The Great Industrial Food Mirage
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Many people distrust the food industry. Part of that is funded on sheer paranoia. The rest is the food companies’ own doing and they well deserve it. A call for more honesty in food marketing.
The Other Side Of The Medal
Recently I wrote an article about how a certain elitism has taken over the definition of healthy food and turned it more into an expensive lifestyle choice than one affordable by most of the population.
However, our reader Neil sent a comment that had me thinking about the other side of the medal: I swiped the concerns of these people off the table without regarding why their thinking actually came to be.
After all, the healthy eating movement is, at its core, a political movement, and political movements are reactions to actions. For the peace movement of the 60s and 70s, that action was the Vietnam war, for the food movement the action are the developments in food production that leave them deeply distrusting of anything that graces supermarket shelves these days.
Home On The Range
That is something the food industry brought upon itself by its own hands. Go ahead, turn on your television and watch some commercials. Chances are you’ll come across at least a couple for meat products, depicting happy farmers who apparently know each of their cows personally. Others feature supposedly Italian chefs showing us how sweetly they caress each and every single portion of their pizza dough before it arrives in the deep freezer of your local supermarket.
Essentially we are supposed to believe that the food industry is still using the production methods of the 19th century. In reality, livestock is raised on farms that approach the size of New Jersey and their herds go into five-digit numbers. Pizza dough is prepared in gigantic steel containers and in the most modern production facilities not a single human hand will touch your pie before you put yours on it.
It’s an illusion, and one we apparently liked to believe in. After all, advertising only uses elements that sells stuff. We deeply wanted to believe that food is still made like in those cozy days of yesteryear. While we were spared the sometimes tedious task of preparing our food from the ground up in our own kitchens like our grandmothers used to, it was such an alluring dream that somebody would do it in our stead.
Let’s Have Some Realism With That
That again sounds like I’m putting us, the consumers, at fault, but not quite. The food industry took the easy way out to sell a product instead of taking an approach that was more in line with reality. In comparison, it is next to inconceivable that computer companies would run commercials with images of nerds soldering computers together in a badly lit shack. Not even the most devout Apple fans could be sold the idea that their gadgets are still put together in a California garage.
Why didn’t the food industry choose to show people how their streamlined methods made foods affordable that once were only available to the rich? That it took a large helping of ingenuity to come up with a pizza dough you can freeze, bake and still have it rise? That the idea of urban farming is nice enough, but can’t feed a city like New York? That in the 1960s industrial food production took a huge burden off women?
If the food industry doesn’t start painting a realistic picture of its products, the number of people turning away from their offerings will only increase. Some consumers already are paranoid enough to blame factory-made food for any ailment that befalls them, no matter how little factual backing those claims sometimes have.
Picture courtesy of Paul Hudson.
Tags: food, food industry, food production, healthy eating, healthy eating habits, nutrition
6 Comments
We grow veg on an allotment. Thank god we don’t have to produce all our food that way! There is a very large upside to industrialised farming and food.
I think you’re right that people are fooling themselves but they are actively being fooled by cynical marketing departments. Here in the UK we have such products as Loch Muir Smoked Salmon. You’d be forgiven for believing there might actually be a Loch Muir in Scotland but there isn’t. Likewise there is no Willow Farm tucked away in the English countryside lovingly crafting cheese. I’d say that’s downright sneaky. It’s tough for busy shoppers to penetrate this marketing bluff and work out what they are buying. As you point out, this doesn’t really matter in most cases but the deception is there all the same.
The deception has a more sinister face in it’s use of the word Healthy and other implications of heathfulness on products that have no real or even relative health benefits. I don’t think it’s consumers’ fault that giants like Nestle and Kellogs have fooled them into believing that the dried starch paste flavoured with significant quantities of sugar and salt that these firm peddle in a dizzying range of breakfast cereals are “healthy”. They add vitamins and usually take into account the milk you add in the per bowl nutritional profile. Yes the vitamins might be useful but is that bowl of sugar really a “healthy way to start the day”? I doubt it. But the wording and pictures are very good and implying that they are. Personally I’d ban the use of the word healthy full stop. It’s ill-defined and often misleading.
For those worried about fibre you can buy the same junk with added fibre. I don’t believe that you can make foods by mixing up component nutrients and it be as healthy as less processed foods. There are 1000′s of nutrients in natural foodstuffs and we are discovering them and their utility all the time. It’s not just about carbs, fat, protein and vitamins in terms of long term health.
Look into square foot gardening, it’s much easier to produce large volumes of food in a small space. It’s also a lot less work than you describe, we grow all of our fruit and veg that way and it takes up a surprisingly small amount of space and time.
Ashley, we eat about one or two salads per week. Over a year that makes it about 80. How would you grow that many on such a small space? And how do you deal with it during winter, if you don’t have a greenhouse?
I agree, the “healthy” claims are the worst of the bunch and leading the pack is Ferrero – no other company exploits this as badly as they are. It has gotten to the point where I developed a very personal antipathy toward the company
Hi EC! This post is both thought-provoking and entertaining, a cool combination that I’ve come to expect from your work. I come from the odd perspective here of being a healthy living blogger whose day job as a PR consultant has often involved marketing food brands. I agree that there needs to be more transparency and less B.S. from food companies. If I wouldn’t eat something personally, there’s absolutely no way I’d promote it.
I think the food industry is a major part of the problem! They produce many distorted foods and encourage a distorted relationship with their foods by the huge amounts of fat, sugar and salt that their products contain.
If this industry, that has over-promised and under-delivered for years, would be helpful to the consumer, it would make a large difference in the health of people.
I understand your point about the realistic necessity of modern food, but it still could be made much healthier without hurting their bottom line.