Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is the author of the novel ‘Chop Chop’ and of ‘Sweet Dreams’, an immersive cinema experience
Picture a world where Tony the Tiger is caged, Ronald McDonald has hung up his clown shoes, and Colonel Sanders is court-martialled; where what’s euphemistically referred to as “less healthy” food is sold without spin. A world without mascots grinning over photo-shopped burgers or whispering, ‘Go on, try it’ through the TV. If we did it to the Marlboro man; we can do it to a cartoon tiger.
It took the UK 50 years from discovering the link between smoking and lung cancer to finally stubbing out cigarette advertising in 2003, and a further 13 years to end branded packaging. The proposed ban on fast-food advertising has taken a similarly tortuous route. On the table for well over a decade, boosted by one Conservative prime minister and bumped by the next, it’s now on a long menu of tasks facing Labour ministers. Under the proposed ban, less healthy products won’t be advertised on TV before the watershed (from 9pm to 5.30am) and online 24/7 from next October.
This is not enough. As with cigarettes, it’s time we had honest branding — or no branding — when it comes to fast and ultra-processed food. Obesity costs the NHS £6.5bn a year and is the biggest preventable cause of cancer after smoking. One in four adults in England is obese. More shockingly, a nationwide study this year found nearly one in four children in England’s primary schools are obese by the time they leave, making them more likely to suffer health issues throughout their lives. Our inability to regulate the brands and their colourful mascots harms the young most of all.
The last six months have seen a flood of reports about ultra-processed foods, both the threat they pose to our health and their ubiquity. Items we might not have considered particularly bad, such as pasta sauces and ready meals, are on the list. UPFs now make up more than half the average British diet. “Let food be thy medicine,” Hippocrates wrote. What is meant to nourish us is harming us.
How did we come to this? Some blame must lie with the food companies. It’s not news to anyone that advertisements manipulate us. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, applied his uncle’s theories to public relations at the end of the second world war, persuading women to smoke by marketing cigarettes as feminist “Torches of Freedom”. (Amusingly, Bernays subsequently spent years trying to get his wife to quit.) Food photography is famously deceitful (strawberries brightened with lipstick). Forms of psychological manipulation known as “dark patterns” make us feel guilty or unloved so we will succumb to temptation and eat all the ice cream.
However, as consumers we must acknowledge our role in this saga, too. When I worked as a restaurant chef, I realised that a large part of the social contract between diner and chef involves the diner not knowing what goes into their food. We want the chocolate tart without seeing the calories listed on the packaging or the sugar cascading into it as we make it ourselves. We want the food to be delicious without thinking how much butter or cream was used to make it taste so good. But only recently I saw how poorly this wilful ignorance serves us.
I’m not suggesting a ban on the food itself. People should be allowed to make their own decisions, good or bad. Personally, I think fried chicken at two o’clock in the morning is one of life’s great joys.
Aggressive taxation has some effect. According to new research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the UK’s sugar tax halved child consumption in just one year. That’s cause for celebration but it’s not the whole story. Soft drinks companies have just replaced sugar with artificial sweeteners. Punitive measures target one ingredient but encourage dishonesty — now drinks are “sugar-free” and “diet” — rather than helping people understand what they’re consuming. The underlying problem remains: our food is lying to us.
Warnings and labels are a start. Some say counting the calories in mac-n-cheese drains the pleasure out of eating it. Yet it’s nothing we don’t already know. Our shock at having the truth spoken out loud feels like a stagy overreaction.
It’s the branding that needs to go. Ban the cartoon mascots, our false friends. Ban the weasel words and crocodile smiles. Cut the trick photography and attractive packaging. Slap on health warnings where appropriate. (I will personally contribute a picture of my belly if it might save the nation.) Let’s stop deluding ourselves and tacitly allowing others to delude us. Some food is not great for our health, and sometimes that’s what we want. We’re only human. But let’s have all the information, free of manipulation. An informed decision is a delicious thing. Go on, try it.