I spent part of my Borders gift card on Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink. Mark, who’s much more in touch with food-industry gossip than I am, had told me about this guy’s research some time ago.
Wansink’s book falls into several of my favorite categories of vacation reading. It’s quick; it’s amusing; it’s nonfiction; it’s popular science written by a scientist, not a journalist; it’s about food (and marketing, and psychology); it occasionally makes me wish I had the author’s job, always a sign that the book is interesting and the writing is good. I immediately started planning to perform experiments on my children. I wasn’t aware that the book had been making the talk-show circuit until after I finished it; it seems that a lot of people are making Freakonomics comparisons, which doesn’t surprise me.
Wansink tells a story about subtle cues in the environment that influence the food choices people make, and most often the quantity of food that people consume. According to him, things like the size of a plate, the shape of a glass, the wording of a menu, the perception of variety, the location of a serving dish, measurably influence what people choose, how much they eat, and how much they enjoy it (or just think they enjoy it) — without their awareness. Some of it is common sense or widespread dieting lore (don’t we all know that a helping of mashed potatoes looks more generous on an 8-inch plate than on a 12-inch plate, or that we eat more chips from a family size bag than from a vending machine?) but what I found really remarkable were his accounts of people who vehemently denied that such things could trick them.
I think that some of his points will also help bring sanity to the national debate on obesity and food policy. Nutrition matters to me, I shop locally, I don’t buy processed food; but this doesn’t mean that I subscribe to conspiracy theories about Big Food. I live with an engineer at a Major Food Company. He tells me about his day every evening at dinner time. I know something about why ingredients are the way they are. If there’s a conspiracy, I am pretty well convinced that it doesn’t go much farther than "Make stuff that people want to buy, spend as little as we can on the ingredients, and charge as high a price as we can get for it." And Wansink points out (in a postscript in the paperback edition) that some of his research has been used to create "win-win" situations, e.g., the "100-calorie packs" — it’s good news to food companies that people are willing to pay more for less food if it’s pre-portioned, something that really does lessen overeating. Wansink’s stuff also shows the limits of consumer education. It’s not bad — improved food labeling really does help people make better choices, and it certainly helps our family — but it’s not ever going to overcome human nature. At some point, pouring more and more public funding into consumer education, tying up the market with more and more labeling and advertising regulations, is not going to make a measurable difference.
More later.
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