Topic > Food Politics in the Food Industry - 710

Therefore, I argue that food marketing is an imperative element that lends food politics to a sociological game. Typically, any trip to a grocery store takes you to aisles full of food products loaded with sugars, fats, salts and calories that, ironically, are heavily advertised, making sellers large sums of money. The trick behind retailers is that they give you what you want, tasty, ready-to-prepare food. What many fail to recognize is the quality of these foods. As described in Eat Drink Vote, most of these products are processed foods with minimal nutritional value – “junk food” – full of texturizers, colors, and flavors designed to make them look and taste like “real” foods (Nestlé 136). Once producers use imagination as a skill, the influence on sales is astronomical rather than marketing the truth. So, researchers find, for example, that emphasizing positive attributes (like taste) is often more effective than focusing on negative ones—the bad things food might do to you. The real problem in the food system is when consumers say they want to eat healthy, but in reality many are confused by nutritional advice and complicated ingredient lists. As a result, this is the gap where marketers take advantage of the confusion by responding to rising ingredient costs that do not result in a price increase. A common example is the bagel.