I have a tradition with my daughter's friends' families. We go on a cottage trip together each year and one of the things everyone gets excited about is the…snack situation 😅.
Each family brings what they want to contribute, for both the adults and the kids. The specific granola or crackers or popcorn the kids ask for and the bags of chips, cookies, chocolates, or any other snacks that get opened after the kids go to sleep (which is usually the too spicy or too salty variety).
Every year we talk about how that pile is unnecessarily large and how we need to dial it back down, and every year we bring just as much.
This year, after a busy day of activities and the kids all went to bed, I looked at the kitchen counter. I wish I had taken a picture, because it’s hard to describe that pile of snacks. I’d say roughly a third of all the kitchen counter space.
I must have been staring for a while because someone asked me if I was eyeing what to eat next. I was, sort of. Though what was actually going through my head wasn't what to eat next. It was, "how are we going to finish all of this." When I said that out loud, someone else laughed and said, it's a lot, but I wouldn't be surprised if we ate most of it. I have no willpower when it comes to chips.
It was an odd tension of the “obligation” to finish food and the idea that willpower is supposed to help us stop at some point.
What we were told about our plate
I was raised on some version of "don't waste food, there are starving kids in the world." Most people I know were raised on some version of it too. The implication being that kids somewhere are starving and here you are with food in front of you and the audacity to leave it there.
In my household, the line was said to induce some kind of guilt, shame, worry, scarcity.. And I understand why - It came from parents and grandparents who had lived through real scarcity, or grown up close enough to it that food not being finished was a serious event.
I am not dismissing food shortages and hunger issues. But if I'm honest about it, the logic on its own doesn't quite hold up. Me not finishing a bag of chips or my plate of food in a rental cottage in Ontario doesn't feed a single child anywhere. If anything, I suppose I shouldn’t finish and be sharing with those who don’t have enough.
As a doctor, what I end up seeing in patients is that this sentence trains a small daily override. The override on satiety cues and whether or not you’d be the person who leaves food sitting there, especially since other people don’t have what you’re eating. Not framed that way, obviously. Framed as respect, as gratitude, as not being wasteful. But the practical instruction, born from a time of scarcity, with a logic that no longer holds up, still doesn’t get questioned.
And then there's the food itself
The line that gets passed along generations encourages you to overeat you by asking. The food you’re eating has been manufactured to get you to overeat without asking at all.
In the 1980s, a psychophysicist named Howard Moskowitz got hired by Campbell Soup to figure out why their tomato sauce, Prego, wasn't selling as well as the competitor’s Ragu. He didn’t bother asking people what they liked, like in a focus group, because he thought people didn’t know what they liked.
Instead he built 61 variations of the sauce, different levels of sweetness, thickness, spice, chunkiness, and had them tested. The Prego study found that Americans wanted significantly more sugar and much larger chunks than they were willing to admit out loud. When Prego reformulated to hit that number, sales went up dramatically.
What Moskowitz found was what the food industry now calls the “bliss point.”
It’s the exact ratio of sugar, salt, and fat at which deliciousness peaks and triggers dopamine (the chemical that gets us to chase / pursue something) but also right before the brain registers as being full.
Natural foods tend to trigger fullness signals. Engineered foods are made to bypass this signal, so stopping is harder than continuing.
Moskowitz went on to do similar work for a very long list of major food brands.
So the counter of snacks we were staring at wasn't a neutral pile of food that we happened to be weak around. Most of what was on it had been iterated on for decades to make sure we wouldn't easily put it down.
I’m not trying to turn food giants into some horrible entity (although depending on where you stand on this, you may already think so). What I mean is that by the time we’re standing at the counter wondering why we can't stop, two forces have already lined up on the same side.
One asked us to overeat from generations of scarcity and respect. The other engineered the food so we would overeat without being asked. Willpower gets called in at the end of that and blamed for both.
If you're wondering how the cottage snack situation ended, we split most of the food up on the last day and each family took some home. Did we overindulge? Probably. 4 bags of chips, 1 bag of popcorn, 2 packs of chocolate, 4 nights, 4 adults. Then again, I'm not sure what the right amount would have been.
A Thought To Carry Forward:
One generation asked us to overeat out of respect. One industry engineered us to overeat without asking. Willpower gets blamed for both.