Consumerism: Redefining Your Relationship with Food

Music. And welcome to Change Your Relationship with Food, the podcast hosted by me, Kyla Holley.

With many years' experience as an eating disorder and bariatric therapist, I know exactly what it takes to help you break free from your diet history and develop a more healthy relationship with food. Please follow this podcast to make sure you don't miss a thing. I heard a really interesting fact a couple of days ago, and that is that 13 million phones are thrown away every day.

13 million. And it really made me think, why have we become a society where we have to have that constant stimulation? Our contract runs out on our phone and we immediately go, well, what's the latest phone? What does that do that my phone doesn't do? And quite often, we're talking about minor differences to a piece of equipment that you've still got in your hand and is now fully paid for that does everything you could conceivably want it to do.

But since you've got that phone, two more versions have come along. What have they got that you haven't got? It's called FOMO, fear of missing out, the idea that other people have got something that you don't have. What does this phone have? And I know a lot of people simply update their phone to the latest one every time they're able to do that. So some of these phones end up in landfill, presumably, because we've got bored, we wanted the newest, biggest, greatest thing.

If you're someone sitting there listening going, oh, well, I don't do that. Maybe you don't, but you only have to look on the news when a new iPhone comes out, for instance, to see people queuing around the block, you know, sometimes overnight pitching tents, that sort of thing, so that they can get their hands on the very latest phone the next day to know that it's true. A lot of people do that.

There is also something called planned obsolescence, which exists in technology, where the product that you buy brand new at the shops, be it a washing machine or a printer or a mobile phone or a television, it has a set length of life. It is designed at some point in its life to malfunction. And the idea is that when it malfunctions, the cost of getting it repaired at that point will be so significant that you will, in the end,

think, well, it's not really worth it. I'll just get myself a new one. Printers are a great example because printers make their money or printing manufacturers make their money from selling the cartridges, not the printer. So they'll sell you a fairly cheap printer in the knowledge that you're going to have to buy cartridges for that printer for the foreseeable future. And then when you go to by the cartridge, you'll discover sometimes they cost more than the actual printer themselves.

So when the actual printer malfunctions and stops working, do you kind of go, well, I'll get someone out to fix this? No, you don't because a new one is super cheap. So you just throw that one in the bin and get another one. So planned obsolescence is built into a lot of these products in order for you to replace them in the future. So some of these excess iPhones are discarded because people want the latest thing, but some of them are discarded because of planned obsolescence.

Gone are the days, unfortunately, for many things where we could get things fixed. I'm not crazy old, but I do remember as a child and as an adolescent that some people would come to the house to fix the washing machine or fix the television. And they did. They fixed them, presumably at quite a reasonable cost, and off they went to fix the next television or the next washing machine. Whereas again, now, something like that goes wrong, especially if we've had the item for, say, five years.

Our expectation is, okay, I'm in a position now where I get it fixed for a great deal of money. Or there's also in the back of your head, that little voice of FOMO thinking, since I've got this one, new stuff has come out. Maybe I should look at the new stuff. And then you reason, well, to fix this old machine that's five years old is going to cost me X amount, but I can buy a brand new one for not a huge amount more at the shops. I'll do that instead.

So we've become this society that needs not only new stuff coming out all the time to stimulate our brains and stimulate those desires for consumerism, but it made me wonder how that relates to food. Because food is something, you know, we are consumers, literally. We consume as in we purchase and we consume as in we eat. And how food manufacturers have to come up with new and wonderful things for us to experience that FOMO for something which is basically essential for life.

When you think about it, we have to buy food. The manufacturers know that we go out there with our budget in order to purchase food. They just have to make sure that we want to spend our money on their product. Rather than just going and buying generic things from a supermarket or straight from a farm shop or something like that. So how do they do that? Well, there's a number of ways that I've explored.

Some are kind of quirky and interesting, but I'm doing this episode really to make you think about how these products are sold to us. When you buy something, what are you actually buying? And where is that money going? The first example I want you to think of is food as being sold as a luxury item. And this is happening more and more. For instance, there is a smoothie that's been created in collaboration with Hayley Bieber. Costs you $25. I think this is in the US.

But the idea that someone, a celebrity, has thought, I will collaborate on a smoothie. What a great move that will be for the world at large. But anyway, she has, and people are going out and buying these things. Influencers are posting stories about them where they pick up a smoothie along with an artisan sandwich that they've picked up. And sometimes the bill runs to nearly $100 for these snacks, this little lunch that they've gone out and purchased.

And that puts a lot of pressure on these products when you think about it. This is food that has to deliver. And what it does to us, it heightens that expectation that our food will do something, that we will get a big reward back from our food. It will be delicious. It will be packaged amazingly. It will look incredible. When you think of these companies that sell amazing cupcakes or have amazing displays, you know, the idea that the expectation is there that what you're going to consume

will be next level. It will be incredible. So it sets this really high expectation that food has to deliver. It really has to give us something. And if it doesn't, if eating is anything less than a remarkable experience, on some level it's failed or we feel that we've failed sometimes in the process because we're not having this incredible experience with food.

If, for instance, we just go and make ourselves a cheese sandwich with what we've got in the house, we're not having the same experience. And it's the experience that people are craving. There is also a lot of examples of a simple food really being talked up.

And I've got an example I'm going to read out to you. This is from a company that makes bread, a very simple product that has been around for as long as we could all remember, bread. And what they say is, and I might do this in a different voice, as a sourdough company, we're committed to sustainability. We bake fresh to order using sustainable ingredients like organic and regenerative flour. This approach helps reduce waste and aligns with our values.

There, did you enjoy that? I know I'm being silly, but what I'm trying to demonstrate is that a simple product like bread, there's this feeling that this company has to give it a story. And this is often what people are compelled to do. We can't simply buy a vegetable or a loaf of bread or a cut of meat without now knowing its story.

And I've been to restaurants before where I've had to sit through the story of the vegetables and the story of the fish and the story of the ingredients for the dessert. Whereas really, I just want to taste it. Does it taste good? That's what I'm interested in. I don't need to know where the fish was swimming before it ended up on my plate or the story of the hardship that the farmer went through as he was growing a piece of asparagus that's ended up there.

I don't actually need to know all that.

The idea of placing a story around the food, making it seem way more special than it actually is, and therefore being able to charge a premium price for it. But when you think about it, if you're going to charge a ridiculous price for, and an example I'll give you is asparagus. A particular restaurant I went to, the asparagus was their starter and it was literally two stalks of asparagus on a plate with a little bit of garnish around it.

I can't remember the exact price now. I'm going back a few years. But this was not cheap for these two stalks of asparagus. If they had put the plate down in front of me and said there you go it's two, stalks of asparagus they wouldn't have been able to charge me what they did so instead I got this whole story about the asparagus which.

Constituted probably for a major part of the bill that I received at the end of the night and it's all quite silly when you think about it I will give you another great example of food silliness, or this is drink silliness, actually. And it's an energy drink called Prime.

Some of you might have heard of this. It was launched in 2022 by two internet personalities. Now, both of these guys had big internet followers, so 40 million subscribers between them. And what they did is they developed this line of drinks and they hyped them big time on social media before they launched them. What it created was a really, really high demand, especially from school age kids and especially from boys.

Chaos ensued. I mean, it was ridiculous. I remember watching the news back then with people fighting at supermarkets, especially in the UK. Supermarkets like Aldi were carrying this brand and people were going crazy, pushing each other out the way, people falling to the floor so that they could get their hands on these drinks, basically. And it's not like there's not a million other energy drinks or sports drinks on the market.

There are. But anyway, this particular brand was desired at the time. And parents were stressing that they had to get this product because their kids were pestering them, pester power. And when you think about it, this has happened over the years a lot. If you have children or you were a child, you have pestered for something. For me, it was the girl's world that I wanted when I was about seven and I never got, I'm still carrying the trauma of not getting the girl's world.

But for my kids, you know, they wanted, I'm trying to think, they wanted Tamagotchis. I remember they wanted these things at one time called Beyblades, which I did manage to get hold of. And I was the best parent in the world for about a week because I managed to get some of these things and none of the other kids had them. But anyway, Prime fell into that category, pester power from the kids. On eBay, someone was selling 12 bottles of this product and they wanted 400 UK pounds for it.

And sometimes people were getting their hands on one bottle and then they were refilling it either with water or with a cheaper product or an easier product to get and just reusing the bottle so that they could walk around being seen using that bottle. Now, Prime is, if you have a look at it, it's been banned in quite a few places. Certainly in Australia, it doesn't reach our Australian food standards limit for caffeine. The limit here is 32 milligrams per 100 millilitres and Prime has 56.

So remember, this is an incredibly high caffeine product, which is being marketed almost solely to our kids. I know it's been banned in quite a few states in Australia, particularly in schools worldwide as well. Food standards are kicking up a little bit of a fuss about this product. Meanwhile, while we know that this is a product that's not on any level good for us, there's sports clubs promoting it as well. The UK soccer club Arsenal. Prime became their official sponsor for that club.

And to 2023, so bearing in mind, this was launched in 2022. In one year, they had 1.2 billion US dollars in sales. So it worked. The hype worked. But do you see where I'm going with this in that this is just an energy drink. There are loads and loads of energy drinks on the market. They had to come along and make you desire this product by any means that they could. I don't know quite how they did it.

I didn't watch any of this sort of social media that they did or anything like that, but they had to create this huge desire in you to sell that product. A product which actually, you know, is it actually better than any other product? I know Gordon Ramsay reviewed it and said it was like swallowing perfume. So I haven't tried any myself, but if you have, you will have your own opinion surrounding it.

Have a think about this this week. The things you buy when you next go to the shops, what are your criteria for buying them? What helps you make your choices? Are you what I call a window shopper? So for instance, if you are hungry for lunch and you walk into a cafe and they have a whole display of different sandwiches and pastries and salads, all sorts of things available for lunch, are you someone that shops with your eyes?

So do you walk in having no idea what you want? You just review the selection and something will draw you to it and make you say yes. And suddenly the desire is there because you've had that visual connection with that product. Or are you someone that has a set idea of what you want before you walk into a shop? So in other words, it's got nearly to lunchtime and you go, I really fancy a ham sandwich, or I really fancy a burger, or I really fancy some sushi.

So you go somewhere with the explicit idea of that's what you are shopping for, and you don't really allow yourself to look at anything else. And also, if you're buying branded products, then why? Are you buying them because you've got them before and you know you like them, you know you like the flavor? Or is there any element of trendiness to what you are buying? When you choose a cafe to get your coffee, do you choose somewhere that's trendy?

It's got a bit of a look about it. It's got certain people hanging out in the cafe that you regard as being cool. Is that something that draws you into that environment? How do you make your choices? And if you are being dragged along by trends, how much is that costing you?

So if you're having your coffee from a particular place because they have a particular cup that looks really cool as you walk down the street holding it, yet their coffee is twice the price of buying that coffee in another shop, you've really got to look at the importance of how you look versus what you're actually getting. So if you're in a queue now for a $25 smoothie.

Simply because Hayley Bieber put her stamp of approval on it, I honestly don't know how much involvement she would have had in the production and the choices and the testing. Probably minimal. She probably had a sip and said, hmm, that's a good one. I like that. Suddenly it's in collaboration with Hayley Bieber. Have a think about this. Food, when you strip it back, is just food.

The artisan sourdough, which is sustainable and organic and regenerative flour, whatever that is, it might align with someone else's values and they're trying to sell you that product on that basis, but does it align with yours? Are you getting what you think you're getting in that situation or are you buying into somebody else's story and ignoring your own?

Maybe it's time for all of us to write our own story with food, make our own choices, not based on what other people want us to do or what other people want us to buy, especially the big corporations that are making millions off the back of trying to sell us an old idea, sometimes in new packaging. So be wise, people. Be wise. Maybe review what you've got in your cupboard. Review your choices. See if there's a better way to remain authentic to your story, not somebody else's.

Thanks once again for listening to me this week. And don't forget there's links in the episode notes for our six-week course called Change Your Relationship with Food and also to the workbook and journal which accompanies that course. It's goodbye until next week. Music.