by Matt Siegel
We can now choose from more than fifty types of Oreos:40 thins, reduced fat, golden, lemon, root beer float, fruit punch, peanut butter, Reese’s peanut butter cup, chocolate, chocolate strawberry, white fudge covered, coco chip, filled cupcake, red velvet, cinnamon bun, watermelon, banana split, back to school (with four different back-to-school designs), gingerbread, peppermint, caramel apple, pumpkin spice, cotton candy, strawberry shortcake, Swedish fish, firework (with popping candy inside), s’mores, cookie dough, key lime pie, brownie batter, Mississippi mud pie, Dunkin’ Donuts mocha, birthday cake (which comes in both chocolate and golden), Halloween (with orange creme*41 and spooky designs), rainbow sherbet ice cream.
This isn’t counting international flavors such as hot chicken wing and wasabi in China.42 And these choices are then compounded with variations in personal filling preferences (original, double stuf, mega stuf, most stuf) and packaging (king size, family size, go packs, snak saks, spooky edition glow-in-the-dark packs for Halloween).
Just as with medieval banquets and fantasylands, a lot of these food choices seem to subvert nature by promising the impossible: fat-free ice cream, zero-calorie soda, sugar-free pancake syrup, nondairy creamer, instant rice, crust- and carbohydrate-free bread, and meatless bacon. Or they’re camouflaged to look like something they’re not, so instead of stuffing medieval pig stomachs to look like hedgehogs or making peacocks appear to breathe fire, we now have dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese pieces shaped like Yoda and Darth Vader—which sort of makes them not macaroni anymore. Instead of gilding foods in silver and gold, we now have rainbow sprinkles, edible glitter, Halloween Whoppers with black hamburger buns,43 and hot pink Fruity Pebbles44 designed to “magically” turn cereal milk blue. And instead of sewing different foods together, we just alter them genetically.*45
Writes Sophie Egan, “It’s no longer enough to merely invent new products.46 Now you have to provide shock value. Nutritional train wrecks that are this over-the-top used to exist mostly at state fairs—fried butter on a stick, for example. But now these types of unbelievable combinations are being sold at national fast-food chains where people dine on a regular basis.”
Recent examples include Starbucks’ Unicorn Frappuccino,47 a Day-Glo concoction of mango syrup, sour blue drizzle, “vanilla” whipped cream, and sweet pink and sour blue powders that starts out purple and tangy but becomes pink and tart as you drink it; KFC’s Double Down48 and Chicken and Donut sandwiches,49 which respectively have “buns” of fried chicken and vanilla-glazed donuts in place of bread; Heinz’s limited-edition Ed Sheeran ketchup bottles50 adorned with the singer’s autograph and images of his tattoos; and crossovers like Burger King’s Flamin’ Hot Mac n’ Cheetos51 and Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco, the latter of which sold more than a billion units in its first year and created so much traffic that Taco Bell reportedly had to hire fifteen thousand new workers52 to meet demand.
Now, conventional wisdom would suggest that all of these choices should make us happier and that we should be grateful to live in a world our ancestors (or maybe even our childhood selves) could only dream of, where innumerable choices surround us and no one has to be ordinary or settle for chunky tomato sauce when they really want extra chunky. In fact, Malcolm Gladwell gave a viral TED Talk on this very topic (“Choice, Happiness and Spaghetti Sauce”),53 explaining how a psychophysicist* named Howard Moskowitz made the world a happier place by convincing food brands to abandon their pursuit of a single perfect formula and instead give consumers more choices by offering multiple formulas. One of Gladwell’s examples is Diet Pepsi, which was formulated to get its sweetness from aspartame rather than sugar (or corn syrup)—but before Pepsi could put it on shelves, they needed to figure out exactly how much aspartame was needed to achieve the perfect level of sweetness, so they hired Moskowitz to find the sweet spot. As Gladwell explains, “that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer,”54 but it wasn’t. Instead, what Moskowitz found was that consumer preferences were all over the place. Rather than pointing to a perfect “sweet spot,” the data was scattered, which suggested to him that Pepsi had been asking the wrong question—that they shouldn’t have been looking for the perfect Pepsi but the perfect Pepsis.
Apparently, that wasn’t very economical for Pepsi, so they settled somewhere in the middle, but Moskowitz applied his insight to other brands. So when Campbell’s hired him in the early 1980s to help Prego, their then-struggling line of pasta sauces, compete against Ragù, he told them the same thing: that instead of trying to please everyone with the perfect sauce, they should try to please everyone with the perfect sauces. If you never had the pleasure of shopping for tomato sauce in the early 1980s, it was nothing like it is today, where you have entire aisles of choices. If you were lucky, you could choose between, well, Ragù and Prego. What Moskowitz helped identify was that there were preferences no one in the industry was catering to. It wasn’t enough to have original and chunky—some people (roughly a third of Americans, in fact) wanted their sauce extra chunky. So, as Gladwell explains, Prego ended up launching a line of extra-chunky sauces and making more than half a billion dollars from them over the next ten years.
And this is why we now have an endless variety of tomato sauces, why Prego alone now offers traditional, lower-calorie traditional,55 no-sugar-added traditional, sensitive recipe traditional, roasted garlic and herb, fresh mushroom, sausage and garlic meat sauce, spicy sausage meat sauce, mini-meatball meat sauce, three cheese, chunky tomato with leafy greens, garden chunky zucchini, creamy vodka, tomato basil garlic, lower sodium mushroom, lower sodium roasted red pepper and garlic, Florentine spinach and cheese, spicy red pepper, pesto marinara, bacon and provolone. These, in addition to entire lines of alfredo (homestyle alfredo, light homestyle alfredo) and farmer’s market sauces (chickpea and kale, white bean and roasted garlic). You get the point.
According to Gladwell, having so many choices makes consumers “deliriously happy,” and by “embracing the diversity of human beings,56 we will find a surer way to true happiness.”
But there’s really only a very small area in which this holds true (at least in terms of food choices, as opposed to other forms of diversity). Certainly, having some choice in what we eat is better than having no choice, and we’re biologically wired to crave abundance and variety for a lot of reasons we’ve covered earlier, like avoiding starvation if the one crop we rely on fails or it doesn’t rain enough or winter comes early or preventing things like pellagra and scurvy by eating a varied diet. Writes Elizabeth Farrelly, “In evolutionary terms, of course, the ‘reason’ for desire is clear.57 The scarcity environment in which humanity evolved prioritised appetite: whoever got the most sex, or food, or stuff was likely to be a successful spreader of the seed.”
So none of us would be here if it hadn’t been for the pursuit of new and exciting food sources and our innate desire for variety packs and family-size packaging.
Yet there comes a point at which enough is enough—when the bell curve correlating choice and happiness starts to go back down again and our unquenchable thirst inevitably drowns us. If we gave everyone their own perfectly formulated Pepsi, would they really be happy? Or would they expect that level of diversity and perfection—an impossible standard—everywhere else in life? (Remember Epicurus’s point that “To whom a little is not enough, nothing is58 enough”?) In fact, numerous studies suggest that adding food options makes us happier only to the point of four or six,59 after which they tend to make us less happy.
“The more choice you have, the greater the number of appealing options,60 no matter how discriminating your tastes,” explains psychologist Sheena Iyengar:
At some point, you simply won’t have enough space or money or time to enjoy all those options. So you’ll have to make some sacrifices, and each of these carries a psychological cost. Your enjoyment of the chosen options will be diminished by your regret over what you had to give up. In fact, the sum total of the regr
et over all the “lost” options may end up being greater than your joy over your chosen options, leaving you less satisfied than you would have been if you had had less choice to begin with.
Psychologists call this “the paradox of choice.” (“When people have no choice,” explains psychologist Barry Schwartz, “life is almost unbearable.61 As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.”)
So basically, our fear of missing out is compounded by each additional product SKU; instead of being freed by choice, we become burdened by it.
And just like Moskowitz, Iyengar drew her conclusions directly from the grocery store, specifically, Draeger’s Grocery store in Menlo Park, California, where she conducted a landmark study of consumer purchase behavior by handing out free samples of jam.62 She and her Stanford colleagues set up a tasting booth and changed the number of jams they were sampling every few hours, offering customers an option to choose from either a large assortment of twenty-four jams or a small assortment of just six jams. (The jams, by the way, were from Wilkin & Sons, “supplier of jams to the Queen of England.”)63 As one might expect, more customers were drawn to the large offering than the small one (60 percent of customers compared to 40 percent). However, a much smaller percentage of those customers actually purchased jam afterward: just 3 percent of the customers who sampled from the large assortment made purchases compared to 30 percent of the customers who’d sampled from the smaller assortment, which is a statistically massive spread. So even though the larger booth attracted far more traffic, more than six times as many purchases were made by those in the smaller group who’d sampled fewer jams.
And not only did visitors to the larger table tend to walk away without buying any jam, they also seemed weighed down by the pressure, so afraid of choosing the wrong jam that they’d eventually give up—some after ten minutes of scrutinizing different jars and discussing “the relative merits”64 of each flavor.
Explains Iyengar:
When the options are few, we can be happy65 with what we choose since we are confident that it is the best possible choice for us. When the options are practically infinite, though, we believe that the perfect choice for us must be out there somewhere and that it’s our responsibility to find it. Choosing can then become a lose-lose situation: If we make a choice quickly without fully exploring the available options, we’ll regret potentially missing out on something better; if we do exhaustively consider all the options, we’ll expend more effort (which won’t necessarily increase the quality of our final choice), and if we discover other good options, we may regret that we can’t choose them all. This dilemma can occur for choices from the mundane, like picking a restaurant, to the highly significant, like whom to marry or what career to pursue.
It’s no wonder our divorce rates are so high. How can we expect to spend our lives with someone if we can’t commit to a jar of strawberry jam?
Meanwhile, all of this is made even worse by the impossible standards behind our food choices. How can we be happy with 15 percent body fat when our ice cream and mayonnaise are both fat free? How can we be happy with someone giving us 100 percent when we can get more than 100 percent of our recommended daily vitamins from a single bowl of fortified cereal? How can we expect to cope with our bitter reality when our morning coffee tastes like pumpkin spice or funfetti?
Many of the foods we see in commercials and on social media are given so much hair and makeup that they bear as much resemblance to real food as pornography does to real sex, so the term food porn—described by food columnist, chef, and cookbook author Molly O’Neill as “prose and recipes so removed from real life66 that they cannot be used except as vicarious experience”—is apropos.
Explains Anne E. McBride:
Today, food porn generally evokes the unattainable:67 cooks will never achieve the results shown in certain cookbooks, magazines, or television shows, nor will they ever master the techniques. In fact, portrayals of food have been so transformed by food styling, lighting, and the actions of comely media stars that food does seem increasingly out of reach to the average cook or consumer. As with sex porn, we enjoy watching what we ourselves presumably cannot do.
Indeed, it’s no coincidence that food stylists and adult film stylists tend to use a lot of the same tools behind camera to make objects look sexier. Granted, food styling has come a long way in the past few decades, trending, like media in general, toward authenticity, but it’s not unusual to see food stylists using things like lipstick to redden berries,68 eyeliner to paint in grill marks,69 nail polish and personal lubricants like K-Y Jelly70 to keep foods looking moist and glossy, and white lotion in place of milk to prevent cereals from getting soggy on set. These, in addition to less sexy ingredients such as vegetable shortening as a heat-resistant stand-in71 for ice cream; shaving cream in place of whipped cream;72 Scotchgard to prevent pancakes73 from absorbing syrup, which might actually be motor oil74 instead of actual syrup; and lit cigarettes75 or wet, microwaved tampons76 hidden behind foods to make them appear steaming hot.
In fact, a lot of fruits and vegetables don’t even make it to the grocery store because they’re not pretty enough,77 so they’re thrown away, left to rot on farms, or incorporated into things like soup or animal feed. In fact, up until recently, Quebec had an “ugly fruit” ban that prevented stores from selling produce with “abnormal physical characteristics,”78 resulting in an estimated 10 percent of fresh fruits and vegetables going to waste, while American farmers report having anywhere from 20 to 70 percent of their yields rejected by commercial buyers because of unflattering curves or blemishes that make them commercially unattractive.79
Even the foods that are pretty enough to make it to stores are often sprayed with edible coatings and antibrowning agents80 to help them stay attractive. You know that mist grocery stores spray over their produce section? Its purpose isn’t to keep foods fresh so much as to make them appear fresh. In fact, spraying too much water can actually encourage spoiling and the spread of bacteria,81 and in the 1990s the Centers for Disease Control traced a fatal outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease82 to a produce mister in Louisiana. (Some, meanwhile, allege that the real purpose of these mists is to add water weight to produce that’s sold by the pound.83)
So the real irony is that even though our food choices have skyrocketed, our food has paradoxically become less diverse. The engineered efficiency that McDonald’s applied to its burgers and fries now applies to pretty much everything.
Seventy percent of the French fries in the United States84 are made from one type of potato, the Russet Burbank (also known as the California Russet, English Russet, Golden Russet, Idaho Potato, and Idaho Baker), in part because McDonald’s, the largest buyer of potatoes,85 wants their fries to be uniform in crispness, color, texture,86 oil absorption, strip length, and “retention of good fry quality after 8 months of storage.”87
Iceberg lettuce is on menus not because it tastes like packing material but because it packs like packing material. Explains food historian B. W. Higman:
Down to World War I most of the lettuces consumed88 in the United States were leaf or butter varieties, the most successful being the “Big Boston,” but after the war the growing market dominance of California was followed by a shift to crisp head varieties, notably the iceberg or “New York” lettuce, with characteristic compact heads and resistance to damage in the near-freezing temperatures that made possible their journey across the continent, packed in crates and resting on layers of chipped ice. By the 1920s the iceberg lettuce had emerged as the first truly seasonless fresh vegetable.
Similarly, writes neuroscientist Rachel He
rz:
Store-bought tomatoes look prettier and last longer89 than they used to, but most of the time they are mealy, slightly sour, and lacking in flavor. In fact, for the last seventy years or so, breeders have been selecting for tomatoes that are uniform in color, since consumers prefer these over the blotchy kind, but the genetic mutation that produces their consistent appearance has an unintended consequence: it disrupts the production of a protein responsible for the fruit’s concentration of sugar, so they don’t taste as good.
So natural character and diversity, writes Martin Teitel, “are bulldozed in favor of the genetic uniformity90 on which mass marketing thrives.”
Sure, we might have endless choices of tomato sauce, but, really, we have less variety because they’re made from tomatoes that have been bred for industrial consistency, bruise resistance, and the extent to which they can endure storage in warehouses and long-haul trucks—in part because McDonald’s is also one of the largest buyers of tomatoes.91 We can choose from nonfat, 2 percent, heavy cream, and whole milk at Starbucks—yet 94 percent of the nation’s milk92 comes from one type of cow bred for its industrial uniformity and production volume.93
Writes Michael Symons in his book A History of Cooks and Cooking:
To think that three million years of human development,94 all that experiment, all that risk, all those dreams, all that heartbreak, all that repetition, have led to this. We have nibbled. We have stirred the pudding. We have ended with McDonald’s. To think that the sum total is Coke clutter—dispensers, billboards, television slots, athletic sponsorships, cities draped in neon. Profit-minded zealots, with a standardised “formula” and global reach, devalue the human enterprise. We end it smothered in cost-cutting corporate cooking, our mouths agape before a thin, anorexic screen. We have sold our birthright for a mess of globally marketed pottage. We have participated in the complete manufacture of choice. We have the power only to decide our baked potato topping.
