A Heaping Plateful of Food Marketing

Eating Not Just to Survive, But to Live

I wrote this paper for the Food Media Module in my Master of New Food Thinking program. It’s a long read, but I wrote it around one of my main reasons for attending UNISG.

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In the 2008 Disney-Pixar movie WALL-E, mankind has abandoned a polluted and nutrient-barren Earth for a gigantic “cruise ship” in space. They have a “regenerative food buffet,” but consume mostly liquid food through straws.

While the title robot, WALL-E, continues to clean up the wasteland that was once Earth, humans spend all their time zooming around the ship on hover chairs, watching non-stop video screens. They visit the pool area but never swim, they video chat and never interact directly, and watch, on their screens, robots play tennis on their behalf. Over seven centuries of this resort life, they have evolved to more than just lazy — through generations of muscle and bone loss and fat build-up, they can barely move without help.

Many people don’t eat healthily. We might “know” we should consume whole foods and dishes we make at home, and that we shouldn’t mindlessly snack on “junk food” and get our meals from drive-through restaurants.

How can we do better, when around the world, in real life and especially in the United States, we struggle so much with that?

A study by Imperial College London showed that more than one billion people — one in eight — are obese. In high-income countries, sometimes more than half of our total calories come from ultra-high processed (UHP) foods, ranging as high as 40% of calories in Australia to 58% in the United States, or as low as 10% in Italy to 25% in South Korea.

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, proposed a simple solution to healthier eating: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He dives into more detail with In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, where he suggests, “don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food,” and “don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.”

But what are ultra-high processed foods, anyway? Of course that’s complicated.

Unless you’re eating something raw, most everything is processed, to some extent. NOVA provides a clear and simple system to sort the things we eat into four groups based on how much they get processed.

• Group 1: Unprocessed and Minimally Processed: removing inedible and unwanted parts, cooking, preserving, and/or crushing or grinding, without adding other food substances like salt, sugar, or oil. In addition to all the fresh fruits and vegetables we buy at the market, this includes grains, dried beans, nuts, milk, and whole meats.

• Group 2: Processed Culinary Ingredients: these are ingredients derived from Group 1 foods or from nature, like olive oil, table sugar, and salt. They come to us by way of some type of processing, but in a minimal fashion.

• Group 3: Processed Foods: these are usually combined Group 1 and 2 foods, preserved through a process like pickling or canning (vegetables and tinned fish), bottling (fruit juices), or non-alcoholic fermentation (simple breads and cheeses).

• Group 4: Highly Processed/Ultra-High Processed (UHP) Foods: these are made in several steps, initially by breaking down whole foods into component sugars (corn syrup), fats and oils (sunflower oil), or proteins, starches, and fiber. These ingredients then undergo other industrial processes to combine them into edible substances like sodas, cookies, frozen pizzas, and breakfast cereals. They may have artificial ingredients added, and may be made almost entirely from substances extracted from foods, virtually free of any Group 1 foods.

UHP foods are made with mass-produced, low-cost ingredients with a long shelf-life. They’re convenient and ready to consume, often imperishable, and aggressively marketed with enormous budgets.

For example, U.S. food, beverage and restaurant companies spend almost $14 billion per year on food advertisements, of which more than 80% promotes fast food, sugary drinks, candy, and snacks. According to finbox.com and statista.com, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola together spend more than US$7.5 billion worldwide on advertising.

In other words, if you want to eat more healthily, there’s an ongoing multi-billion dollar marketing campaign trying to convince you otherwise.

And that’s not to mention the indirect promotion of unhealthy eating in mass media. According to studies in Health Psychology and Appetite, top-grossing Hollywood movies tend to treat healthy foods differently from less healthy foods simply by showing many more characters eating unhealthy foods. Also, healthy foods in film were most commonly characterized in terms of health qualities, whereas unhealthy foods were most distinguished by “craveworthy, exciting, and social connection themes.”

Famously, in the 2008 Marvel movie Iron Man, billionaire weapons dealer Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey, Jr., escapes captivity in Afghanistan and returns to America, saying he wants “an American cheeseburger.” In what appears to be an inspirational product placement, Stark hungrily devours not one but two Burger King hamburgers, as he announces a turn-around for his company, which will no longer manufacture weapons.

But in later interviews, Robert Downey Jr. noted he had previously stopped for Burger King back in 2003, a time in his life filled with drugs, arrests, and jail time. For him that burger was “disgusting…and I thought something really bad was going to happen,” and he vowed to get cleaned up. That burger represented his “rock bottom,” and the scene in Iron Man is a nod to the actor’s real-life turn-around.

Of course, the movie still had even more tie-ins with Burger King, with Iron Man appearing in the company’s commercials and Iron Man toys placed in kids’ meals.

Product placements, when a branded product is featured or used by a character in a movie or even a video game, are nothing new, and come from negotiations between movie studios and consumer goods. Mike Meyers mocks this in the 1992 movie Wayne’s World, when the title character comedically enjoys Pizza Hut, Doritos, and Pepsi, even as he espouses, “contract or no, I will never bow to any sponsor.”

These scenes add more definition to both the characters and the products, by making Burger King the hero’s definition of an American meal, and by solidifying Wayne’s cheeky irony. As 20th century literary critic Roland Barthes explains. “For what is food? It is not only a collection of products that can be used for statistical or nutritional studies. It is also, and at the same time, a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior.”

The junk food industry knows this, and feeds it to us by the shovelful. They’ve heaped on extra urgency with Robert F. Kennedy, a vocal HPF opponent, now leading the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. They use obfuscation, as when Francis Menton writes in the Manhattan Contrarian, “…However, I’ve done plenty of research to conclude that the category of “ultraprocessed foods” is completely meaningless as a guide to trying to figure out how to eat a reasonably healthy diet.”

Other supporters of HPF place them in the beneficial “time-saving” category. “Processed foods really help us make it through the scramble of the week,” says Tim Requarth in Slate. “And Michael Pollan isn’t in my kitchen helping out in the mornings.” Requarth concludes, “More families have both parents working, more families are single-parent, and job demands are increasingly pressing. Time is scarce…I would prefer to spend time with my family rather than bake my own zucchini chips or whip up home-made mayonnaise. And that has value, too.”

David Chavern, president and CEO of the Consumer Brands Association, takes the time-saving argument a step further in Real Clear Policy. Beyond staying that processed foods give the food-insecure population “food options that are affordable, shelf-stable, and easily prepared,” he suggests our best days, our “milestone moments” happen because processed foods take less time than preparing less-processed meals. “Processing gives us that time back that we can use to create new memories.”

Back on Earth, WALL-E is visited by another robot, EVA, who is searching for any sign of life to indicate the ship can return and reboot the planet. The two robots find a single plant, a confirmed specimen of ongoing photosynthesis, and bring it to the ship. The plant, once presented to the captain, triggers the process to finally return to Earth (un-ironically, for “re-colonization”).

Similarly, we try to find “signs of life” in our search for better food, and to make more healthy choices. We might select a rustic whole wheat bread over sliced white bread, but without the preservatives the artisan loaf gets stale faster. We buy fresh vegetables, and the time really does get away from us, and they go bad in the back or bottom of the fridge.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has tried to help people make healthy eating choices with a Food Pyramid offered in 1992, revised to MyPyramid in 2005, and replaced with MyPlate in 2011. The idea has been adapted and modified by many other countries, such as the spinning top design used in Japan, or the Canadian rainbow format.

All these systems divide foods into groups, like grains, vegetables, fruits, fats and oils, dairy, and meat and legume proteins. They generally encourage more vegetables and fewer fats, more fruits and less meat. They recommend some foods on a daily basis, such vegetables and milk, and that others, like sweets and shellfish, be consumed less often.

In December 2024, the USDA proposed further guidelines to emphasize plant-based proteins, and to encourage people to eat more whole grains and fewer sugary drinks and processed foods. "There’s strong evidence to suggest that a dietary pattern that is high in beans, peas and lentils is associated with lower chronic disease risk,” said the advisory committee’s vice chair, Angela Odoms-Young, a professor of maternal and child nutrition at Cornell University.

The recommendations go even further, pointing out links between diets high in processed red meat, like bacon and hot dogs, with a greater risk of cancer and dementia, and even suggesting the Mediterranean diet — high in vegetables and leaning toward olive oil and away from other fats — is healthier than one including “unprocessed red meat, like home-cooked steaks or lamb chops.”

The USDA 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee made even more striking and specific recommendations. It noted, in its “Overarching Advice to the Departments,” that legumes like beans, peas, and lentils, and fish and seafood, were associated with “beneficial health outcomes,” while “higher intakes of red and processed meats were related to detrimental health consequences.”

Meanwhile, innocent WALL-E becomes an “infection” on the ship as he leaves a trail of dirt behind him and exchanges friendly greetings and surprising but pleasant interactions with humans and other robots. He helps passengers in need, and inspires the captain to dig into the online encyclopedia and learn about “Earth” and other unfamiliar words. When the two robots fly around outside the ship, for example, they inspire two passengers — who have both interacted with WALL-E — to turn off their videos and talk directly with each other.

As much as we are inundated with marketing to consumer high-processed foods, we also see positive influences and inspiration to cook and eat better. As we discussed in class with Luca Antoniazzi, food television comes in many flavors, including traditional instruction (America’s Test Kitchen), personality driven (Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern,), food travel (Somebody Feed Phil), game shows (The Great British Bake Off), and documentaries and series (Chef’s Table). Plus there’s YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more: Pasta Grannies demonstrate how to make hundreds of pasta shapes, Matteo and Emiliano of Lionfield express their shock at American interpretations of Italian food, and other influencers share “secret” dishes you won’t find in restaurants.

As more people watch more social media and food shows, more food shows appear. Top Chef (USA) has 22 seasons, and 24 countries show a local version of the franchise. America’s Test Kitchen is on its 25th season, and has spun-off Cook’s Country and 11 other programs. The Food Network has 24-hour programming, and I counted more than 40 cooking series on Netflix.

Just last month, the Netflix Bites Vegas restaurant opened in the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, with dishes and drinks inspired not by the streaming service’s cooking shows, but based on other programming. Featured menu items include the extremely punny Orange Is The New Mac (Hot Cheetos dust on macaroni and cheese), the World Wrestling Entertainment WWE Smash Burger, and The Dessert Is Lava, a lava cake with gummy “contestants” to run through the molten chocolate.

Perhaps these shows lead more people to cook. Certainly more people know about plating a dish, and even if they don’t do it at home many are familiar with the concept of molecular gastronomy. Restaurants featured in movies and TV regularly have long waits for a table, or even months-long waits for a reservation. Speaking for myself, after seeing the movie Ratatouille I immediately wanted to start cooking. So it certainly helps.

An advertisement blares excitedly over the loudspeaker: “Time for lunch…in a cup!” A robot teacher helps children learn their ABCs using the name of the corporate behemoth sponsoring the ship and everything on it - “B is for Buy-n-Large, your very best friend.” The captain, meanwhile, discovers a hidden recording from Earth, 700 years earlier, declaring the clean-up a failure and telling the ship to survive in place. “Cancel Operation Recolonize, stay the course; it’s easier to remain in space than to try to fix it.”

The plant — the sign of life from Earth — begins to die.

We also fight again other blaring voices encouraging us to eat more junk food. To counter the move away from red meat, the National Cattleman’s Beef Association rose to the challenge of the USDA, calling the recommendations not just “unhinged,” but “one of the most out-of-touch, impractical, and elitist conversations in the history of this process.”

“We would laugh at the suggestion that beans, peas, and lentils are going to replace lean red meat and fill all the nutrient gaps Americans are facing if it weren’t such a dangerous and deceptive idea,” said NCBA Vice President of Government Affairs Ethan Lane, who is a registered dietitian and nutrition scientist. The response noted that even as red meat consumption has declined, obesity and chronic disease has increased, disassociating any causality. Lane says the recommendation would “marginalize” meat eaters, and put vulnerable people — older Americans, adolescent girls, and women of child-bearing age — “at risk for nutrient gaps.”

The announcement also called the recommendation “questionable advice,” “a solution in search of a problem,” and “the wrong direction,” and stated “cutting back on beef isn’t going to Make America Healthy Again.”

Meanwhile, the Farm Action Fund notes that while the NCBA membership includes fast food and HPF corporations like McDonald’s and Cargill, it includes only 3% of independent cattlemen. The organization is 70% funded — to the tune of $26 million — by a mandatory fee paid by all cattlemen.

WALL-E’s influence has been strong, and the captain’s research leads him to help the plant by watering it. “You just need someone to look after you,” he says. As he nurses the plant back to health, he suddenly realizes they must go back to earth to fix the planet.

“Home is in trouble, I can’t sit and do nothing. I don’t want to survive, I wanna live!”

We also want to survive, and live, and so we can look and think and understand that lots of highly processed foods, or even lots of red meat, is probably unhealthy. I have personally lost more than 30 pounds/13.6 kilos and several notches on my belt since moving to Italy in October. This happened for many reasons, including much more walking, but also because I eat more vegetables and less red meat than I did in the U.S.

And there is plenty of scientific evidence as well: “Greater exposure to ultra-processed food was associated with a higher risk of adverse health outcomes, especially cardiometabolic, common mental disorder, and mortality outcomes.”

"The relevant findings showed that UPF consumption is significantly associated with the incidence of obesity, increasing insulin resistance, BMI levels, waist circumference, and LDL cholesterol levels while reducing HDL cholesterol levels, leading to a potential increase in the risk of type 2 diabetes.”

“In summary, this bibliometric analysis reinforces the substantial body of evidence linking UPFs to obesity and diabetes, underscoring the urgent need for public health interventions that address the widespread consumption of these foods.”

The return to earth is prevented by AUTO, the ship’s automatic pilot gone rogue, who insists on following the directive to not return and tries to destroy the plant. But WALL-E has had a positive impact, and with the help of a band of rogue robots and inspired passengers, the now strong-willed captain finally stands up — literally and figuratively — to AUTO. Together the captain and passengers rescue the plant, save the ship, and return to earth. Unfortunately, WALL-E, now a hero to all the people and robots, is severely damaged.

So, how can we overcome unhealthy eating habits and find our way through all these facts, this confusion, these loud and persistent voices? Surely we can modify our approach with many of the lessons we learned in our Food Media Module.

In Photography, Erik Olsson showed us how photographs can be created, and recommended we look with a discerning eye and ask, how was this done? As we look at food marketing and advertising, we need to remember that everything in the picture is important, and was put there with a specific purpose. We need to look at the details, and ask, do I trust this photo?

In Food Marketing, Pier Paolo Catucci advised us, as we try to promote our own products and services, to appeal to people’s desire to be healthier, and to translate our specific “brand voice” to make it resonate with the consumer. Similarly, in Media Industries, Food Representations and the Politics of Eating, Antoniazzi taught that advertising in general, and food advertising specifically, first undermines our confidence, then sells us back up, then pushes us toward consumption. We need to discern in the food marketing we see whether it is fulfilling a real need, or if it is trying to create its own empty space to satisfy with its own creations.

Antoniazzi also showed the effect celebrity chefs and influencers can have on us, by Comparison (how am I similar to or different from this chef?), Identification (what would I do in the same situation?), by parasocial interaction (in imaginary conversation with the chef), and Social Learning (how might I model how this chef acts?). We might be inspired by these personalities, but we should take a closer look to understand if the influence is really beneficial.

Bruce McMichael, in Creative Food Writing, taught us about storytelling, so we should look at what story is that brand trying to tell, and how can we look at it critically? Similarly, Soliel Ho (outside this module) brought her entire Food Communication class into the context of how food is used to sell, and to try to help us form an identity.

So, we continually must look for deeper meanings, and how the marketing might be trying to impact us.

Serena Guidobaldi, in Food Communication, showed us how misinformation and fake news need to be countered with debunking and fact-checking, and there is a “danger in a single story.” It’s important to seek out other versions of the story and round out the narrative with different perspectives.

Perhaps most important was Guidobaldi’s advice to “eat with your hands” and experience cooking, eating, and life directly rather than through a screen. That way we preserve direct contact with the food, and with the elements and the world all around us, not just through a process controlled by someone else. With everything, including food communication, by experiencing it first-hand, we can ask questions, dig deeper, and find the truth.

The ship arrives back on earth, which is still mostly a wasteland but still offers hope, perhaps with someone to look after it. While Eva repairs and looks after WALL-E, the Captain leads the children and everyone else in the process of working to fix the planet, starting by putting the single plant in the ground.

“This is called farming. You kids are going to grow all kinds of plants. Vegetable plants. Pizza plants!”

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Notes:

1. Worldwide trends in underweight and obesity from 1990 to 2022: a pooled analysis of 3663 population-representative studies with 222 million children, adolescents, and adults. Phelps, Nowell H et al. The Lancet, Volume 403, Issue 10431, 1027 - 105

2. Mertens E, Colizzi C, Peñalvo JL. Ultra-processed food consumption in adults across Europe. Eur J Nutr. 2022 Apr;61(3):1521-1539. doi: 10.1007/s00394-021-02733-7. Epub 2021 Dec 3

3. “The Omnivore's Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto," Michael Pollan

4. NOVA Food Classification System. https://ecuphysicians.ecu.edu/wp-content/pv-uploads/sites/78/2021/07/NOVA-Classification-Reference-Sheet.pdf

5. Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them, Part of: Ultra-processed foods, Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2019 Carlos A Monteiro , Geoffrey Cannon ,Renata B Levy ,Jean-Claude Moubarac ,Maria LC Louzada ,Fernanda Rauber ,Neha Khandpur , Gustavo Cediel

6. Advertising spending of selected beverage brands in the United States in 2022, University of Connecticut Rudd Center for Food Marketing and Health, https://uconnruddcenter.org/research/food-marketing/

7. Turnwald, B. P., Horii, R. I., Markus, H. R., & Crum, A. J. (2022). Psychosocial context and food healthiness in top-grossing American films. Health Psychology, 41(12), 928–937. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0001215

8. Do top-grossing American movies portray healthy and unhealthy foods differently? A systematic analysis of food in film, APA, November 16, 2022, https://www.apa.org/pubs/highlights/spotlight/issue-251

9. Bradley P. Turnwald, Margaret A. Perry, David Jurgens, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Dan Jurafsky, Hazel R. Markus, Alia J. Crum, Language in popular American culture constructs the meaning of healthy and unhealthy eating: Narratives of craveability, excitement, and social connection in movies, television, social media, recipes, and food reviews, Appetite, Volume 172, 2022,

10. Iron Man/Marvel/Burger King commercial, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x97f510.

11. What is Product Placement in Movies and TV — With Examples, StudioBinder, Kyle DeGuzman on February 25, 2024

12. Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption, Roland Barthes

13. The Scourge -- Or Not -- Of "Ultraprocessed Foods", Manhattan Contrarian, January 14, 2025/ Francis Menton, https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-1-14-the-scourge-of-ultraprocessed-foods

14. Is There Anything to the Panic Over Ultraprocessed Foods? Slate, Tim Requarth, July 18, 2023 https://slate.com/technology/2023/07/ultraprocessed-foods-parenting-health.html

15. The Empty Definition Behind ‘Ultra-Processed’, Real Clear Policy, David Chavern November 03, 2023

16. Food Pyramid, Britannica, Sanat Pai Raikar, https://www.britannica.com/science/food-pyramid

17. U.S. dietary guidelines should emphasize beans and lentils as protein, new proposal says, NBC News, Dec. 12, 2024, By Randi Richardson, https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/dietary-guidelines-beans-lentils-protein-less-red-meat-rcna183681

18. Part E. Chapter 1: Overarching Advice to the Departments, https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/Part%20E.%20Chapter%201_Overarching%20Advice_FINAL_508.pdf

19. Every Dish and Drink You Need to Try at the New Netflix Restaurant, Food & Wine, Merlyn Miller, February 11, 2025

20. National Cattlemen Slam Dietary Committee Recommendations to USDA, Hoosier Ag Today, by Eric Pfeiffer October 23, 2024, https://www.hoosieragtoday.com/2024/10/23/national-cattlemen-slam-dietary-committee-recommendations-to-usda/\\

21. Exposing the Truth about NCBA: a Public Service Announcement, Farm Action Fund, October 18, 2023, https://farmactionfund.us/2023/10/18/exposing-the-truth-about-ncba-a-public-service-announcement/

22. Lane MM, Gamage E, Du S, Ashtree DN, McGuinness AJ, Gauci S, Baker P, Lawrence M, Rebholz CM, Srour B, Touvier M, Jacka FN, O'Neil A, Segasby T, Marx W. Ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes: umbrella review of epidemiological meta-analyses. BMJ. 2024 Feb 28

23. Almarshad MI, Algonaiman R, Alharbi HF, Almujaydil MS, Barakat H. Relationship between Ultra-Processed Food Consumption and Risk of Diabetes Mellitus: A Mini-Review. Nutrients. 2022 Jun 7

24. Agjei RO, Balogun OS, Olaleye SA, Adoma PO, Afari-Baidoo M, Adusei-Mensah F, The Impact of Ultra-Processed Foods on Obesity Risk: A Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis, Clinical Nutrition Open Science, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nutos.2025.02.009