The Art of Consumption

Like most of my classmates, I, too, found this exercise both difficult and extremely tedious. As I organized my weeklong meal plan, I never expected to end up with 32 ingredients. Searching for each ingredient was incredibly difficult—both store and shelving layout played a huge role in this. Not only did aisles change drastically one by one, but each shelf did so, too (even if items were technically the same). I quickly found myself lost, walking up and down aisles and looking up and down shelves multiple times, to no avail. Eventually, after much wandering and much reading, I found all of the products needed to complete the weeklong meal plan and recorded all of their information. There were a few elements that stuck out to me the most whilst doing so: 1) the way in which foods are packaged and 2) eating organically is ‘healthier’.

For this exercise, I tried to keep as many items as possible organic; I think I did a pretty decent job. However, as I looked through the nutrition labels for both the organic and non-organic versions of the same item, I noticed that the two nutritional aspects that we were asked to note (sodium and sugar) didn’t show a stark difference—something that I was expecting. In fact, I found many non-organic products that had sodium and sugar levels far below that of the organic one. I am not saying this happened in every instance, but it did happen quite often—particularly in regards to sodium levels. I guess at that point the consumer ought to think about other benefits of eating organically (such as environmental) and not just view it through health concerns/health benefits. 

The second aspect that stood out to me while completing this exercise was the way in which foods were packaged. It was quite astonishing, actually. It’s as if producers have one second to sell an item to you, and they are all competing by creating works of art through their product’s packaging. There was not one item on my grocery list that didn’t have a health claim written on or all over it. Words such as “USDA Organic; Natural; GMO Free; 0g Trans Fat; Vegan; No Preservatives; Dairy-free; Fat-free; etc, popped up everywhere. This is when I thought most of the idea of education and lack of it—if consumers are not aware of what these terms mean in their entirety, then the easier they succumb to a producer’s propaganda. Items also differed in words, color, text font, size, shape, background images, etc. It made me realize how much of an influence aesthetics actually do play in our purchases. Producers tailor their items to our sensory qualities, and we fall for this trick so easily. I kept wondering why; all that I could really come up with (and refer back to what we learned) was that we already have personal, established connections with most of the items being sold. Producers are able to connect products to consumers in such a way that we rarely consciously notice: through the product’s aesthetics (or packaging). We innately lean towards food items that we have already established connections with (hence the idea of comfort foods and food-mood relationships); by appealing to this aspect, producers are truly able to hook their consumers.