The writer is the author of the novel “Chop Chop” and “Sweet Dreams,” an immersive cinematic experience
Imagine a world where Tony the Tiger was in a cage, Ronald McDonald hung up his clown shoes, and Colonel Sanders was court-martialed; where what is euphemistically called “less healthy” food is sold without argument. A world without mascots smiling at retouched hamburgers or whispering “Go ahead, try it” on television. If we did it to the Marlboro Man, we can do it to a cartoon tiger.
It took Britain 50 years to end cigarette advertising in 2003, after the link between smoking and lung cancer was discovered. It took another 13 years for Britain to end advertising on branded packages. The proposed ban on fast food advertising has had a similarly tortuous path. On the table for more than a decade, encouraged by one Conservative prime minister and rejected by the next, it is now on the long to-do list for Labour ministers. Under the proposed ban, less healthy products will no longer be advertised on television before the critical threshold (9pm to 5.30am) and online 24/7, from next October.
It’s not enough. As with cigarettes, it’s time we had honest branding – or no branding – when it comes to fast and ultra-processed foods. Obesity costs the NHS £6.5 billion a year and is the leading preventable cause of cancer after smoking. One in four adults in England is obese. Even more shockingly, a national study this year found that almost one in four children in English primary schools were obese by the time they left school, making them more likely to suffer health problems throughout their lives. Our failure to regulate brands and their colourful mascots is doing the youngest harm.
Over the past six months, we have seen a flood of news stories about ultra-processed foods, both the threat they pose to our health and their ubiquity. Products we might not have considered particularly harmful, such as pasta sauces and ready meals, have made the list. Ultra-processed foods now make up more than half of the average British diet. “Let food be thy medicine,” wrote Hippocrates. What is supposed to nourish us is harming us.
How did we get here? Food companies are partly to blame. It’s no secret that advertising manipulates us. Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays applied his uncle’s theories to public relations at the end of World War II, persuading women to smoke by marketing cigarettes as feminist “torches of freedom.” (Bernays, amusingly, later spent years trying to convince his wife to quit.) Food photography is notoriously misleading (strawberries illuminated by lipstick). Forms of psychological manipulation known as “dark patterns” make us feel guilty or unloved, leading us to succumb to temptation and eat all the ice cream.
But as consumers, we also need to acknowledge our role in this saga. When I worked as a restaurant chef, I realized that a big part of the social contract between customer and chef involves the customer not knowing what’s in their food. We want the chocolate pie without seeing the calories on the package or the sugar that’s added when we make it ourselves. We want food to taste delicious without thinking about how much butter or cream was used to make it taste so good. But it’s only recently that I’ve come to see how badly this willful ignorance serves us.
I am not suggesting that food itself be banned. People should be allowed to make their own decisions, good or bad. Personally, I think eating fried chicken at two in the morning is one of the great joys of life.
Aggressive taxation is having an effect. According to a new study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the UK’s sugar tax has halved children’s sugar consumption in just one year. That’s a cause for celebration, but it’s not the end of it. Soft drink companies have just replaced sugar with artificial sweeteners. The punitive measures target an ingredient but encourage dishonesty (the drinks are now “sugar-free” and “diet”) rather than helping people understand what they’re consuming. The underlying problem remains: our diets are lying to us.
Warnings and labels are a start. Some say that counting calories in macaroni and cheese takes the fun out of eating it. But we already know that. Our shock at hearing the truth spoken out loud seems like an overreaction.
It is the branding that needs to be removed. Ban cartoon mascots, our false friends. Ban misleading words and crocodile smiles. Eliminate misleading photographs and attractive packaging. Put health warnings where necessary. (I will personally contribute a picture of my belly if it will save the nation.) Let us stop fooling ourselves and tacitly allowing others to fool us. Some foods are not good for our health, and sometimes that is what we want. We are only human. But let us give all the information, without manipulation. An informed decision is a delicious thing. Go ahead, try it.
