Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (23 page)

Food processing generates yet another cost that few of us ever think about—water pollution. Food processing corporations in the United States contribute more waste to water pollution than does our entire human population.
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Not only do we pay for this processing, for burgeoning advertising, for bigger stores and the labor to stock them, but we also pay for the “research and development” of these “new” foods. In 1981 just one company—General Foods—budgeted almost $100 million for developing “new” foods. Food corporations tell us that they are responding to our needs, yet rarely do we get a glimpse of how new products really come to be. This description from Foremost-McKesson is a candid exception.

According to a company spokesperson, the first step is a brainstorming session that produces all kinds of crazy ideas. Typically, only 50 out of 200 ideas are chosen for a preliminary technical analysis. These 50 are presented to “focus groups” of sophisticated consumers (formerly called housewives), and their reactions whittle the number down to 10 ideas, leading to perhaps 5 prototype products. Then test marketing brings the selection down to one.

We, the consumers, ultimately foot the bill—even if the product never makes it. Foremost-McKesson, with $3.3 billion in annual sales, spent a whole year and $200,000 developing “Quick ’n Saucy” sloppy joe lunches, then ditched them before they ever hit the supermarket.
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While product proliferation has gone wild, with 60,000 brand-name processed food items introduced in ten years, only 100 basic foods still account for three-quarters of the food we eat.
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Doesn’t this suggest that the billions of dollars spent on processing, advertising, and packaging are peripheral to our real diet? Most of us have plenty of variety with a minuscule fraction of what is offered.

The “Don’t Just Make It, Serve It” Strategy

More than a third of America’s food dollars are spent on food eaten away from home. To profit on this trend, you’ll need to buy into the fast food business and spread your stores throughout the nation.

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Into every city and town enter the fast food outlets, their invasion often fueled by the big money their new conglomerate owners can put behind them. (See
Figure 9
.) The same food giant that brings us Pillsbury flour brings us Burger King hamburgers. The same conglomerate that feeds our dogs Gainesburgers feeds us Burger Chef hamburgers. The same multinational company that brings us Pepsi serves us Pizza Hut pizzas. These giant corporations have driven out of business the roadside diners and Mom and Pop cafés which once served us local specialties and real cooking—soda biscuits, corn bread, and homemade soup. After a tour of over 26 fast food restaurants in a five-mile stretch outside Tucson, MIT nutritionist Judith Wurtman reported: “Despite the number and variety of these places, their menus were relatively similar … pancakes, doughnuts, fried or ‘char’-broiled meats, hotdogs, fried potatoes, soft drinks and soft ice cream.… None served carrots, chopped liver, whole wheat bread, vegetable soup, baked potatoes, yogurt, skim milk, bananas or broccoli.”
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Forced to select foods only from these places, she concluded, “one might begin to feel deprived.” Deprived not only in variety but nutritionally, too, because the fast food joints hit us with every nutritional hazard from high fat to high salt to low fiber.

Figure 9. Who Owns the Fast Food Giants?

All but Royal Crown Cola are among the 200 largest industrial corporations in the country.

The “Cut the Calorie” Strategy

Now that you’ve captured the national market, how can you expand U.S. sales? Our population is growing very slowly. And while some Americans might aspire to owning 20 pairs of shoes, most can eat only three meals a day. Since you can’t produce bigger people, you could launch a “fat is beautiful” campaign. No, that might not go over … Why not just take the calories out of food? That will appeal to the weight-watchers, and since the food will have no calories, people can eat almost unlimited amounts!

This ingenious sales expansion strategy also increases your profit on each item. For while you can charge the consumer the same price, or even a premium price, manufacturing low-calorie “foods” costs you less. Saccharin is cheaper than sugar. “Light” beer costs less to produce.

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Diet sodas and low-cal foods are born. By the late 1970s, three diet sodas were among the top ten best-selling soft drinks in America.
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By using less expensive ingredients but charging the same for diet sodas, soft drink makers are overcharging American consumers $300 million each year, estimates the Center for Science in the Public Interest. No one’s added up the overcharges for “light” beer, but buying Michelob Light means paying a higher price for regular Michelob plus water.
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The “Salt Plus Soft Drink” Strategy

Now there must be another angle on this. Since people can eat only so much at any given meal, what about
between
meals? Can’t you make some progress there? Snack food—that’s it! With plenty of salt and sugar. Bet you can’t eat just one! (And if more people are eating salty snacks, certainly that must help push up your soft drink and beer sales.)

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Americans bought almost $4 billion in salty snack foods in 1979. Since 1949, soft drink consumption has increased almost four times.
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The Popcorn Institute even arranged for joint popcorn-Coke ads on television in the 1950s.
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Enormously successful, the campaign led to more and more Americans munching and sipping in front of their TVs. The connection was completed in 1965, when PepsiCo bought Frito-Lay Corp., makers of Fritos corn chips and Lay’s potato chips, and the first company to sell $1 billion worth of snack foods in one year.
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   So far you’ve explored five possible strategies to expand sales. The second path to corporate prosperity is to ring up more profit on every item you sell.

The “Up the Price for the Same Ingredients” Strategy

Raw produce and even unprocessed frozen foods aren’t so profitable. But if you turn these ingredients into some “new” specialty, you can charge more for them. “The biggest growth and profit potential lies in prepared foods—frozen entrees, vegetables in special sauces and ‘ethnic’ combinations—products that command higher margins for the producers,”
Forbes
advises.
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Your strategy means higher prices and more and more processing. In fact, that seems to be a recurring theme here! How else can you take macaroni (55 cents a pound), add a bit of “dried cheese” and some chemicals, and convince consumers that Betty Crocker will stretch their food budget with Hamburger Helper? Hamburger Helper costs $2.38 a pound; a few aisles away hamburger itself sells for just $1.50. (By the way, Hamburger Helper is 23 percent sugar, according to
Consumer Reports.)

The “Reduce Your Costs” Strategy

If you can cut your costs while charging the customer the same price, your profits will rise. To do this, you can use fewer expensive ingredients, more of cheaper ones, invent cheap flavorings that taste like quality ingredients, and use synthetic flavor enhancers or MSG while reducing the amount of real, expensive ingredients. You can also try to use fewer ingredients which are imported or in unreliable supply. After all, if the prices of basic ingredients are constantly changing, your financial planning becomes a nightmare.

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Your strategy has led to more salt, more sugar, more artificial flavors. To clam chowder with an almost invisible portion of clam, but the clam flavor enhanced by one whole teaspoon of salt in every cup. To “chocolate” candy bars with little chocolate. (Cocoa prices are unpredictable.) To soft drinks sweetened with saccharin. (Saccharin costs about one-tenth as much as sugar.) And to raspberry and blueberry pies actually made from apples and flavorings. (Berries are too expensive.)

But What’s Good for Conglomerated …

Your logic as a Conglomerated Foods executive was impeccable. There was only one problem: virtually
every one
of your sales strategies added one more health risk for everybody who buys your products. More salt, more sugar, more fat, less fiber, more additives (not to mention higher prices and more energy wasted).

Ironically, at least four of our giant food corporations—Borden’s, Nestlé, General Foods, and Kellogg’s—were started by men whose prime motive was to make people healthier. Dr. Kellogg was a strict vegetarian working in a world-famous sanatorium when the first wheat flakes were developed in 1894.
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Yet the logic of corporate profit-seeking is so powerful that today Kellogg’s boasts two of the most sugared cereals. General Foods, the same company that was launched with Postum by a man who wanted to free us from the evils of caffeine, now sells seven brands of coffee plus Pop Rocks and Dream Whip.
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The man I met at the party would respond: “But people
buy
the stuff. And more than ever. So it must be what they want.”

While he’s right that Americans are buying more and more high-risk foods, this justification for defending the status quo doesn’t hold up.

First of all, the same corporations that sell us food also control virtually all of the information bombarding us every day about food. The top 50 food firms control 90 percent of all food advertising on TV. A typical television-watching child is exposed to between 8,500 and 13,000 food and drink commercials each year.
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Hundreds of times a week Americans hear that nutritionally empty foods will actually make our lives better: Coke “adds life;” Betty Crocker cake mixes help us show our love better; Jell-O helps us “have fun.” In other words, health-risky food is continuously promoted as an antidepressant in a society where depression is epidemic. (Valium was the most widely prescribed drug in America in the last decade.)

TV’s power of persuasion is well demonstrated by the history of presweetened cereals, disclosed in a Senate hearing on TV advertising aimed at children. When the cereal industry first introduced presweetened cereals, before World War II, consumers vetoed them. Yet now they are among the best-selling cereals. Sidney Margolius testified, “I attribute this [change] largely to the development of television as a very powerful selling medium for children, and I think if we had television before World War II, the housewives would not have been able to reject it [presweetened cereal].”
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Almost half of all TV commercials are for cereals, candy, and gum. The sweetest cereals of all—some half sugar—have the highest advertising budgets.
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TV advertising promotes such low-nutrition foods specifically to children. General Foods’ Tang was advertised 24 times on Saturday mornings, but only once each on Sunday and Monday evenings, according to one study. Similarly, Nabisco aired its Cream of Wheat commercial only once—on a Monday evening—but 16 Nabisco commercials for its Chips Ahoy, 12 for its Fig Newtons, and 16 for its Oreo cookies were shown on Saturday mornings during a two-week period.
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The food corporations know what they are doing. Almost half the time children are successful in influencing what their parents buy, according to surveys by psychologist Joanne Paley Galst. Other studies have shown that the more time children spend watching TV, the stronger their desire for advertised foods—and the more they eat of them.
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