Is your brain hostage to food engineering?

Just the other day I was pondering the adage “Thieves always think they’re being stolen from; liars always think they’re being lied to” — a psychological truism I obtained courtesy of my mom.  (Thanks, mom!)

It leads to an interesting conclusion about “consumers”.  What are they?  Well, in a simplistic sense, they’re lazy.  It’s not that they don’t work, but rather that they’re afraid of work, so they’ll end up working far harder (in the long run) to avoid work than they would have worked to do it in the first place.  But for simplicity’s sake we’ll call this odd relationship to effort “laziness”.

I suggest this extension to Mom’s wisdom:  Lazy consumers think that corporations are lazy too. As evidence for this claim, I present food.  How many average people in Western countries do you think believe that food manufacturers are conducting all kinds of extensive research into what ingredients in what combinations will sell the most food?  In my experience, most people believe the opposite:  That corporations are just making things and selling them, and how much they sell (and how much we eat) is “up to us”.  Because consumers aren’t doing the work to police the ingredients and marketing of the food we’re being sold, I think those consumers assume that corporations aren’t paying much attention either.  But as anybody who understands capitalism will tell you, those corporations have a very powerful incentive to do exactly the opposite — and on a long enough timeline, in a competitive business climate, it’s the corporations that are most successful at getting people to buy more food that will push the others out of business.

So what do we have now?  Now we have a book written by the former head of the FDA, showing that corporations have indeed been working their tushes off for years, experimenting to find just the right combination of sugars, fats, salts, and flavorings to make consumers buy and eat more food.

Surprised?  If so, ask yourself why.  And even if you’re not surprised, ask yourself why this book is seen as espousing a relatively radical idea, and why its conclusions will make a lot of people uncomfortable.  Think about how many people seem to really want the obesity epidemic to be the fault of the consumers.  What are they really saying?  They’re saying “I don’t want to believe that corporations have really been working, and succeeding, at finding ways to coerce people into buying and eating more food.”

And hey, that’s understandable; nobody wants to feel coerced.  And people who want to remain lazy — who recoil at the idea of producing even some of their own food from scratch, but who don’t see a problem paying ten times as much to someone else and receiving questionable nutrition in return — really don’t want to admit that by doing so, they’ve opened themselves up to deliberate manipulation of the nastiest kind.  That the people you “trusted” to be as lazy as you–to at least not be trying to do you harm in the interest of making a buck–are, in fact, going full speed ahead with that and are, in fact, being incredibly successful at it.  And you’re letting them.

It’s an uncomfortable realization that’s going to become more uncomfortable soon, as the children we’re now raising a full third of to develop juvenile diabetes begin to ask us why the hell we stopped cooking at home, when the stuff we were buying was such obvious junk.

Exerpt from NYTimes article on the book:

When it comes to stimulating our brains, Dr. Kessler noted, individual ingredients aren’t particularly potent. But by combining fats, sugar and salt in innumerable ways, food makers have essentially tapped into the brain’s reward system, creating a feedback loop that stimulates our desire to eat and leaves us wanting more and more even when we’re full.

Dr. Kessler isn’t convinced that food makers fully understand the neuroscience of the forces they have unleashed, but food companies certainly understand human behavior, taste preferences and desire. In fact, he offers descriptions of how restaurants and food makers manipulate ingredients to reach the aptly named “bliss point.” Foods that contain too little or too much sugar, fat or salt are either bland or overwhelming. But food scientists work hard to reach the precise point at which we derive the greatest pleasure from fat, sugar and salt.

via Well – How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains – NYTimes.com.