The Unhealthy Fallacy of Food ‘Choices’
If you want people to stop eating bad food, stop selling it…Pat Thomas makes a plea for Government to stop tinkering around the edges of health and sustainability.
It’s been a bad week for anyone who cares about food. Defra – with it’s finger always on the pulse of a dead horse that’s been flogged to death – announced its intention to push through plans to intensify livestock production in the UK. This in spite of the fact that the intensive model is not feeding the world, is driving biodiversity loss and soil degradation and is driving farmers out of business. Given that intensive farming actually threatens our future food security you have to wonder what the Government’s real agenda is here.
We have also seen the recent release of a couple of new foodie films: Planeat here in the UK – which advocates a vegan lifestyle for health and sustainability and Forks Over Knives in the US – which proposes that most human disease is caused by meat and junk food heavy diets.
Like Food Inc before them, they examine the human and global cost of our unbalanced, unsustainable food production and consumption, but never quite get to the heart of the matter. As long as we continue to advocate highly processed foods and high calories take-aways as a basic human right, we will never make any progress in health or sustainability.
It seems to me time to raise the issue of ‘choice’ and specifically ‘choice editing’ once again.
It’s a concept that no one in government likes. And as the UK government hands control of its healthy eating advice service over to major food multinationals in a deal which sees junk food companies buying their way out of bothersome regulation, it’s worth asking why are politicians so scared to challenge the assumption that a ‘healthy diet’ has room for every kind of food in it – including the ones that are killing us? And why – given the multi-billion pound hard marketing sell that goes on behind junk food would anyone still believe that people make their food choices based on anything like ‘free will’ or informed consent?
The whole issue of choice is a social and psychological minefield. The concept of ‘choice’ has insinuated its way into our beliefs about a free and democratic society and it’s always sold to the public as a positive.
The politicians’ syllogism goes something like: In a democratic society people are free; Free people have choices; More choices means more freedom.
Therefore to restrict someone’s choices is to restrict someone’s freedom, autonomy and self determination. And that might be fine in a world where all choices are equal, without consequence or at least been proven to have equal impacts, and were open to everyone. But this is not the case
You could say there are two types of freedom: freedom from and freedom to. It’s easy to assume they are the same thing but they are not. When the government put a ban on smoking in public places it clearly recognised that this is not the case. The freedom to smoke in public made it impossible for others to have freedom from annoying, unhealthy secondhand smoke. When it comes to food choices, freedom from heart disease or obesity may actually be linked to a curtailed freedom to choose junk food and takeaways.
And while some people may carp, the absence of such foods, combined with a greater availability of fresh, wholesome foods might not only simplify our lives and our shopping, but improve our health. It might free up more of our food budget for foods that enhance health rather than harm it.
Bad choices
Some pundits would argue, of course, that plenty of choice helps us to make better decisions. And it’s a compelling ‘sell’ from a marketing point of view. But from a sociopsychological point of view it is flawed.
In a world where we all took the time to carefully weigh up the pros and cons of all our food choices we might well reject junk food. But that’s not how we decide in the supermarket – nor is it how we are encouraged to decide. We make choices based on situations and the layout of the supermarket, the lighting, the smells, how the products are positioned and the background influence of the ads we see on TV or in magazines are all designed to promote action without forethought.
We can also become addicted to making the same choices over and over again. Remember that when a person goes into a supermarket they aren’t shopping for food, they are just shopping. And shopping is a cultural addiction. We keep buying to satisfy all kinds of hungers, not all of them physical. The same impulse that drives young girls into Primark to buy the same cheap dress in 6 different colours, also drives us to buy 3 for 2s of crap foods and mega deal, supersize takeaway meals.
Consumers, like politicians cling stubbornly to this myth that more choice makes us happy and free. In fact, research shows that there comes a point where too much choice becomes paralysing. There is a famous study that looked at what happened when shoppers were given the option of choosing from either smaller and larger ranges of jam. The study found that in theory customers liked the idea of a big selection to choose from. But when faced with the reality of actually picking one jar from an assortment, they were 10 times more likely to be able to choose if they had to select from a range of 6 than they were form a range of 24.
Dig deeper under the choice myth and you will find data showing that abundance of choice can create a kind of mental emotional paralysis. It contributes to a dissatisfaction with what we have – and this works only to the benefit of big food producers and supermarkets. If this product doesn’t match our expectation, well the next one and the next one and the next one might.
More choice also makes us more aware of compromises and trade-offs, of all the things that we don’t know about the products that we buy – where they come from, what’s in them, whether the claim on the packet is actually true – and this of course is reminds us that it is a fallacy that choice equals freedom. It reminds us that in fact more choice can be a kind of tyranny.
Most important of all, however is the fact that our choices are mostly illusion. Think about the increasing size of our supermarkets and the increasing number of products on the shelves. The average UK supermarket has 30,000 products in it. And when you walk through the doors, it’s hard not to be both impressed and overwhelmed by the choices on display.
But in reality it’s the illusion of choice. For instance while some supermarkets might sell 38 different kinds of milk, there are only 5 or 6 large companies in the UK supplying that milk. It may look like there are dozens of brands and varieties of bread, but behind those labels there are only two or three main millers and producers of bread in the UK. Think of all the brands of jam, salad dressings, fruit squashes teas and coffees. Most of them owned by a just handful of companies.
And of course even though there is all this choice, most of us probably buy the same core products a week. After all how many types of milk or bread do you really need?
Food politics is politics
Food continues to be a hot topic for environmentalists. Food is concrete; it’s something most of us can grasp, so for an environmentalist it’s often easier to get your point across using food as the platform.
My own experience is that food is many people’s way into understanding the other environmental and social problems that our society faces. This is because food intersects with every area of our lives: climate change, energy use, pollution, toxic chemicals, health, the global economy, corporate control, social justice, animal welfare, every issue that is important eventually finds its way back to the food system.
The fact is that food politics is linked to all politics. So food campaigning often becomes a means of exposing all the wrongs – the corporate influence on politics and on science. The waste, the exploitation, the corruption, the coercion – that go on behind the scenes of a so called free society.
Campaigning on these issues is the easy part. It’s easy to point a finger and say what you think is wrong. But when it comes to solutions it’s all too easy for environmentalists can get shunted down a very narrow pathway. They are just as prone to seeing food as a commodity as politicians, supermarkets and manufacturers and just as liable to formulate their solutions in a kind of utilitarian way that seeks to work within the prevailing free market system. Invariably this comes out as saying that if people want good food they should be prepared to pay for it, or that we need yet another labelling scheme to add to the bewildering ‘choice’ of labels we already have on our food products.
Rarely, if ever, will you catch a campaigner saying we should simply take these damaging products off the market.
Probably nothing short of radical action will force us to stop filling the supermarket shelves with crap food – indeed to stop pouring healthy basic foods like wheat, meat and dairy into a variety of branded junk foods. Even as food prices rise, restricting our basic human rights to healthy food, we still seem unwilling to accept that we don’t need dozens varieties of crisps, or yogurts in tubes, or sodas in order to prove that we are ‘free’?
Instead all our talk is about ‘nudging’ the new political buzzword for addressing change in a way that is more carrot than stick (see here for a recent debate for and against in the British Medical Journal). Nudging, in a health context, attempts to steer consumers towards a healthier life without the need for all that tiresome regulation (and I can’t help wondering doesn’t anybody get that the beast in the middle of the carrot and stick analogy is usually an ass? And doesn’t it bother anyone that our politicians formulate their policies and strategies based on the image of the public as an ass?).
For the UK’s coalition government nudging is a useful way of distancing itself from its responsibilities when they get too complex to think through, or too difficult or unpopular to execute. It works well with the so-called Big Society concept inasmuch as it emphasises personal responsibility. But it also panders to the corporate food producers’ need to create, maintain and even grow food markets based on highly processed and niche foods, and big brand fast food chains. Although it is seen as a step away from the Nanny culture, it is in fact Nannying by stealth or by proxy. It’s dishonest, it’s vague, it’s a distraction and it’s destined to fail.
Choice editing might sit uncomfortably with some but it is, at least, proposing a genuine alternative – to restrict the availability of certain types of food which are bad for us, which are energy and carbon intensive to produce and which do not add to the greater human good. Although it is not a process that has been fully developed, and there are still questions about how it would work in practice, the concept of choice editing represents the beginning of a real conversation about how we as a society extricate ourselves from a food system that is terribly flawed and damaging to our health and our environment.
Let’s start talking.
© Pat Thomas 2011. No reproduction without the author’s permission.
