Food Advertising

After reading “The Joy of Cooking Too Much: 70 Years of Calorie Increases in Classic Recipes” and watching the food advertising video I was able to understand how marketing plays a vital role in what people consume and how much of it. The rhetoric used in the food advertising video was ethos driven because the speaker was a food marketer. Her argument relies on her character and the fact that her occupation is being a food marketer. The things she talked about in the video were convincing and held meaning in my opinion. A few statements the speaker made were important, when she talked about how consumers believe the labels and have willful ignorance when making purchases. Systematic cruelty occurs in the business of food processing but the fact that a few vague labels will make a consumer feel better about themselves makes me wonder how much consumers really care about the situation. I heard the speaker mention that 50% of antibiotics used worldwide are used on animals. That was unsettling for me and it definitely made me think about the personal choices I make when consuming food. Also the rhetoric used in the excerpt by Brian Wansink, and Collin R. Payne was logos driven because they used experimental data and factual evidence to conclude their opinion. After compiling data from various editions of the cookbook The Joy of Cooking it was determined that serving sizes had increased in every edition since 1936. So essentially food marketers are determining how much food families should consume. With that being said, I think food marketers do have a large influence over consumers. Consumers should educate themselves about the food products they’re purchasing so that they can make better choices. The more consumers know, the less control these food marketers will have over important food choices.