slo collection: September 2010

Food and Children
Marian Shaghoury
Concordia University
August 4th, 2010

Food was the first ever maker of profit. It was realized by the fact that the industrial revolution created the right machinery to do more work in less time. By the 1850’s, People who had settled in North America had realized the potential of growth when they had enormous crop space. In the book “ The end of Food”, Paul
Roberts emphasizes the magnitude of wealth people felt at that time when it became possible to have meat everyday. Farmers were selling so abundantly that the unit was able to sell for really cheap. The first American company to advertize a ready-made product was coffee. This creation arose by the fact that abundance of food made food substantially cheaper and that people had more money to spend. By the time the middle class was established, there was comfort and there was the need to live comfortably. When the first coffee company began to sell coffee from the cup they recognized this new lifestyle, this gave rise to so many other recognizable companies today, like Coca-Cola. Eventually, while food was growing linearly, population was growing geometrically. It had grown so much that the crops became no longer sufficient in feeding them. It was only until the 1950’s where science used genetics to mutate food to fit into the machines, and double up in size and in number that abundance truly was born for good..

Essentially science and Industry saved us from hunger, the effects not only mutated the foods we recognized, but it’s necessity became a means of controlling what we eat and how we eat it. In 2010, Obesity is sky rocketing and every year it’s affecting younger and younger children from ages 2 to the tweens. The question is how does it happen, and how is it being controlled. For a food and soft drink company to be successful at selling a product it first needs people with money to buy it, but to be able to control the people to buy it frequently they hire psychologists to tap into the minds of adults and children to know what their needs are, what excites them, what their fears are. This is going to help determine how these companies are getting through to children in homes, schools, and the public sector.

When industrialization started shipping food to far away communities, consumers no longer had a relationship or communication with the farmer who would bring them fresh produce, mascots had to designed to look like people of it’s time, like Quaker and Aunt Jemima for people to trust new products. As trends are changing, advertisers are on the hunt to find out how close they can get to the consumers by finding out what are the current values. It is true that parents will go out and purchase food from the grocery store, but what we must realize is the numerous thoughts, concerns, memories that occur in their heads until the moment they grab the product and place it in the shopping cart. It is in that moment that psychologists are eager to understand what shapes their decisions. But are these decisions personal and un-biased or are they influenced by advertizing? In the “Food Marketing for children” book, it mentions the advertising association that conducted a case study in 1996 on around 7000 families. They created settings where the family was answering questions together, mothers alone, children alone, and mixed environment this way they can see how each person gets influenced in different environments. By the end, an estimated 7% of concerns were given to the actual health of the product, yet at 37% went into concerns over what to “buy/prepare/plan” (G. Smith, 1997) which is neck and neck with what they decide to eat or not to eat. 15 percent went to the actual hope of enjoying the meal. The next study showed that mothers influenced what got served at 20 percent and the children were 13 percent, and fathers at 12. With just this information alone, advertisers can create an atmosphere that caters to these demands by suggesting a product that the mother can approve yet the children will like.

The act of picking food for the family is also an emotional setting because parents worry about what the children will like based on past experiences. These experiences have a lot to do with how children and parents interact with each other. Family dining might be for some a negative atmosphere if it is a place for fighting, and aggression. The idea of a sit down meal with cooked food might become devalued. Knowing that family issues do arise during dinner gives advertisers a big window of opportunity to not just sell a prepackaged meal, but the idea that this meal brings family together. The point isn’t whether it does but that it sends a positive message. It’s the type of brainwashing that can at least contribute to a neutral environment within the family, or cut down on family meals altogether where only one person enjoys the product. But the main goal that advertisers are trying to reach is to make you believe that only through purchasing this product can you truly know how a meal can be enjoyed in a family environment.
Another issue that families come across at the dinner table is reward systems, making a child eat something they don’t like to get what they truly like only makes them hate the undesirable and enjoy the goodies more. Ex: if you eat your broccoli, you can have a chocolate muffin.

It’s understandable that creating a negative environment makes the dinner table undesired, but there are two reasons why reward systems are used. First, if home is an environment where there’s a lot of processed foods with high levels of sugar, fat, and salt, then it becomes high enough level where the body only craves these specific ingredients and sees vegetables and fruits are bland. Glen Smith explains that kids aged 2 ½ to 5 begin to have a growing need for sugar, and parents don’t necessarily know the difference it makes to feed the child simple versus complex sugars. Often times than not this is also around the time that kids get exposed to different types of processed foods that develop their palette, as they grow older. Secondly, advertising can brand the notion of vegetables being undesirables to children and this would directly influence how children see vegetables.

Socially, children respond well to foods when they see a family with their children enjoying the same kinds of foods, and that’s generally what most ads try and do. Sometimes, parents fear their kids are always underfed and tend to use the wrong types of food to ensure they have a sufficient number of calories to keep them active, but there’s a “catch-up” phase where kids start to vocalize what their preferences are, This is by the age of 5. But by the age of 10 a kid can start to develop a shift into familiar foods from what they see on TV, this is usually because they start feeling some independence in choosing what they want to eat. By adolescence, there’s a lot of different exposures to food, and pressures to look a certain a way; Glenn Smith reveals another case study done in 1996 on 462 adolescents which 10 percent reported being underweight, 21 percent over, yet 50 percent of them spoke about the anxieties they felt about what they were eating.

When obesity was first mentioned 40 years ago, it was believed to affect only adults because children had what was called “compensation driven reward system”(Kessler, 2009) that is when the body over consumes in one meal, it eats less in the next one. Kessler uses statistics from Susan Johnson study that directs the children’s eating laboratory at the University of Colorado Health Center. She tells us how this is no longer true when she revealed that in 1980 kids aged 2-4 would compensate 90% of what they over consumed, and by 1990 that percentage dropped to 45%. By age 3-4 kids are eating an 800-calorie meal. When she tested the 5-12 years old with either a high or low calorie soft drink diet, those with the high calorie drink compensated to a lesser degree than those with the low calorie soft drink, and as they get older compensation disappears. This loss of control is termed: “conditioned hyper eating” (Kessler, p.157).

“Sugar, Fat, and Salt make us eat more Sugar, Fat, and Salt” (Kessler, p. 157) “newborns who are given drops of a solution of sucrose and water exhibit pleasure with their facial expressions” (p.13) the higher the sugar content the more blissful it tastes. Barry Levin used rats as an example when he over fed one rat with loads of calories while the other was well fed; he eventually gave both rats a very sweet liquid to which they both indulged uncontrollably. (p.15) This is why children are eating so excessively.

Jennifer Fisher is an expert in Pediatric nutrition at the center for obesity research, she conducted a study on children aged 3-5 who she gave half of them a healthy portion of Mac and cheese with a side of apple sauce, sugar cookies, milk, and carrots. The other ones got double that size. Those with the doubles portion ate 25% more but compensating some of their snacks, yet still consumed 15 percent more calories than those with one portion Mac and cheese. The next day she did the same thing with the Mac and cheese but while she told the kids to wait another 10 minutes she laid out a snack bar and told everyone they can have anything they want. Although they all said they were full, those who received double the portion of Mac and cheese were the ones who went to the snack bar and ate. Brian Wansink dedicated his book “Mindless Eating” on the effects of over eating and added there are certain cues, even in the home, that causes us to over eat such as a regular plate. Some symptoms of over eating are when you eat out and automatically taste your friend’s food, or when you prepare the next bite even while you’re still chewing on the first. More importantly is that 100 calories more or less each day is 10 lbs more or less in a year.

To conclude, serving more only influences the “obesogenic”(Kessler,2003) behavior of eating. The settling point can easily be manipulated and your body can quickly adjust to a number specific calorie. So the cues of what we choose to eat only help us to fulfill the craving until we reached our settling point. This is where we explain how diets don’t work because they don’t deal with switching the settling point, re-measuring but with abstinence.

Obesity has doubled with kids aged 6 to 11, and tripled with kids aged 12-19, in the 1970’s, that “ type 2 diabetes mellitus is no longer rare in pediatric practice” (Marion Nestle, 2006, ¶ 2). If you look at a children’s diet, 30 % of is going to come from sweets, soft drinks and snacks, and fast food. Soft drinks alone, equal to 10%, double from 1980. Over weight children would be consuming about 1200 to 2000 calories a day. By the time children have reached the point of obsessing or simply requesting certain unhealthy products certain tactics are used to getting what they want, most notably accepted due to a form of guilt of the parents is nagging. In the Western International Corp., they surveyed and found that “ in some categories the nagging mattered more because the parents claimed they would not have bought the item if the kids had not asked for it”. (kidfluence p.114)

Due to the fact that we live in a culture where both parents go out and work it has changed the way the family interacts with each other. Permissive parents meant a more expressive family unit. Today, it means unable to control or set grounds. Today’s generation believes that the child has a voice that needs attention. In the medieval ages, kids were regarded as equal to parents; almost as soon as they could walk they were workers and servants. It was only when the world became literate that there became a distinction in learning and a divide was obvious. It was only by the 19th century that children were viewed as innocent beings by psychologists and that needed protecting from the harsh world, to save their childhood. What church and state decided to do was create schools with well-behaved children. By the 20th century, school became relevant to life.

Today, if advertisers really wanted to reach out to children to influence them, they have to find the children and that means they would have to advertise to the school, and in the school, and they do! By the 1980’s channel one created a kids TV show which had 2 min. commercials, the schools had satellites and monitors to allow these kids to watch TV and in return they would get sponsored by the soft drinks companies. Schools have been engaging in product selling from the 1890’s but school policies haven’t evolved with the changing culture. A student can easily spend about 35$ a year in soft drinks, and the school would generate in one year about 100 000$ to 300 000$ for a district. Minnesota alone racks up 40,000,000$ a year in soft drink sales in schools. “ This has turned out to be an alternative to state shortfalls” (Sutherland and Thompson, 2003,p.109)
Zapme! Supports 2000 schools in 45 states by giving them computers and internet connection because schools need to educate children on the ever advancing use of technology in the real world. However, what “Zapme!” gets in return is product placement on all computers and it collects information from the students who are using the computers to find out what they like, and what they are doing, so that this information can be used in advertizing to children because they will respond to it.

By the age of 7, TV watchers will have seen about 20 000 commercials. Furthermore, Marion Nestle, from the New England journal of Medicine tells us that the IOM says that food marketers like little children because commercials to them are all about colors, and attraction and they don’t understand the difference between truth and advertising. As they get older they find familiarities in the commercials because there are some enduring themes in almost all child advertising that gets them locked in, and that is getting the kids to feel in control, understanding their need to be older, socially accepted. The perfect example of kids in control is when Pepsi made a commercial with a little girl sitting on the bar with her black sunglasses talking like a soprano t the bartender. Or When Shaq plays basketball with a kid for a Pepsi commercial. Kids look at commercials as enjoyment this way. By the ages of 13-15 kids start to want to look up to role models and kids around them. Soft drink companies know who their role models are and they sponsor them in their ads to create a product for teens who can have something in common with the role models, Naomi Klein puts it this way “ that there true products was not their products i.e. Nike, Latte, computers, it was an idea, a lifestyle, it was meaning itself.” She goes on to include Mc Donald’s as selling the idea of family, and Starbucks as selling community, a place to socialize, study, hold meetings.

Advertizing to children is an extremely profitable market because kids have to ability to request for things due to the family atmosphere. So much so that 30 billion dollars are spent annually from children on these items. Around 600 food products have been advertized since 1994. Half belong to candies and gums, one quarter for sweets and salty snacks and the rest is on the health side like baby food, bread and bottles water. 10 billion dollars go to advertizing food products for children, Mc Donald’s alone is over half a million dollars in ads.

What schools need to do is use technology to educate children on just how widespread information travels and what advertizing means. “ The idea that some forms of marketing increase the risk of obesity, says the IOM ‘cannot be rejected’ ” (NEJM, 2006).

Bibliography
Kaynak, E. (1999) Cross-National and Cross Cultural Issues in Food Marketing: International business press.
Kessler. D ( 2009) The End of Overeating : Taking control of the insatiable American appetite: Rodale
How Marketers Target Kids: file://localhost/Users/marianshaghoury/Desktop/How%20Marketers%20Target%20Kids.html
Nestle, M. ( 2006) Food Marketing and Childhood Obesity — A Matter of Policy: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp068014
Pawlick, T (2006) The End of Food: How the food industry is destroying our food supply: Greystone books
Roberts, P (2008) The End of Food : Houghton Mifflin
Sutherland, A ; Thompson, B(2003) Kidfluence: The Marketer’s guide to understanding and reaching generation Y-Kids, Tweens and Teens: McGraw-Hill
Smith, G. (1997) Children’s Food: Marketing and Innovation: Black academic and Professional

The other night, I went to Village des Valeurs to look for some ceramic plates and cups to create a 3 tier serving plate at a low cost. Thrift stores and vintage shops are some of my most favourite places to be, despite a time when I was embarrassed of my second hand clothing at a young age, I soon grew to appreciate objects from the past and saw them as direct connections to history, small time travelling machines of sorts.

While looking for a matching set of plates, I found a few from a Japanese company called "Mikasa", I was drawn to the type used and simple quaint aesthetic of the plate. I'm assuming it is from the 70s due to the colours and graphic elements. Although tacky, it was exactly to my taste, tackiness done right!

Before glueing everything together I thought this would be a good opportunity to observe not only the difference between our slo plates and the standard plate but also the difference between the standard plate of today and that of another time.

The first thing I noticed was that the rim was larger and the space dedicated in the center was smaller. Both plates were framed by a floral decoration but the one I have at home was more subtle. Also, the weights of the plates were slightly different where the mikasa plate was a bit heavier.

Once I prepared my lunch, I arranged it onto the mikasa plate first. I centered the food, making sure it didn't go over onto the rim. The arrangement was quite appetizing and the aesthetics of the plate went well with the meal. It appeared to be very full and I looked forward to eating my pierogies and sauerkraut!

In order to see the difference a plate can make to the appearance of a meal, I transferred it onto the plate I have at home. I instantly felt the difference of space allowed in the center. In comparison to the mikasa plate, it looked slightly less appetizing and empty. Also, in contrast to the decorative rim in the mikasa plate which brought the attention to the center, the subtle decorative rim on the newer plate wasn't framing the food at all and in fact made the plate appear emptier than it was.

The differences are quite remarkable considering that at first glance both plates appear to be quite similar in size and function.

As a result of this experiment, I believe the decorative element in the mikasa plate was meant to make the center appear more abundant whereas in the newer plate the decorative element seems to be an afterthought and the focus is put on the abundance that can be placed onto the surface.