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Those, says a friend who is a top executive at a major American food processing company, are the primal tastes that the human tongue craves. And it’s pretty much what is marketed and sold to Americans, including children.
Currently there’s a lot of concern about how food marketing may be contributing to childhood obesity. Even FTC commissioner Jon Leibowitz has taken up the cause, threatening to regulate food marketing to children if companies don’t do it on their own.
But it shouldn’t take the FTC to make us realize that marketing does have an impact on children’s food consumption. Food companies market to children (and through them to their parents) because it works. And it works because it appeals to what they most crave—sugar, salt, fat.
Look at any fast-food menu, print or TV food ad. If the product isn’t fried, sugared or salted, it simply doesn’t appear, at least not in large print. Small wonder that we have a bumper crop of chubby children well on their way to becoming super-size adults.
But wait. Before you can market, you have to have a product. So what is the responsibility of the companies that develop these products and the fast-food chains that sell them? Of course, ultimate responsibility literally lies with the hand that feeds the mouth. Still, is it responsible for companies to flood our food outlets with items that are soaked with what children unwittingly crave and ultimately lead to obesity?
To complicate matters, studies tend to show that some black communities endure a disproportionate amount of sugar, salt, fat marketing than others, and have much less access to super markets and farmer’s markets where a greater choice of unprocessed foods is offered. How responsible is that?
As a highly educated country, don’t we really know that too much sugar, salt, fat is unhealthy, and that fruits, vegetables, whole grains, protein, etc., are at the core of healthy eating? Or do we? Has marketing worked that well--making children (and far too many adults) believe that sugar, salt, fat IS a healthy diet?
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