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Food marketing: the other side

Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Mel Varley, Latest reporters' blogs April 20th, 2007 by Melinda Varley

While it is all very well that the government, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Commission of Advertising Practice (CAP) (just to name a few) are banning the advertising of foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt to our kids, what’s it saying to us?

Pick up any women’s magazine and its glossy pages are filled with perfectly airbrushed images of ‘beautiful’ women. Thin and gorgeous.

Turn on the TV and all you hear is what not to eat. Now days there is a certain stare of disgust if anyone should dare eat a burger or a packet of crisps and eating isn’t just turning into a healthy exercise like the experts want us to believe, it is becoming an obsession.

Over the past few years we’ve been inundated with programmes such as You Are What You Eat, Celebrity Fit Club and Diet Doctors which attempt to tell us what we should be eating. However, the message that is translating to most people is that we can’t eat anything.

Food marketing is, instead of telling us to eat responsibly, telling us we should be thin. Ads such as the Kelloggs ‘cereal diet’ are even offering us solutions – is that the way we should be marketing what is essentially a daily need and way of life?