Fast Food Burglars
Behold the <insert name of favorite fast food>. Before it enters your belly, it goes through the following processes. Ingredients are typically dehydrated, freeze dried, etc. This removes the majority of flavor. And so, <insert name of favorite Global Food Conglomerate> employs the services of the flavoring industry. Food is simply the delivery vehicle for flavors created by companies such as International Flavors and Fragrances, and Givaudan. (It turns out that a lot of food is designed to be tasteless. So that they can better absorb the flavoring.)
Isn’t that crazy? That a food and its flavor are independent of each other? Millions of years of evolution have wired us to expect that flavor is an intrinsic property of food. So it’s no surprise that Big Fast Food is taking advantage of our cognitive shortcomings.
Before you eat ____, you go through the following changes. You are exposed to numerous advertisements that suggest that you can’t just have one. That you are about to uncork happiness. That ___ is love. And that you are saving malnourished kids in Ethiopia by buying a _____. Billions are spent on subliminal subterfuge in the form of ads, TV spots, celebrity endorsements and packaging, and each exposure implants the idea deeper in your mind. Who said Inception was fiction?
The power of these messages is associative in their effect. Propaganda and other aspects of the experience- color, packaging and lighting act in concert to sell you an idea. They try to evoke certain images and memories- waterfalls in a tropical paradise, a sunny day from childhood or grandma’s freshly baked cookies. The flavor is the final act of history’s greatest break-in of the collective consciousness.
So when you eat ____, you really do believe that it was based on a timeless recipe from <insert name of rustic place> and that only the choicest of herbs and spices from around the world were used in its making, and they were carefully assembled by master chefs. When in reality- the patty was flipped by a minimum wage slave working overtime to pay for his college tuition; the chicken was raised in a factory farm, fed on its own shit; and that burger in its innocuous, friendly looking wrapper has killed more people than the Al-Qaeda.
The global fast food industry has developed a powerful reality distortion field indeed.
Based on- Fast food Nation and Givaudan.
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