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Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
by Brian Wansink (New York: Bantam Books, 276 pp.)
Essentially, this book acquaints the reader with the research that is being conducted in Brian Wansink’s Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University and with the research at some of the other food labs primarily in the United States. Introduction to a few of the research questions asked will provide an introduction to the contents: “If your bowl never emptied, for how long would you keep eating Tomato soup?” “Do big plates and big spoons result in big servings?” “If you are given a large box of spaghetti and a large jar of sauce, will you make and eat more than if you were given medium-sized packages?” “How many calories do you consume (or think you consume) when dining at McDonald’s versus Subway restaurants?” Wansink pulls together varied research on people’s food consumption behaviors to build a picture of the unsuspected dynamics of eating and, in particular, of overeating.
Although this book is ostensibly written for the individual—shall I say, the consumer—wanting to reengineer his or her food life and make it more mindful, it is also a book that may be of interest to a select group of academics. Because the quick-reading ten chapters are followed by extensive notes, including references to researcher perspectives and journal articles, it may be useful for those interested in exploring the intersection of psychology and food marketing. Across disciplines that use behavioral research, I believe that this book would be good for doctoral students to read—first, because Wansink communicates in an enviable way that research can be fun and, second, because he also makes it perfectly clear that not all experiments work as planned. The engineering required to make the bottomless-soup-bowl experiment work properly, though messy, would be comforting to students grappling with their own attempts at manipulating stimuli in the lab. Furthermore, Wansink communicates a home-grown passion for his work that is inspiring. His farming family helped him understand the long chain between the seeds in the ground and the plate and what is on it. This is perhaps the perspective taking that makes his enthusiasm so convincing.
The chapters all report research on food-related behaviors: new and old, his and others, logical and irrational. There is coverage of seemingly natural tendencies (or well-ingrained ones) to eat food even if it is stale, soggy, or old. There are chapters that bring the “tricks” of perceptual psychology into everyday expression. For example, the drinking glass illusion finds that a tall, slender glass is perceived as holding more than a fat, short glass, and thus people drink less when using tall, skinny glasses. Other chapters discuss food intake as it is related to eating scripts, susceptibility to food naming, and the desire for comfort and variety. Fast food receives a debunking, not so much for being unhealthful but rather for the mind games made possible by some health-oriented marketing programs and people’s willing gullibility to believe that if they eat in a restaurant making healthy offerings, all the food is indeed healthy. The last chapter offers reengineering advice for people wanting to avoid these traps.
Marketing practitioners with any connection to food preparation, packaging, promotion, and sales should find this book of interest. It is unknown whether marketers will adopt Wansink’s win–win philosophy—food companies want to provide customers healthful food for a profit (if only they would eat it)—or whether marketers simply understand more clearly how to make their offerings more appealing given the revealed psychology. What is clear from the reported research is that there are seemingly invisible influences on food choice and consumption that deserve researcher attention and practitioner understanding. For example, restaurateurs should find it meaningful that busing tables promptly (and not leaving buffet diners with their chicken bones for long) may actually increase the amount that people tend to eat. According to the author’s blog (http://mindlesseating.org/book.htm), some companies have already introduced profitable 100-calorie single-serving packages that help people eat less.
Unlike Wansink’s 2005 book titled Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology and Obesity, this book holds perhaps less for public policy makers. As I mentioned previously, the book is written for the individual consumer and even contains appendixes to support behavioral change; one offers a comparison of popular diets, and the other offers tips to avoid food traps that lead to dangerous food-related behaviors. If policy implications are to be drawn from Mindless Eating, they might focus on the nature of information supplied on packaging and ways to help consumers understand it. For example, information on serving size, when it is “impossible to miss,” actually influences how much people consume.
If something is missing from the book, it is an understanding of how some people, subject to these same mindless eating conditions, manage to stay slim. What stopping triggers or control mechanisms do those who exhibit more thoughtful eating patterns employ? There is also a nagging conclusion that the reader must draw from the book and resolve. Again and again, it is demonstrated that people are stunningly rotten at estimating calorie content and caloric intake. However, calorie counting, a decidedly mindful behavior, seems necessary if people are to understand their eating patterns and, in particular, their sources of overeating. Although Wansink offers a clever account of how estimations of meal size have been confounded with estimation of calories by obese people (who happen to choose larger meals that are more difficult to estimate), little hope is offered to improve people’s overall estimation abilities. Is there some other basic metric for food that has not yet been unexplored?
At first, the title Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think struck me as needing revision. Shouldn’t the subtitle be, Why We Eat More Than We Think We Eat? On second thought, however, I rather like the possible double entendre, intended or not.
References
Wansink, Brian (2005), Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology and Obesity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—T. Bettina Cornwell, University of Michigan |