It is common to compare the present struggle over obesity and public health to the state tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s. Many articles and pundits believe that the threat to public health by industrial food companies resembles the threat to public health by tobacco companies.
This comparison may be apt in more ways than one, though. New scientific research shows that chemically and scientifically designed food plays a critical role in the involuntary nervous system. This system is connected to the brain's reward center. Like nicotine in cigarettes, it appears that industrial food contains critical combinations of substances that the brain finds intoxicating and addictive. We know these substance as sugar, fat and salt. This alarming and straightforward information is the subject of the recent book The End of Overeating by David A. Kessler, MD.
Researchers like Kessler have found that industrial food is "hyperpalatable." In other words, it induces eating that happens "outside our awareness" (Kessler 7). In new studies of animal behavior and human brains, eating food appears to be a separate activity than simply nourishing hunger. Scientists and biologists once thought that food regulated hunger in just this way. They used a homeostatic model of regulation to theorize the body's ability to eat and not eat according to when it was necessary. Yet it appears that the biological forces in play during digestion have less to do with the stomach than with the mind.
Since foraging and securing food was a vital task for human beings before the advent of modern food economies, the human brain is wired to motivate eating in the same way that mammal brains wire animals in the wild. Humans and animals rely on emotional rewards for securing food. Emotions are the surest way to motivate behavior, not logic, reason, or even planning. Over time the emotional "reward center" of the brain, which is connected to the release of positive emotional neurochemicals, evolved to connect the most pleasurable chemicals to the substances found least in nature: sugar, fat, and salt. It is a perverse irony of evolution that these same substances are now manufactured cheaply and everywhere. It is not, therefore, a coincidence that food corporations create ever more products with these substances in ever more emotionally rewarding combinations.
Foods that contain these meticulously designed combinations of sugar, fat, and salt are called hyperpalatable. This food stimulates brain circuitry that releases intensely pleasurable neurochemicals, called "opioids," that give bodies a euphoric feeling. They also relieve stress and pain in the body. In study after study in rats, sugar and fat receive the same preferential treatment as cocaine. Dosing oneself with sugar, fat, and salt even has a scientific name: "orosensory self-stimulation" (Kessler 37). When the right combination of sugar, fat, and salt hits the brain, it's called touching the brain's "hot spot" (Kessler 40). This hot spot is the ultimate trigger for the release of opioids into the bloodstream. Hyperpalatable foods are the crack cocaine of the industrial food system.
The human body learns to crave these substances the same way that it craves drugs. Visual cues induce appetite and yearning. Simply seeing foods such as these can set off powerful triggers of desire in the brains of potential eaters. Just like addicts, bodies wired for hyperpalatable foods choose the same locations over and over to "use" them. This conditioned preference for place is common in bodies addicted to nicotine, alcohol, and other drugs. Moreover, over time bodies crave new combinations as the brain comes to "tolerate" certain "tastes." The food industry calls this craving "dynamic contrast." Ice cream must have a hard shell on the outside; pretzels must be added to the ice cream; a powder-sugar coating must be added to a chocolate dip. This lust for variety is the hallmark of addiction. Yet this addiction isn't an analogy, or "like" drug addictions. Industrial food plays the brain the same as other drugs, and it's just as lethal over time.
The health consequences of sugar, fat, and salt are obvious. The human body gains weight and becomes sick from over-eating these substances. Heart disease, obesity, and diabetes have reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The film Food, Inc reports that 1 in 3 children born after the year 2000 will contract early-onset diabetes. The threat to public health is obvious, just as it's obvious that the FDA and the USDA have sided with the industrial food system in the long-term battle over public health versus private profits. Corporations have never been more powerful in US history, or had this much influence over legislation. Therefore new regulatory legislation is just as unlikely to have an effect as it is to be passed by the US Congress.
In Suing the Tobacco and Lead Pigment Industries, Donald G. Gifford reviews the legal frameworks that made it possible for state attorney generals, such as Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore, to begin suing tobacco corporations for harmful products. Overall, Gifford finds that the courts resisted class-action lawsuits brought by ordinary citizens as a way to regulate corporate behavior. It was therefore necessary to have the executive branch, represented by the attorney generals, take on corporate responsibility and malfeasance.
This reveals a precedent for potential new lawsuits, but also a dangerous trend. On the one hand, it is possible to force corporations to take responsiblity for harmful products. On the other hand, the judicial system has essentially nullfied the power of Congress to regulate products -- the executive branch, of all places, is where the last remaining "legal" power of the people resides.
Anticipating the defense of the industrial food corporations is important. In the the tobacco lawsuits, one of the main legal counter-concepts used by the companies to skirt their responsiblity was the common law notion of volenti non fit injuria, or "to a willing person no injury is done." Arguably, people know eating ice cream is bad for them. They know that eating fast food is harmful; they do it anyway. But the new science says that people are addicted to these substances, and use them to self-medicate stress, among other things.
The tobacco corporations lied about nicotine being addictive. This means that the real test for the industrial food corporations is to subpoena them and make them testify about what they know. Do they realize they're designing food people can't stop eating?
Spring Break Extra Credit
Students are not required to write a blog over Spring Break, but those who do so will be awarded extra credit. The blogs must be completed by Friday the 22nd at 11.59 pm.
ASSIGNMENT: For this assignment, students should connect a personal experience or memory to an issue from class. Students may write about their experiences in the food industry as a consumer or as a worker. They may write about their personal reaction to the material we have studied. They may write about a story a friend or family member told them that is relevant. Somewhere in the blog the student must be clear about the meaning of their connection, and how it directly connects with an issue from the class reading or discussion.
ASSIGNMENT: For this assignment, students should connect a personal experience or memory to an issue from class. Students may write about their experiences in the food industry as a consumer or as a worker. They may write about their personal reaction to the material we have studied. They may write about a story a friend or family member told them that is relevant. Somewhere in the blog the student must be clear about the meaning of their connection, and how it directly connects with an issue from the class reading or discussion.
The Controlling Mentality
The documentary Food, Inc by Robert Kenner reveals the link between the psychology of control and the exploitation of workers and animals by the industrial food system. The organic farmer Joel Salatin puts it best, perhaps, when he says that the same “controlling mentality” that sees the pig as “matter” will also view workers and other human beings in the same light (Food, Inc). In short, the controlling mentality he mentions is one that sees life itself as matter to be converted into capital, into profit, into dollars, and whatever system of production that best serves that purpose is therefore justified.
In the film, we can see this mentality at work when a hidden camera turns to a hog plant in North Carolina. The pigs are shuffled into the butcher lines, and the workers are shuffled into police vans – they are, after all, illegal immgrants. Despite being brought to the United States at the request of the meatpacking companies, in this case the Smithfield meatpacking corporation strikes a deal with local law enforcement to make token arrests under the cover of darkness. They will not raid the factories themselves and stop production.
The irony of this controlling mentality is that we can never quite see it; just like the Tyson chicken corporation, the Smithfield corporatoin refuses to be interviewed on camera. It may be most terrifying, one imagines, to realize that should the company become visible the public relations officer might look just like you or me.
Control, Profit, Power
The fast food companies rely on meatpacking companies to generate the food products consumers will purchase. They know that meat products must be uniform and cheap. In order to keep meat products cheap the meatpacking corporations exert acute control over the production process. Their power comes from this control, and this power leads directly to real material profits.
First, the companies act as an oligopsony: a group of buyers that have enormous power of cattle ranchers because they are few and the ranchers many (117). Additionally, the meatpacking companies have “captive” cattle supplies to put downward pressure on cattle prices when ranchers go above their desired price. Once the meat has been processed, the final costs are kept down by the fast food companies themselves. They hire “marginalized workers,” or vulnerable workers that are disabled, immigrants, or elderly (71). Paid with a minimum wage, these workers can’t complain out of desperation. They serve the meat products to consumers, and lack better choices.
First, the companies act as an oligopsony: a group of buyers that have enormous power of cattle ranchers because they are few and the ranchers many (117). Additionally, the meatpacking companies have “captive” cattle supplies to put downward pressure on cattle prices when ranchers go above their desired price. Once the meat has been processed, the final costs are kept down by the fast food companies themselves. They hire “marginalized workers,” or vulnerable workers that are disabled, immigrants, or elderly (71). Paid with a minimum wage, these workers can’t complain out of desperation. They serve the meat products to consumers, and lack better choices.
Profits, Not Unions
In Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser comments upon three seemingly disparate facts about the fast food industry. First, cattle are grown fast and large, and are sometimes fed cattle blood, chickens, chicken manure, pigs, sawdust, and newspaper. Companies feed cattle these bodies, feces, and trash due to the high cost of (subsidized) grain.
Once this meat reaches the retail fast food chains, it’s reheated by deskilled workers. These workers aren’t allowed to unionize for more benefits, higher wages, or more control. In the late 60s and early 1970s, McDonald’s went to great lengths to abort the presence of unions in their franchises. Sometimes in these restauraunts workplace safety became an issue, given the unregulated conditions. The leading cause of death among women in the restauraunt industry in the 1990s, for example, was homicide – murder. But restauraunt associations fought off more regulation and safety inspections from OSHA, the government agency charged with protecting workers.
Once this meat reaches the retail fast food chains, it’s reheated by deskilled workers. These workers aren’t allowed to unionize for more benefits, higher wages, or more control. In the late 60s and early 1970s, McDonald’s went to great lengths to abort the presence of unions in their franchises. Sometimes in these restauraunts workplace safety became an issue, given the unregulated conditions. The leading cause of death among women in the restauraunt industry in the 1990s, for example, was homicide – murder. But restauraunt associations fought off more regulation and safety inspections from OSHA, the government agency charged with protecting workers.
These three examples discuss the importance of profits for fast food companies. Anything that could jeprodize profits, such as costly regulations, are thought to be destructive to the financial health of those companies. The companies themselves would probably say that two things are at stake: the ultimate price of the food products, such as burgers, and the ultimate amount of money the company can return to its shareholders, who own stock in the company and expect a return on their investment. The political philosophy underpinning this belief is one of “free markets,” or business freedom that is unregulated by government interference or laws.
Instant Gratification
In Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation he discusses the role that instant gratification plays in the consumption of food. First of all, fast food depends on visual cues to entice customers; Schlosser reports that “more than 70% of fast food visits are ‘impulsive’” (Schlosser 66). These visual cues are reinforced by the food itself, which more resembles “food products” than what we might consider ‘real’ food. Real food is food that doesn’t go through a process of mechanization and design to be eaten. It doesn’t contain chemical additives that are essential to it tasting good prior to consumption. It is hard to eat raw, uncooked food prodcuts, for instance, without heating them up. Likewise, it would be difficult to eat food products, such as Bagel Bites, if they did not contain all the additives that make them “taste” good to the tongue and brain, without actually being healthy for the body.
This manufactured taste plays an incredibly important role in food choice because it gives consumers an instant reward for selecting unhealthy food. This instant reward is "instant gratification." Even though the food is processed and specially designed to cover its flaws as a food product, the body cannot distinguish evidence of this process in the state. Instead, the taste is chemically satisfying and immediately gratifying. It’s a biological trick with alarming consequences for long-term health, both for individuals and for populations generally.
Stroking
In Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser discusses the concept of “stroking,” which is a psychological technique used by fast food managers to encourage positive emotions in employees. This is a necessary part of company strategy because these workers are otherwise alienated from their work, as it’s “deskilled,” repetetive, and low-paying.
Stroking can also be a useful way to understand an anecdote from a subsequent chapter about seling “success” to middle-management employees of the fast food chains. In this later example, Schlosser explains how celebrity speakers at a “Success Authority” convention tell platitudes to the attendees about achieving their dreams through hard-work and self-confidence.
Both of these instances of stroking seem to imply that forging temporary emotional connections in workers is a necessary part of supplementing work that’s unattractive or not emotionally fulfilling on its own, no matter what position in the corporate heirarchy that variuos workers belong to. While the profit motive makes sense for companies as a whole, it’s often not enough to fulfill individual workers within the company.
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