 |
| Marion Nestle |
I heard food activist
Marion Nestle at Franklin &
Marshall College’s Common Hour today. It was a good talk; Nestle is a lively,
engaging speaker with a compelling message.
In her view, it’s no wonder U.S. obesity rates doubled between
1980 and 2008. Profit-hungry corporations are spending billions of dollars on
marketing junk food to every man, woman and child in the country, portion sizes
have expanded like crazy, and government policies have mostly made matters
worse, not better. We need to eat real
food, in smaller portions, and we need to curb the power of the food-industrial
complex (my term, not hers).
Afterward, there was a Q&A. The first questioner said he
was a libertarian, and asked why any government involvement was needed on food
issues at all. Nestle had spoken approvingly of New York Mayor Michael
Bloomberg’s initiative to limit the size of soft drinks; shouldn’t people be
allowed to make their own choices, free of state paternalism?* Nestle responded that government is always involved in food
policy, and it’s unrealistic to expect it not to be; the important thing is to
align it with public health goals.
That’s true as far as it goes, but I think a
better response would have been to remind the questioner of a story she told
midway through her speech.
It seems a group of students in an introductory nutrition
class at New York University were shown two soft drink cups, an 8 oz. one and a
64 oz. one, and asked to estimate the number of calories each would contain. The
correct answers are about 100 calories and 800 calories, respectively. The thing
was, the students’ guesses for the large cup were only about three times bigger
than the estimates for the smaller one, even though they were given the ounce
numbers. According to Nestle, the students simply refused to believe that any serving
of a soft drink, no matter how large, could contain 800 calories.
Isn’t that interesting? Here you have affluent, educated young
adults in a nutrition class at a prestigious university, not being exposed to
any advertising, facing at least some incentive to get the right answer – yet they
still can’t bring themselves to believe that a 64 oz. drink will have eight
times the calories of an 8 oz. one.
The libertarian conceit is that people are smart enough to
know their own best interests, should be free to pursue them without government
interference and should be left to bear the consequences, good or bad, on their
own. When taken to extremes (and it often is), I think libertarianism turns a blind eye to the emotional, habit-laden ways real human beings make most decisions. A successful libertarian regime would require a level of widespread decision-making competence that's hard to square with an NYU class letting naive incredulity trump simple
multiplication.
__________
*Bloomberg’s much-mocked soda ban was based on solid
behavioral science, according to Nestle. When you ban 32 oz. soda, it’s true
that consumers can just buy two 16 oz. ones, but doing so requires just enough
extra effort that most people don’t bother. The 16 oz. drink satisfies, them,
they stop drinking when it’s done – and the 32 oz. drink’s extra 31 grams of
sugar never enters their bloodstream.
