Grocery Stores Don't Force People to Eat Junk Food
A Popular Conspiracy Theory
Recently, I read Jesse Walker’s United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, the argument of which is that conspiratorial thinking is not confined to the fringes or extremes of political life, but is mainstream. Left, right, center, apolitical, and everywhere in between, conspiracy theories abound. And they have from the colonial era.1
Walker argues that when mainstream, moderates, centrists, or elites come up with conspiracy theories, we don’t call them conspiracy theories. We call them moral panics (or we just believe they’re true).
Although not covered in the book, one line of conspiratorial thinking which I find incredibly common is the one about corporations brainwashing people through advertising or through the oppression of choice. This is the theory that large multinationals have the power to trick people into buying their products (or even control people’s lives in granular detail).
Most people don’t think this is a conspiracy theory. Subliminal messaging was a myth, but most people think it really happened. The research on the oppression of choice hasn’t held up well, but most people believe that too many choices overwhelm our brains.2
Often, there is a tiny kernel of truth.3 But there was a tiny kernel of truth to many of the most famous conspiracy theories. The CIA really did run crazy programs like MK ULTRA and COINTELPRO. Some historians think a few of the accused Salem witches (most of whom were not burned at the stake, and many of whom were not executed) actually were attempting to practice witchcraft. Southern slaveowners may have imagined thousands of plots which never existed, but there really were slave revolts like the Stono Rebellion and Nat Turner’s Rebellion.
So, yes, corporations try to use clever advertisements and slick marketing strategies to sell their products. But the return on ads is shockingly low. The amount of advertising required to net even one sale is much higher than many people realize. Advertising doesn’t manipulate or brainwash people, but that doesn’t stop people from assuming that other people are manipulated.4 Few of us think we have been manipulated by advertisements, but many of us are willing to say that someone else was.
Perhaps the most annoying is the theory that grocery stores manipulate consumers into buying loads of junk food by cleverly arranging the aisles to force people to buy chips against their will. If grocery stores had this kind of power over people, they wouldn’t be scraping by on a 1 or 2 percent profit margin. Yes, it is sometimes true that they place certain items in certain areas in order to have customers walk by them. (Other times, they place certain items in areas where it is easier to have freezers or refrigeration.) But the key is that they wouldn’t put those items in prominent locations if people didn’t buy them. They can’t force anyone to buy anything. If a product display at the front of the store doesn’t sell, it doesn’t go out next time.
The items placed at the front of the store are not placed there to manipulate people. They are placed there because people buy them. You might argue, “That’s because the manipulation worked,” but everyone knows that if you switched out the candy bars in the checkout aisle for broccoli, the broccoli wouldn’t sell as well as the candy bars. The candy bars sell because people like eating candy bars. You could put gourmet seven-dollar-a-bag kale in the checkout aisle instead of cheap candy bars, but if you did you wouldn’t stay in business very long.
Much is made of the two hundred or so options in the cereal aisle. Once again, there are two-hundred options because people buy them all. If a new kind of cereal doesn’t sell, the company stops making it or it goes out of business. This happens all the time. There are two hundred options in the cereal aisle because consumers collectively want two hundred options. If we didn’t want all those options, grocery stores would only remain profitable by ditching the dozens of cereals which weren’t selling.
The theory holds that companies have the power to change our preferences. By introducing us to two hundred cereals, they make us want two hundred cereals. But if companies had this kind of power, why didn’t that work for New Coke? Why didn’t it work for McDonald’s Arch Deluxe?
Interestingly, the best-selling single item in most grocery stores is not candy bars. It’s bananas.5
Personal Responsibility:
In my day job, I work with people, from all walks of life, who are trying to improve their health. To a person, they know they shouldn’t be eating candy bars and caramel corn if they want to lose weight. None of them have trouble identifying junk food. All of them know that nutritious, unprocessed foods are healthier for them.6 Every single one of them knows that broccoli and kale are more in line with their health goals than Cap’n Crunch. It isn’t the case that they have trouble figuring out what to buy in the grocery store. All of them say some version of, “I know I shouldn’t eat X, but… I like it.”
The real problem isn’t that consumers are being forced against their will to buy food they don’t want to eat. The real problem is that we like eating food that tastes good but isn’t good for us. And most consumers buy this food, not because they are being conspired against, but because they want to eat it.7
Typically, without any prompting on my part, people will say something like, “I know I need to quit eating junk food, but I just haven’t.” And they will often be much harder on themselves than I would be on them. Generally, I find that what they need is encouragement and help with putting systems in place that will make it easier for them to make the choices they already want to make. But what they don’t need is for me to tell them that it isn’t their fault and the grocery stores are forcing them to eat unhealthy foods. The truth is that all of us find ourselves in situations in life we didn’t choose and which may be unfair in some way. But it doesn’t matter whose fault it is (usually, nobody’s). What matters is how we respond. We can either respond by trying to control what we can control and taking what small steps we can to improve our situations, or we can respond by blaming other people and doing nothing. But only one of those responses will lead to positive outcomes.
It is true that genetics plays a role in determining who is more likely to be overweight or obese. It’s true that age plays a role; an obese 20-year-old can shed weight more easily than an obese 60-year-old. Life is unfair and much of what is unfair is outside our control. But conspiracy theories about grocery stores making people fat won’t make life fairer. And besides, there are people who are predisposed to obesity by their genetics who have successfully lost their extra weight and kept it off, typically by working harder than other people (or, by using pharmaceuticals like semaglutide or tirzepatide).8 Also, it is worth mentioning that not everyone who is obese is genetically predisposed to obesity. A majority of Americans are overweight or obese. But a majority of human beings are not genetically predisposed to obesity, just as a majority of alcoholics are not genetically predisposed to alcoholism.