Okay, first off–can I make it clear that I’m female? Not that it matters in any substantive way, but it does make it easier for y’all to pick the right invective, just sayin’.
Forum Bot, I’m not into parsing as an activity because it’s hard to read and tends to get bogged down into forest/trees issues pretty quickly. I would like to point out, though, that of the posts you were addressing only one was actually directed to you, the others were responding to Frylock and Renob. One of my objections to parsing is that it’s all too easy to elide several posts as though they were all one–which has indeed occurred in this case.
Frylock pointed out, and rightly so, that I kinda came out of left field with my first response and that I was perhaps a tad more heated than was strictly necessary, to the detriment of my argument. I was trying to amplify further my objections to corporate irresponsibility and the abdication of personal responsibility in favor of the nebulous and possibly nonexistent “they” that’s been occupying quite a bit of my mind lately. Not any of your guy’s fault, it just kinda happened here.
Specifically with regards to the subject of overeating and overweight I have grave concerns with the way that such items as “100 calorie packs” are marketed. It was pointed out that the 100 calorie Oreo is not the same critter as the regular one–but nobody seemed to be concerned about the fact that Nabisco has come up with what appears to be a lower calorie cookie alternative, which it isn’t, really–the packaging says that a serving is 22g, slightly less than an ounce, and per this calorie counter siteit appears that pretty much any chocolate wafer cookie would have about the same calorie count. So basically you could just as easily scrape the goo off a regular Oreo and calorie wise an ounce would be the same as eating the prepackaged ones. Instead, we have six little packages, put into a cardboard box–overpackaged. Now it appears that the little snacky cookies have a shell of some kind of candy on them, I surmise to make them more “Oreo-like.” So my question here is, why isn’t Nabisco marketing these just in a nice box with a pound of them as an alternative to regular Oreos? Why can’t you get those unique items in any other way than overpackaged?
Answer, in my opinion, is that they’re trying to market these specifically as a diet food and aiming it at overweight people who want no-think portion control. The fact that it’s MORE PROFITABLE to them to market it this way couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the decision, right? Selling a package (and the outside packaging is pretty large) that only contains less than five ounces of actual product for the same price as a 12 oz package of regular cookies strikes me as a total scam. Going for a niche market pays. Being part of a targeted niche market costs.
Food companies make disproportionate amounts of money off of the weight conscious and brand conscious consumer. I’ve watched the bins of bulk foods being refilled at the local Winco–yup, a large proportion of the boxes are name brands of cereal, biscuit mix, snack food, candy, you name it. But it’s cheaper–and a large reason why it’s cheaper is that the perception is that bulk foods aren’t as good as those in packaging with the name on the front. Packaging sells–but doesn’t it make more sense to get educated so you can enjoy the same food without the higher cost AND with the little eco-bump of avoiding the overpackaging? Not to mention maybe I don’t WANT a whole pound of candy–just a little bit. Why should we be penalized in the pocket if we want a smaller serving WITHOUT the corporate decision makers deciding for us what that serving will be?
There are other forms of marketing that concern me as well–cookies that have “NO FAT!! LOWER FAT!! NO TRANS FAT!!” emblazoned all over the package–does it make sense to demonize one source of calories but totally ignore the others? Just the way that the Bleu Cheese salad dressing in the fridge has a large blazon “0 CARBS!!” but never a mention of the 16g of fat and 170 calories in the (2 tbsp) serving. It’s encouraging people to focus on one thing while hiding the whole picture–that eating too much of ANYTHING is bad for you and will make you fat. Well, unless it’s celery–that’ll just get you malnourished! But skinny. Very skinny.
Why are people so hung up on these ridiculous marketing tricks? In one of the few really great consumer protection moves ever the Federal government requires that all food have a label which clearly states the serving size, the calories per serving, the percentages of RDA of essential nutrients and every single ingredient that goes into the product. It’s all RIGHT THERE! All anyone has to do is look at it and decide whether or not it’s a good move for them to buy or eat it.
So basically it seems to me that there is a whole lot of abdication going on over choices we as sovereign humans ought to be making for ourselves. It goes way beyond the supermarket, although there are enough egregious examples there to keep anybody busy for months. For just one example, why are the small diesel engined cars that are readily available in the EU and UK not available here? It’s nothing to do with safety regulations–many EU/UK model cars end up rebadged as domestic models. Could the oil lobby have anything to do with it?
We’re letting corporations get away with murder, letting them off the hook when they befoul our environment and poison us and then so many of us come to their defense and say it’s necessary to let them do whatever they want without accountablility because to do otherwise will result in some nebulous unspecified economic harm that nobody can really quantify. We let the government loosen environmental regulations on corporations while voluntarily taking on ourselves the responsibility to improve our own little corners of the world–kinda like donating to charity while Dubya gives 15 billion dollar tax cuts to corporations.
I guess I just don’t understand why, in a world where so many decisions are made for us without our knowledge or consent, we would voluntarily give away any of our precious sovereignty–but that’s what I see when I see those goddamned 100 calorie packs of Oreos.
Yeah, I realize that it’s a bit ridiculous and I’m making gallons of stew from one oyster but sometimes that’s all it takes–the single particle in a supersaturated solution that forces crystallization. The straw that breaks the camel’s back. That one guy yelling “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it any more!” It’s different for all of us, and for me, just recently, an epiphany is occurring. Unfortunately epiphanies, like sudden attacks of nausea, don’t always occur in appropriate places or times. Apparently both can also result in unintended messes–I really didn’t intend to offend anyone on a personal level and if I’ve done so here I sincerely apologize.
