P9: Why We Buy What We Buy

There are so many similar topics covered by both articles but I’m going to focus on the nutritious side of both. In both articles, there is a large emphasis on how people have always been looking for what is the healthiest diet a person can eat. In the 20th century this really became a big thing. Dupuis writes in his essay History of Food Advice, “By World War 1, nutrition professionals had become less interested in promoting the least expensive diet for workers and began to focus instead on the best diet for optimum public health and vitality.” And in Pollan’s essay Unhappy Meals he writes, “Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles — things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies — claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like “fiber” and “cholesterol” and “saturated fat” rose to large-type prominence.” Both of these essays are talking about how once we discovered what was really in foods, we started advertising the healthy and unhealthy ones strongly with things like “Low Saturated Fat” and “High in Vitamins”.

It was becoming more about what is actually in the foods that what the food is. My mother is a perfect example of this. She has been trying to eat healthy for the last couple of years and is always coming home with new foods from the grocery store. What they all have in common is that they are all high in proteins or nutrients or fibers or vitamins. It could be a granola bar one day or a cereal the next, she does not really care what the food is only that it has a lot of these ingredients that she wants. I can personally attest that she is not buying these foods for the tastes, I have tried most of them and almost all of the ones that I have tried have not been appetizing. This is something that we see more and more in our culture. If is has the ingredients that the people want then they don’t really care what they are buying, only that it has the ingredients that they want.