The Future (29 page)

The causes of this surge in obesity are both simple—in that people are eating too much and exercising too little—and complex, because the manufacturing and marketing of food products has changed dramatically. Dr. David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has extensively documented how food manufacturers and restaurant and fast food chains carefully combine fats, sugar, and salt in precise ratios that reach the “bliss point”—which means they
trigger brain systems that increase the desire to eat more, even after our stomachs are full.
On a global basis, the World Health Organization has found a pattern of increased consumption of “energy-dense foods that are high in fat,
salt and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients.”

Hyper-urbanization has
separated more people from reliable sources of fresh fruit and vegetables. Quality calories in fruits and vegetables now cost ten times as much as
calories per gram in sweets and foods abundant in starch. In a report for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Arielle Traub documented the increase from 1985 to 2000 in the price of fresh fruits and vegetables by 40 percent,
while prices of fats declined by 15 percent and sugared soft drinks by 25 percent. Relative price, limitation of access to healthy food, increased inactivity, and the cumulative effects of massive food advertising campaigns all contribute to the obesity epidemic.

Several studies indicate that low-income neighborhoods have less access to supermarkets with a selection of fresh fruits and vegetables and are more likely to have fast food chains and convenience stores selling Slim Jims and Big Gulps than middle- and higher-income neighborhoods. Relative income and the time and
knowledge necessary for food preparation both also play a role. Once eating habits are established, they are harder to change. When the U.S. government introduced healthier foods into the school lunch program in 2012, students at many schools launched protests on social media and
threw the healthier food away.

In many countries, there is an almost precise correlation between the
introduction of American fast food outlets and climbing obesity rates. One of the factors that led to the surge in fast food, manufactured food, and increasing portion sizes was a historic change in U.S. agricultural policy in the 1970s, at exactly the time when obesity rates began their climb. Instead of compensating farmers to withdraw land from production, as had been the case since FDR’s New Deal, the government subsidized farmers to grow as much as they possibly could. This policy change coincided with new advances in agriculture technology, including better hybrid seeds coming out of the Green Revolution.
Consequently, food prices went down significantly. Dr. Carson Chow, a mathematician working at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, constructed a detailed mathematical model that strongly suggests that the changes in U.S. agricultural policy correlate
precisely with the large average weight gains and increased obesity.

The advertising industry has played a major role. One fast food hamburger chain, to pick only one example, famously used in its television advertisements a
skimpily clad sex symbol washing a car in a suggestive manner. The advertising budget for manufactured food items and fast food chains is already two thirds that for automobiles. And again, these interrelated trends may have started in the U.S., but have now spread around the world. The impact of obesity on the world’s resources is the
equivalent of adding an extra one billion people to the planet.

The rising rate of consumption in the world is a relatively new phenomenon, less than a century old, and is also a trend that started in the United States. Although mass advertising began to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most historians date the true beginning of consumer culture to the 1920s, when the first mass electronic medium, radio, was introduced in the United States, along with the
first national circulation magazines and the first silent films shown in theaters. Significantly, consumer credit also became more widely available during the Roaring Twenties to help buyers finance the purchase of relatively expensive
new products like automobiles and radios.

Electricity, which was available in less than one percent of American households at the beginning of the twentieth century, rose to almost
70 percent of U.S. homes by the end of the 1920s. The technology of mass production with interchangeable parts and early forms of automation (all forerunners of today’s Earth Inc.) began to decouple productivity from increased employment and produced a cornucopia of consumer goods that stimulated a keen interest among
manufacturers and merchants in the emerging science of mass marketing. The advertising
industry entered a new and distinctly different role in the marketplace.

It was at precisely this moment in history that the ideas of Sigmund Freud became popular in the United States. Freud’s first trip to America was in 1909, to deliver a series of five lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to an audience that included William James (whose young protégé, Walter Lippmann, was greatly influenced by Freud) and
many of the other most prominent intellectuals in America. Throughout the following decade, ideas popularized by Freud—like the role of the subconscious in understanding
human motivation, psychological transference, and other insights from psychoanalysis—spread, particularly on the East Coast, where the advertising industry was and is located. The
American Psychoanalytic Society was founded two years after Freud’s visit.

By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, these psychological concepts had been adapted into techniques of mass persuasion that were used during the war effort. Woodrow Wilson established a
Committee on Public Information. Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, served on the committee, alongside Walter Lippmann, only two years his elder, whose influence on Bernays almost rivaled that of his uncle Sigmund. After the war, Bernays pronounced himself astonished at the effectiveness of mass propaganda and
set out to introduce the techniques into mass marketing.

Known as the “father of public relations,” Bernays actually coined the phrase “public relations”
in order to avoid using the word “propaganda,” which had acquired a negative connotation in the U.S. due to its frequent use
by Germany to describe its mass communications strategy during the war. Bernays revolutionized the field of marketing research by discarding the then standard technique of asking consumers what they liked and disliked about various products. Instead, Bernays spent time with psychoanalysts and conducted deep interviews with people designed to uncover the associations they made
in their subconscious minds that might be relevant to the marketing of products and brands. Bernays’s business partner, Paul Mazur, said, “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture.… People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality.
Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

As Bernays later wrote, in 1928,

In one of his early successes, Bernays tackled a problem for his client, the American Tobacco Company: how could he break down the social taboo against women smoking cigarettes? He hired a group of women to dress as suffragettes and march in formation in a parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City on Easter Sunday, 1929. When they reached the section of elevated seats reserved for the press, the faux suffragettes all pulled out cigarettes, lit them up, and proclaimed them to be “freedom torches.” Decades later, the iconic cigarette advertisement aimed at women—“You’ve come a long way baby”—was still using Bernays’s innovative but
sinister association of smoking with women’s rights.

In 1927, a prominent American business advisor, Edward Cowdrick, wrote that stimulating consumption had become more important than production: “the worker has come to be more important as a consumer than he is as a producer … not to manufacture and mine and raise enough goods, but to find enough people who will buy them—this is the vital problem of business.” He described this fresh macroeconomic conventional wisdom as the “
new economic gospel of consumption.”

His use of the word “gospel” was not as casual as it may sound today. The struggle between capitalism and communism had taken on a new significance in the wake of Lenin’s successful revolution in Russia ten years earlier and the establishment of the USSR. During the long struggle between capitalism and communism in the twentieth century, unlimited
growth
was the one assumption built into both ideologies that neither questioned.

In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge in a speech to advertisers ventured into the same sacred territory that Cowdrick had described as a new economic gospel: “Advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade. It is a great power that has been entrusted to your keeping which charges you with the high responsibility of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world. It is all
part of the greater work of regeneration and redemption of mankind.”

Three years later, two months before the stock market crash of 1929,
Coolidge’s successor as president, Herbert Hoover, issued the report of his Committee on Recent Economic Changes, which took note of the newly recognized power of psychology in mass marketing: “The survey has proved conclusively what has long been held theoretically to be true, that wants are almost insatiable; that one want satisfied makes way for another. The conclusion is that economically, we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants that will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied … by advertising and other promotional devices, by scientific fact finding, by a carefully predeveloped consumption a measurable pull on production has been created … 
it would seem that we can go on with increasing activity.”

In the 1930s, another Freudian psychoanalyst from Vienna, Ernest Dichter, immigrated to the U.S. and began working on mass marketing. Fully aware of the popularity of Freudian concepts in the advertising business, he told potential customers on Madison Avenue and Wall Street that he was not only a “psychologist from Vienna” but that he had lived on the very same street as Sigmund Freud. He promised them that he could help them “sell more and communicate better.” And, like President Coolidge, he saw the importance of stimulating more mass consumption as a means of strengthening America’s economy in the struggle to ensure the triumph of capitalism. “To some extent the
needs and wants of people have to be continuously stirred up,” Dichter said.

Inevitably, the new power of psychology-based mass electronic marketing had an enormous impact on the democracy sphere as well as the market sphere. Bernays and Lippmann had both always predicted it would. But in the desperate and dangerous interwar period in Europe, these new powers were put in the service of totalitarianism. In 1922, Joseph Stalin became general secretary of the Communist Party in the USSR and Benito Mussolini became the fascist prime minister of a coalition government in Italy. Six months earlier, Adolf Hitler had become the chairman of the National Socialist Party in Germany.

Fifteen years later, after the Nuremburg Laws and the opening of the first concentration camps, Edward Bernays was dismayed by the eyewitness report of a recent visitor to Berlin who told him that Joseph Goebbels was making intensive
use of Bernays’s book
Propaganda
in organizing Hitler’s genocide.

In the U.S., also in 1922, Bernays’s friend and former wartime propaganda colleague, Walter Lippmann, wrote:

As noted in the previous chapter, the combination of unlimited secret campaign contributions and extremely expensive but devastatingly effective psychology-based mass electronic marketing is indeed posing a deadly threat to the continued vibrancy and good health of participatory democracy. If the current assault on the integrity of democracy is allowed to continue, Lippmann’s dark prophecy may yet come to pass; if elites can use money, power, and mass persuasion to control the policies of the United States, the average person may eventually come to a point where it seems, in Lippmann’s words, “no longer reasonable” to believe that America is a democracy.

In the market sphere, the amount of money spent to “manufacture wants” and stimulate increased consumption has continued to rise year by year. The appeal of Freudian-based mass marketing began to wane later in the twentieth century, but more recently the invention of more sophisticated techniques such as brain scans has
reinvigorated the use of subconscious analysis in the field of neuromarketing. Mass marketing to promote increased consumption is now so pervasive that we almost consider it to be a normal part of our environment. The average person living in a city used to see
an average of 2,000 commercial messages per day thirty-five years ago. According to
The New York Times
,
the average city dweller now sees 5,000 commercial messages per day.