Complex Numbers

Food Psychology

Let's see how we're being manipulated these days, courtesy of Cracked.

15 Food Marketing Tricks They've Been Duping Us With  

These are only some of the ones we know about. I've noted before that science can be used for good or evil (the obvious example there is nuclear fission), and psychology is no exception.

You’d think, since we need it to survive and all, food would be the thing that needs the least marketing in the world, maybe aside from boobs and jet skis.

On the contrary. Food needs marketing more than anything. There's plenty of it (for now, and this only applies in more developed areas), so people need to be lured into buying your product instead of someone else's. It's kind of like what streaming services have become.

Also, no amount of marketing will get me to buy a jet ski. To use one, I'd have to be *shudder* outdoors.

But food companies want us eating only the sweetest, saltiest, most addictive food they can wrench from the depths of their nightmares, so they’ve created entire industries and fields of science to keep you mindlessly chewing the corporate cud.

And that's not even going into the bullshit that certain companies pulled to get people addicted to using their baby formula. Or the abomination that is bottled water. Or chicken wings: "We have too much of this stuff to make dog food; what should we do with it?" "Let's put hot sauce on it and call it sports food."

There are fifteen of these examples, but I'm only going to highlight a few.

15. Scent

While most bakeries do their kneading and seeding in the hours that shouldn’t exist to make sure their goodies are fresh every morning, Panera bread does the opposite to make sure the store smells like fresh bread when you walk in.

Calling the doughy crap Panera serves "bread" does a disservice to actual bread. I'm pretty sure there's more sugar in one of their sandwiches than there is in a donut.

14. Colors

Have you ever noticed that all fast food restaurants have roughly the same color schemes? It’s a lot of red and yellow, because yellow is a “happy” color but red is the color of alarms and stop signs and other things that lend a sense of urgency. Basically, they want you desperate to be happy.

Yeah, I'm not convinced here. It could just as well be for a sense of familiarity, and in the case of McDonald's and such, red is for beef and yellow is for delicious, crispy french fries. Yes, I like McDonald's fries; deal with it.

Speaking of which, they used to serve their larger fries in a cardboard sleeve, red on the outside with yellow stripes printed on the inside. It was pointed out to me by a former employee (there are a lot of those) that the yellow stripes were meant to make it look like there were more fries in the sleeve than are actually there.

Well, last time I went to one (I think I've been twice this year so far), I noticed that they'd replaced the yellow stripes with actual graphics of fries. Like they're not even trying to be sneaky about it anymore.

12. Tricks to Make Food Look Good in Pictures

All kinds of things are substituted, like glue for milk or mashed potatoes for ice cream, or added, like Scotchgard on pancakes or soap in carbonated beverages, to food to make it look better on film.

As a former photographer, I learned this a long, long time ago. Nothing's changed. And, I mean, this isn't even a big secret.

7. Misters

Grocery stores mostly let their produce run through the sprinklers for two reasons: so it’ll look better and weigh more.

Back when I did my own grocery shopping instead of paying Instacart to do it for me, the only thing that pissed me off worse than self-checkout were produce misters. I was convinced that someone was sitting in the back watching me on the security cameras, and as soon as I got close to the lettuce, they'd hit a button to make the water spray all over the lettuce and me. That or there was a motion sensor set to "nerd approaching," because this happened 9 times out of 10, but it didn't ever seem to happen to the lady with the three squalling sprogs. It was enough to put me off vegetables.

5. Decoy Pricing

I've gone into this in more detail in previous entries. Here's one: "The Real Decoy" 

1. Apps and Kiosks

All those digital kiosks and delivery services aren’t just convenience measures that also cut down on payroll overhead. You’re actually more likely to order more food if you don’t have to look another human in the eye and ask for a double bacon cheeseburger and 20 chicken nuggets and a Satanic mudslide.

I flat-out hate this crap and go to great lengths (usually a drive-thru) to avoid it. In the case of apps, I actually read the TOS, and so I don't install the app. You know what pisses me off more, though? When, instead of a printed menu, you get a QR code you have to scan. Or try to scan; sometimes it doesn't work. That shit was okay for about a week, between "restaurants reopened after the lockdown" and "it turns out that the 'rona isn't spread by touch." Before and after that, it was annoying and frustrating. Also self-defeating, because if I have to charge my card again to get a second beer, I'm not going to get that second beer (at least not at the restaurant), so you're out that revenue. And why would I tip a server for a service he or she didn't actually provide, especially when I'm not convinced that a tip entered into my dumbphone is actually going to them?

In any case, the article has a few more I didn't go into here. While they're not actually "evil," I think it pays to know how they're trying to manipulate us.