have released a report claiming that the very existence and availability of fast food somehow makes us be in a hurry. “Fast food represents a culture of time efficiency and instant gratification,” says Chen-Bo Zhong, who co-wrote the paper with colleague Sanford DeVoe to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science. “The problem is that the goal of saving time gets activated upon exposure to fast food regardless of whether time is a relevant factor in the context. For example, walking faster is time efficient when one is trying to make a meeting, but it’s a sign of impatience when one is going for a stroll in the park. We’re finding that the mere exposure to fast food is promoting a general sense of haste and impatience regardless of the context.” They did three experiments, each with less than sixty participants (less than thirty outside of the control groups), all of them University of Toronto students. So we already know we aren’t looking at real science. Their theory, which they “confirmed,” was that fast food logos, such as the ubiquitous Macdonalds’ golden arches, make people more impatient, and make them do tasks in more of a hurry. The experiments consisted of subliminal or peripheral vision flashes of fast food logos during other tasks. (We wonder if the control group got subliminal flashes of Alice Waters and the food at her restaurants.) While they don’t actually say in their paper that they are talking about why poor people make bad decisions, they do talk about “density” of fast-food restaurants, which we all know tends to happen in lower-income neighborhoods. (Fast food isn’t exclusively, or even perhaps mostly, the food of poor people. Know any white men in the tech industry? Any gamers?) Nonetheless, Kathryn Hughes, writing in the Guardian, has an excellent class-based critique: The panic around the moral and psychological damage of fast food … was always [fueled by] a much deeper suspicion of what it represented: ignorance, indifference, a wilful inability to imagine a better way of feeding the future. It’s for that reason that, back in the early 19th-century, moralists including William Cobbett churned out a whole array of “cottage economies” and “penny cookbooks” aimed at stopping the working classes from squandering money in the pie shop. These prim moral primers were full of bright suggestions for turning the scrag end of lamb and on-the-turn turnips into something that not only nourished body and soul but also saved pennies for a rainy day. … What all those Victorian moralists missed – just as the Toronto report ignores – is that fast food is the emblematic product of maturing and late capitalism. Urban workers, forced to work longer and longer hours, do not have the time to invest in cooking from scratch. Those who are obliged to live in shared accommodation and rented digs may not have the right equipment for making real food slowly (Agas don’t fit into bedsits; microwaves do). When you are exhausted after a 10-hour shift, then soup is fiddly to consume on the way home. Burgers and kebabs, by contrast, are easy to eat with one hand and require neither plates nor knives. Far from being the refuseniks of capitalism, unable to master its first principle of delayed gratification, the people who rely on fast food outlets are its honourable foot soldiers. We should salute them. Hughes is right on target for most of her essay, and is invoking a long and fascinating history of missionaries, settlement houses, and other do-gooder efforts aimed to make “the poor” eat “right,”  but we disagree with her that delayed gratification is a capitalist virtue, especially in 21st century capitalism. While she excoriates the study for ignoring how workers are pushed into fast food, she also ignores how consciously and carefully fast-food corporations engineer the attraction and desirability of fast food. Just to be clear, neither we nor Hughes are saying that fast food is a good thing, or good for us. Working through purchasable state legislatures, the corporations work hard to ensure ridiculous amounts of salt and sugar in every school cafeteria. Working with urban planners, they carefully calculate which street corners, neighborhoods, and strip malls will be most profitable for new locations. And working with food scientists, they carefully study exactly how much fat, salt, and sugar will make you reach for the next Dorito. So who exactly is into instant gratification? Who is trying to move fast, make immediate moves that might not be so sensible in the long term? Who is impatient? Well, fast food customers perhaps–but fast food owners, demonstrably. And no one is going to fund tiny, silly studies of what the owners do when their own logos flash subliminally onto a screen. Thanks to Annalee Newitz at i09 for the pointer.

Junk Food Addiction and Diet Deprivation: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Lynne Murray says:

I’ve recently come across articles about the seemingly unrelated topics of engineering food to be addictive and conditioning teenagers to be lifelong dieters. The first common element that struck me was disconnecting the body’s natural relationship with food and turning it into a marketable commodity.

Food consultant Howard Moskowitz, who earned his Ph.D. in experimental psychology at Harvard, is famous in the industry for the concept of “the bliss point.”

“More is not necessarily better,” Moskowitz wrote in his own account of the Prego [pasta sauce] project. “As the sensory intensity (say, of sweetness) increases, consumers first say that they like the product more, but eventually, with a middle level of sweetness, consumers like the product the most (this is their optimum, or ‘bliss,’ point).”

The biggest hits — be they Coca-Cola or Doritos — owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.

On the surface, designing a perfectly addicting snack looks like the opposite of this sad story of a teenage Biggest Loser victim celebrating her birthday:

Did she have cake? Well of course not, the show has taught her that she doesn’t deserve cake if she wants to be “healthy”. Instead her trainer, after an “exhausting workout”, gave her, “a tiny, sweet mandarin orange with a birthday candle stuck into it” which according to Sunny, “was, hands-down, the best birthday cake I’ve ever tasted”.

Many viewers and readers will certainly regard this teenager’s fervently coached extreme exercise and deprivation as the “cure for obesity,” which is frequently assumed to be “induced” by junk food.

But I couldn’t help noticing how similar the perceived trigger for obesity (junk food) and the perceived cure for obesity (deprivation) were, especially in how they build on each other and how they are presented.

Emerging research on food addiction suggests that processed salty, fatty or sweet foods of any kind — also called “hyperpalatable foods” — can trigger brain responses similar to those created by controlled substances in addicted individuals.

People react differently to processed foods than they do to foods found whole in nature, says Ashley Gearhardt, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Michigan.

“It’s something that has been engineered so that it is fattier and saltier and more novel to the point where our body, brain and pleasure centers react to it more strongly than if we were eating, say, a handful of nuts,” Gearhardt said. “Going along with that, we are seeing those classic signs of addiction, the cravings and loss of control and preoccupation with it.”

While engineers fabricate the foods that facilitate uncontrollable binges, limiting food consumption itself provides the starvation mindset most likely to lead to bingeing. A ten-year study at the University of Minnesota following dieting teenagers documented what many of us have found through bitter experience, and what the HAES community has been saying for decades:

The use of dieting and unhealthy weight control behaviors is common among teenagers and may counterintuitively lead to weight gain through the long-term adoption of unhealthy behaviors such as binge eating, reduced breakfast consumption, and lower levels of physical activity.

Four major similarities connect scientifically engineered junk food and food deprivation programs which are commonly called “dieting”:

  1. Detaching the person from trusting their body and its normal hunger patterns
  2. Setting up an infinite loop cycle as the diet-binge-diet-binge processes alternate over and over again.
  3. Giving the customer the illusion of control, while controlling them.
  4. Providing maximum profit to the marketers.

I do not believe in a horrible conspiracy betweem junk food engineers and diet-pushers. I think that most people and businesses are not organized or cooperative enough to perpetrate conspiracies. Instead, I believe these two groups of marketers are pursuing the same population (people who eat) with equal cynical ruthlessness, and that’s why their tactics converge.

Thanks to eleyan for the food engineering link and to my web diva for the Biggest Loser pointer.