June 18, 2012 |
Photo Credit: J. McPhail/Shutterstock.com
New York Mayor Bloomberg's new rules limiting sodas and other sugary
drinks sold in restaurants, movie theaters, sports arenas, food carts
and delis to 16 ounces has spurred a national debate. Should government
limit our serving sizes? Bloomberg's rules do not prevent a person from
buying two, five or 10 16-ounce sodas and drinking them all in one
sitting. They just prevent a restaurant from selling that much soda in
one cup. Stupid rule? Not if you know the history of supersizing.
The idea can be traced back to a man named David Wallerstein, who ran
movie theaters in the 1960s. He tried method after method to get his
customers to buy more than one order of popcorn. Nothing worked. Then he
realized why: people thought they would look like pigs if they bought
two popcorns. So he tried increasing sales a different way, by offering a
jumbo size popcorn. The trick worked. Popcorn sales went up.
Nowadays, this profit-boosting trick is the standard at any movie
theater. Some theater chains require cashiers to inform every customer
that they can have the next size up for an extra quarter or two. It's a
tiny amount of money to pay for a larger size of soda or popcorn, but
for the theater, those extra few cents are nearly all profit. The labor
costs them the same to sell you a small popcorn or a large one. The
added cost of a box or a cup plus some syrup and water, or some popcorn,
salt and seasoning is minimal. And you as the customer perceive this as
a great value.
Wallerstein's brilliant idea might have stayed in his theater chain,
but in 1968, he became a director of McDonald's. In the 1970s, the
economy was not on McDonald's' side, and customers were visiting the
restaurants less and less and then only buying very little. Wallerstein
convinced the chain to offer larger sizes of fries to boost sales --
and, of course, it worked. Incredibly, the large size of fries from the
late 1970s is the small size of fries today! The same is true of other
menu items. The largest soda in 1955 was a mere seven ounces,
smaller than the 12-ounce child size offered today.
The economic crunch of the 1970s brought the chain another innovation
as well: the value meal. Fries and sodas both have higher profit margins
than burgers. Yet, while a penny-pinching diner might order a burger
with no sides or drinks, nobody is going to come in for a meal and order
a soda or fries without a burger. A McDonald's franchisee named Max
Cooper pushed the company to sell value meals and the rest is history.
It hardly took a rocket scientist to observe McDonald's success and
mimic it. Today supersizing and value meals are standard practice in a
number of restaurants. In fact, even sit-down restaurants feel pressure
to offer large servings, since customers complain and feel cheated if
they do not. And once a larger portion is placed in front of a diner, he
or she is more likely to eat more food -- especially if he or she is
distracted by another activity.
Take the case of popcorn in movie theaters. Moviegoers in one study
were given either medium or large-sized containers of five-day-old
popcorn to eat as they watched a film. Those with large popcorns ate an
average of 50 percent more. As Linda Bacon writes in
Health at Every Size,
"They didn't eat the popcorn because it tasted good (it was stale!),
they ate it because of the external cue -- the container size."
In some cases, marketers have figured out how to get us to order what
we might not otherwise allow ourselves to eat. Take the Starbucks
frappuccino. A morning coffee is normal. A morning milkshake is not.
Drinking several cups of coffee a day is normal, but you might not allow
yourself several milkshakes in a day. By presenting its frappuccinos as
fancy coffee drinks, not desserts, Starbucks has its customers lining
up to order "coffees" filled with sugar and topped with whipped cream
and chocolate or caramel syrup starting early in the morning. A
venti chocolate cookie crumble frappuccino has exactly 10 calories less than a Big Mac. You want fries with that?
To help encourage diners to eat more than ever, food manufacturers have
discovered how to make all that food go down quick and easy. Former FDA
administrator David Kessler calls it "adult baby food" in his book
The End of Overeating.
In one case, he cites meat that has marinade injected into it with
hundreds of needles that tear up the connective tissue, quoting an
industry executive who called the meat "pre-chewed." Another industry
source described the food at Chili's by saying "All of this has been
processed such that you can wolf it down fast... chopped up and made
ultrapalatable." Kessler then weighs in, saying, "By eliminating the
need to chew, modern food processing techniques allow us to eat faster."
Nowhere is this truer than in the case of beverages. When you eat a
solid food, your body recognizes you've eaten and adjusts by eating less
later. Not so when you
drink your calories!
When a corporation offers you a little more syrup and water in a larger
cup for a little bit more money, they pocket the extra profit and you
feel you are getting a great value -- but your body doesn't realize that
it is supposed to eat fewer calories later because it just drank a Big
Gulp. This is particularly troubling since added sugars in beverages
make up 41 percent of added sugars in the diets of American
kids and teens, who now eat more calories from added sugars than they should have for both added sugars and fats combined.
A third innovation from the 1970s that enters this equation is the
invention of high-fructose corn syrup and the agricultural policies to
make it cheap -- and cheaper than sugar. In the U.S., sugar has long
enjoyed import quotas that keep the price artificially high. But
agricultural subsidies make corn -- and high-fructose corn syrup --
cheap. By the early 1980s, the major soda companies had switched
entirely from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup. Now that soda's main
ingredient was cheaper than ever, it cost nearly nothing for restaurants
and convenience stores to sell larger and larger sodas. Almost every
extra penny paid for a larger-sized soda was pure profit.
Americans like to think of themselves as individuals who are capable of
making their own choices. We don't need the government to tell us to
drink less soda, right? But this is more a matter of the government
telling corporations not to prey on human psychology and physiology to
trick their customers into buying and drinking more soda than they want
-- and more soda than is healthy for them. Particularly not when the
result is a lifetime of illness and increased medical expenses, about
half of which is shifted onto taxpayers who pay for Medicare, Medicaid
and the VA.
On the other hand, nobody is banning consumers from drinking as much
soda as they want. Just like in the old days before David Wallerstein's
discovery of the "supersize," customers can still buy 32 ounces of soda
if they want 32 ounces of soda. But in New York, that will involve
ordering two sodas in two separate cups. Does that make you feel like a
pig? Well, you're drinking 388 calories if the soda in your two cups is
Coca-Cola. That's nearly 25 teaspoons of sugar: two and a half times
what you should consume in a day. You can still have that much soda if
you want it -- but maybe it's a good thing if ordering it makes you feel
like a pig.
Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog
La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of
Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It..
No comments:
Post a Comment