The Grocery Conspiracy

This past week I read an interesting article by Martin Lindstrom entitled "Fear And Ice Chips Selling Illusions of Cleanliness". The article was about how advertisers use different tactics to convince consumers that their food is "freshest" or "cleanest" or "best" in one way or another. Psychology and sociology fascinate me, and the truths brought to light in this article were both interesting from a marketing and psychology standpoint and disturbing from the consumer's perspective. I found the tactics used by Whole Foods (which has a large store close to home) especially interesting. For instance, Lindstrom points out the chalk boards that display the prices of extremely perishable goods (flowers), as though they've been written out by the farmer himself. He writes "It's as if the farmer or grower had unloaded his produce (chalk and slate board in hand), then hopped back in his flatbed truck and motored back to the country." These subtle signs immediately conjure romantic images of farms and sunshine and a personal touch. However, Lindstrom brings the consumer back to reality when he says "while some of the flowers are purchased locally, many are bought centrally, and in-house Whole Foods artists produce the chalk boards." Another illusion that shocked me was the vegetable sprinkler system used by many groceries. You've no doubt seen the rows of bright veggies being showered with mist every half-hour or so. Lindstrom tells us that "those drops serve as a symbol, albeit a bogus one, of freshness and purity" He goes on to say that "that same dewy mist makes the vegetables rot more quickly." In this case, the company's efforts to entice us to buy their "fresh" produce are actually leading us to buy goods that are spoiling! The author's last anecdote is much like his first with the farmer's "personal touch". He tells the story of a friend who worked on a modern fishing boat that would get the day's catch, then transfer the fish to an old, outdated but charming boat, and bring that in to the harbor so customers would see the catch coming from a more picturesque source. He adds "it was all staged, but the customers ate it up. . .we want to buy the illusions that the marketing world sells to us. . ." So which is better, eating up the illusions of marketing companies and living in a consumer fantasy or actually knowing what we're getting and where it comes from? What Lindstrom fails to tell us is how we can avoid these ploys to get to the honest truth about what we buy and eat.  Why? Because they're unavoidable. Everything from bananas to shampoo has been chemically altered, colored, "freshened" to convince us to spend. It appears that the only source one can trust, is one's own garden.