Friday 20 September 2013

Stuff and Stuffed - week 8


Week 8

Stuff and Stuffed

According to Raj Patel (2007 p. 1), there are 800 million people going hungry in the world compare to one billion people suffering from obesity.  Described by Patel (2007) “Global hunger and obesity are symptoms of the same problem.”     The Food cooperation influence how we eat and they are guided only by profit motives.  They use their marketing skills that attempt to get personal with the customer, but in fact their true motive is to target consumers.  For instance, look at the beginning of McDonalds, they were not considering the health factor of their foods, but mainly concentrated on the taste.  If customers were satisfied with the taste, then they would continue to buy the burgers.

It wasn’t until you heard about a woman in the United States of America, suing McDonalds for her obesity.  This is when the menu changed and McDonalds knew this court case would open up a “can of worms.”  I noticed with the supermarket giants a few years back, when shoppers became more aware and educated about certain preservatives and additives in packaged food. People were not purchasing products for this reason.  The packaged food ingredients were changing.  Ten years ago it was extremely hard to find any food without harmful additives, these days it is common to see food with advertisements all over them stating, no artificial this and no artificial that, no preservatives and no added msg.  It was the people power that made this change, slowly, by not buying those certain products.  Still there is a long way to go. 
Giant Food Cooperation’s, do have cooperate control and they surveillance the people to widen their profit margins, but that doesn’t mean consumers have no control to change some situations.

References

Patel, R. (2007). Winning and losing: An introduction, in Stuffed and starved: The hidden battle for the world's food system (pp. 1-19). Toronto, Canada: Harper Perennial.


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