Snack Packaging’s Role in the Obesity Crisis
October 28th, 2010 by Andy Didyk
Fellow blogger Hemi Weingarten over at Fooducate posted this interesting article today. It seems that some researches at Baruch College, CUNY have discovered that if you put more abundant-looking pictures of food on a snack package, that people will generally eat more. This is especially true with packaging that has lots of food on it versus packaging that has no depiction of food on it. When you think about it, this is just marketing profiting (and preying on?) how primitively our minds and bodies operate sometimes.
Alone and starving in the woods? If you found an apple tree with only one apple on it, you’d probably ration that apple. You’d at least eat it more slowly and purposefully than if you came across the mother of all apple trees (MOAAT for short) that was bursting with apples. Same thing if you snared a small rabbit versus a bear or something. Humans are programmed for survival, and for subsistence off of scarcity, which is why we’re so good at gaining weight and struggle so much with losing it.
For those of you who think that you’re immune to marketing, or that you’re not a part of the consumer culture, think again. I’m sure that at least a sizable percentage of the people they interviewed for their experiment were educated, intelligent people who at least know the basics about eating well. I’m not anti-marketing; I’m pro-ethical marketing. These same primitive human thought patterns can be employed to encourage good behavior as well as bad. And surely there’s a ceiling to these kind of tactics. I doubt you could induce people to eating until they threw up by suggesting it on the label (although nothing’s impossible).
For the record, I don’t necessarily think that putting abundant pictures of potato chips on a plastic bag is an unethical thing. But I do think that it’s our responsibility as consumers to find out as much as we can about why things are marketed they way they are.
Think about that the next time you wander the snack isle or pop open a package of your favorite snacks.
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 28th, 2010 at 1:53 pm and is filed under blogging, consumerism, design, marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.