Advertising and Food

Every year the American people season and inflate their food with large quantities of expensive advertising. To a considerable degree, this advertising determines what we eat and how much we pay for it.

Not only is advertising one of the principal determinants of our food habits; as an enterprise in the manipulation of belief, concerned equally with accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative, advertising is also indirectly responsible for the curious legend, embodied or at least implied in current government-sponsored documents, that advertising both does and does not influence food habits; that the good food habits which constitute the hope of our nutritional salvation are immaculately conceived and given unto us through the disinterested zeal of nutritionists, enlightened food processors and advertising men, whereas the bad food habits–our addiction to white bread and white sugar for example–are the result of some kind of Original Anthropological Sin.

Actually, of course, advertising is a two-edged weapon which cuts both ways. It is a “pure” technique, as innocent of inherent moral content as are the weight tables by which the nutritionist measures the growth of his laboratory rats. What happens when the advertising technique is employed is good, bad, or indifferent from the standpoint of the public interest, depending on who uses it, where, how, and for what purpose.

It is important to distinguish between the advertising technique and the advertising business, the latter being defined realistically as the total apparatus of advertising supported newspapers and periodicals, broadcasting stations and agencies, together with various collateral branches and services of supply such as printers and lithographers that come loosely within advertising’s widely ramified community of interest. It is the advertising business that is responsible for the legend, cited above, that advertising carries no responsibility for causing and perpetuating the national malnutrition which it is now being used to remedy through its enthusiastic sponsorship of the “enrichment” program. This is nonsense, of course, but it is not safe for any nutritionist or social scientist in an exposed public position to say so. Hence the atmosphere of unreality and make-believe that stultifies much of the current public discussion of food and nutrition problems.

What is Lacking

For example one looks in vain through the 176-page bulletin entitled “The Problem of Changing Food Habits,” issued by the National Research Council, for any mention of the role of advertising in changing food habits both for better and for worse, as well as in creating good and bad food habits–Coca-Cola for example–and imposing them de novo upon the population. Why? And why has the Committee on Food Habits of the National Research Council undertaken no study of a problem which falls so clearly within its field of interest and responsibility? Why does not the Nutrition Foundation finance such a study, especially in view of the fact that the Foundation is itself supported by a representative list of the largest food advertisers in America?

Nothing could be more tactless, of course, than to raise such questions. Nutritionists and social scientists, no matter how honest and how devoted to the public interest they may be, can scarcely afford to risk their careers by such tactlessness; hence they will not mind if I serve as their proxy.

It is a conscious or unconscious bowing to the taboos wielded by the advertising business, one suspects, that obliges Russell M. Wilder and R. R. Williams to write their recently issued pamphlet entitled “Enrichment of Flour and Bread” in a kind of historical and economic vacuum.

In this document, prepared with the aid of the Committee on Cereals of the Food and Nutrition Board (on which sat, with manifest impropriety, at least one employee of the milling interests), no mention is made of the 20-year record of the organized milling and baking industries in forcing the sale of white flour and bread because it was profitable for them to do so, despite the recognized nutritional deficiencies of these products and the demonstrated effects of these deficiencies. No mention is made of the implacable pressure of commercial cereal processors and advertisers on food scientists in and out of Government service, and on the editors of newspapers and magazines. No mention is made of the campaign, at once unscientific and unblushing, launched by the organized milling and baking interests in 1925 with the cooperation of the organized medical profession and its official press, designed to smear as “food faddists” those informed and public spirited physicians, dietitians, home economists, and health officers who were trying to bring about the general use of whole wheat bread, and who but for this and other stabs in the back might have succeeded. No mention is made of the fact, established by repeated studies sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission, that for at least two decades the price of bread has been controlled by the handful of large chain bakers who dominate the industry. No mention is made of the fact that this price has been kept higher than anywhere else in the world–25 per cent higher even than in Canada according to a study sponsored by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics where the costs of materials and labor are comparable.

Is the price of bread an important dimension of the American nutritional problem? The distinguished nutritionists who discussed the fortification proposals first broached at the 1939 convention of the American Institute of Nutrition all thought so and said so. Yet Messrs. Wilder and Williams do not quote them. Especially they do not quote Dr. W. H. Sebrell, nutritionist for the United States Public Health Service, who was later to become one of the most enthusiastic advocates of the enrichment program, but who said on that occasion:

“… It does seem a little ridiculous to take a natural foodstuff in which the vitamins and minerals have been placed by nature, submit this foodstuff to a refining process which removes them, and then add them back to the refined product at an increased cost. Yet this seems to be the thing that is being proposed. If this is the object, why not follow the cheaper, more sensible, and nutritionally more desirable procedure of simply using the unrefined or at most the slightly refined natural food…”

Has anything happened during the past six years to make the enrichment program seem less ridiculous in 1945 than it did in 1939? On the contrary, the trend of later research findings has emphasized the importance of the nutritive elements, known and unknown, which are largely removed by modern milling processes and not restored by the enrichment formula. The program, by the admission of its advocates, was and is a dubious, inadequate, and expensive makeshift, calculated to appease existing vested interests and to create new vested interests in the materials of fortification. Virtually its only justification was the belief, doubtless sincerely held by its scientific sponsors, that the American addiction to white flour and white bread was irremediable, being due to the perversity of the consumer–to Original Anthropological Sin.

What Can Be Done

Speaking as a former advertising man, I do not share this belief. The advertising technique can be used and has been used to promote good food habits as easily and as effectively as to promote bad food habits. Admittedly, once the white bread pattern had become established, it was much easier for the milling and baking industries to continue it in all the several departments of production, distribution and advertising than to change it. But it could have been done, and the reason it was not done is not the Original Anthropological Sin of poor old Throttlebottom, the American consumer. Dr. Samuel Lepkovsky is 100 per cent right when he declares in the April 1944 issue of Physiological Review: “The unpalatability of whole wheat bread and the alleged refusal of people to eat it are myths and have no foundation in fact.”

Fortunately, our advancing food science and technology is as skeptical of myths, anthropological and otherwise, as is Dr. Lepkovsky. Either I am very much deceived, or the whole enrichment idea will be overwhelmed within a few years after the war by a multitude of other and better applications of nutrition science. How long before the breeding, growing, and segregated milling and marketing of high vitamin and high mineral grains gives us a completely new set of nutritional dimensions for the cereals? How long before we begin to utilize the huge nutritional potential of food yeast? Of soybean and sunflower seed flour? How long before improved processes of attraction make sugar–of which the Army is currently consuming perhaps eight times too much–nutritionally respectable again?

Advertising will be used to promote these developments–and the pressure of the older advertising vested interests will be used to abort them. Advertising will serve God and Mammon indifferently, alternately, and even sometimes simultaneously. The linked community of interest of the earlier advertising-created hegemonies over our food habits will creak and groan as new claims are staked out. The publishers of The Saturday Evening Post and the Women’s Home Companion will have some bad moments. Sweatingly, we shall lift ourselves nutritionally by our institutional galluses, of which advertising is one.

And what should be Government’s role in all this? Both less and more, one hopes, than its wartime role. Government needs to add substantially to its arsenal of regulatory yardsticks. We must have both grade labelling and nutritional labelling in the interest of both the consumer and the honest food processor. And if we are obliged to go in for relief feeding–as we probably will–that’s a chance to develop other food yardsticks, over and above what the rapidly growing consumer co-ops will be providing.

Finally, the Government should get out of the advertising business as soon as the war is over or preferably sooner. Speaking as a former professional, I am not impressed by the high-minded amateur efforts that have been coming out of Washington recently. The advertising business is bad enough as it is. Let’s not socialize it.