NOVEMBER 2004 IN
RICK ASTER’S WORLD
Staple foods are the most useful kind of food. So why do you hardly ever see advertising for staple foods?
A staple food, such as grains, peas, potatoes, or squash, is so close to being nutritionally balanced all by itself that you could eat it again and again with no ill effects. The traditional diet consists mostly of a single staple food with small amounts of other foods added when they are available.
Staple foods have all but disappeared in the American diet. Bread, an important part of meals a century ago, now comes in the form of a tiny roll you might or might not eat while you wait for the meal to arrive.
On top of that, the standard American bread — commercial white bread — no longer qualifies as a staple food. The fluffy, sugary bread that “kids love” — whether marketed as white, whole wheat, rye, or something else — is virtually indigestible when eaten raw. It is not just nutritionally empty, but gums up the whole digestion process, taking minerals out of any other food eaten at the same time. (Toasted, it’s relatively harmless, but people don’t toast most of the bread they eat.)
People eat so little staple food these days because there is so much advertising inviting them to choose among other, more interesting food items. Advertisers are always looking for a way to extract a little extra money from consumers, and they do so mainly by promising something extra in their products. Of course, they won’t make any profit if these extras are expensive, so when food manufacturers try to add advertising words like zing, hearty, or elegance to a recipe, what you usually get are dirt-cheap ingredients like sugar, beef fat, and chemical additives. Regardless of the specifics of what they start with and what they add, the result is something complicated, quite the opposite of a staple food.
More often than you would care to admit, the versions of food and other products you get after advertisers persuade you to go for “more” (in one form or another) are not as good as the original products they are based on. Wonder Bread does not have either the flavor or the nutrition of the grain-based white bread that preceded it. Pop-Tarts might be convenient, but they can’t match the nutrition or appeal of a real apple tart or cherry pie. Compare a light-iced decaffienated sugar-free-vanilla soy latte and a plain cup of hot coffee side by side, and you might well prefer the plain cup of coffee. Or compare Chunky Monkey to any real vanilla ice cream, and you’ll have to admit that the vanilla has a more complex and rewarding flavor.
Ah, yes, vanilla. A century ago, ice cream was vanilla, but then dairies introduced fake vanilla, along with equally compromised versions of chocolate and strawberry. Now, “plain vanilla” has become almost a term of disparagement in a culture where people expect their ice cream to contain at least three kinds of candy. But if you’re radical enough to try it, you can understand that there is a reason for vanilla. Vanilla is what made ice cream popular in the first place.
I’m not saying everyone should eat vanilla ice cream or drink black coffee. I started out talking about staple foods. Even the plainest vanilla ice cream and black coffee are fancy food when compared to a slice of bread or a baked potato. Remember that manufacturers don’t make fancy products for your benefit. They make fancy products so they can charge fancy prices. As long as fancy products cost more than simple products, you should make sure they’re really better before you choose them. Don’t choose a TV dinner unless it’s better than a baked potato. Don’t drink coffee if you would really prefer water.
To get what you really want, you might find that you have to start making conscious decisions again. Advertisers will steer you toward the richest, sweetest, saltiest food you can stand, so much so that the average American eats his or her own weight in added fat, sugar, and salt every year. If you stop to think about it, you probably won’t want to base your diet on the kind of food you see in advertising, so it’s important to make those decisions consciously.
As important as food is, the same ideas apply to other categories of products. Stereos are continually sold with “audio enhancements” with names such as Extended Bass Response, but every single one of these features is a form of distortion that interferes with the clarity of the music or other program you’re listening to. New safety features, such as anti-lock brakes on cars, can turn out to be nearly as dangerous as the hazards they are meant to protect against. Then there are the lens coatings that can double the cost of eyeglasses while actually making them more fragile.
In any category, certain formulas and designs become the low-cost classics and standards, and when you think you’re getting something extra, it’s often just that you’re paying extra for something different.
If you want a dramatic example of how “extras” can ruin a product, it’s hard to think of a better example than music radio. The idea behind traditional music radio is innocent enough. A radio station broadcasts music, free to its listeners, and it pays for its operations by occasionally broadcasting paid commercial announcements. But today’s music radio is worlds away from that original concept. It becomes a stark contrast as soon as you spend an hour or two listening to satellite radio.
Satellite radio is paid for by a monthly subscription fee of around $10 a month. The subscriptions completely cover the cost of operating over 100 radio channels — a remarkable accomplishment when you consider that the operating costs of commercial radio can be over $10 a month per listener for a single station! Satellite radio boasts that it has no commercial interruptions — but that’s not what satellite radio listeners talk about. Instead, the first thing they mention when they describe the satellite radio experience is how much more relaxing it is than listening to commercial radio. The descriptions I’ve heard sound like exaggerations, but I’ve heard enough satellite radio programming myself to know that the difference is real.
So how can taking away a few minutes of commercials per hour make such a big difference in the listening experience? It couldn’t, of course. The commercials are just part of what makes commercial radio what it is.
In order to attract advertisers, radio stations have to have good ratings. Ratings are based on the listening journals of randomly selected listeners. These listeners have to know what station they’re listening to. Then they have to remember to write it down in their journals. As a practical matter, this means that commercial radio stations have to remind you who they are at least seven times an hour.
Commercial radio stations also have to attract as many listeners as they can. They do this with gimmicks such as contests and promotions, and you’ll hear about these contests and promotions all day long too.
On top of that, commercial radio stations have to do whatever they can to get listeners to actually listen to the commercials. To do this, they hire announcers who have strong personalities. Radio commercials tend to be tremendously irritating, so radio personalities have to be equally irritating. Of course, radio has tried playing music with no announcers and with mild-mannered announcers, but this approach makes the irritating commercial breaks far too obvious, and listeners develop an automatic habit of changing the station whenever a commercial comes on. At a successful commercial radio station, everything about the programming is geared toward getting you to listen to as many commercials as possible. Think about this the next time you listen to commercial radio, and you’ll hear what they do in a whole new light.
Sad to say, most of these qualities are present to a degree in noncommercial broadcast stations also. They too have to compete for listeners and ratings, so they end up doing many of the same things that commercial radio stations do.
It’s easy to see how a commercial radio station can be so expensive to operate. It’s much more than just the process of broadcasting music. To pay for everything, stations tend to run 10 minutes of commercials an hour or more.
But it’s important to remember that the actual value of the radio station comes from the listeners hearing the music. If all you want is to listen to music, you might well choose something simpler than a commercial radio station. If you want to hear music and be in touch with what’s new in music, satellite radio is currently the simplest choice. The $10 a month price might seem expensive, but if the commercials affect your shopping decisions — or if you are tense and buy drinks to relax — you might actually spend less by switching from commercial radio to satellite radio.
There are other music options, of course. The spectacular success of the iPod, Apple’s personal digital music player, may be seen in part as the spectacular failure of commercial radio in supplying music programming for listeners.
With any product you consider, ask yourself what result you are hoping to get. Most of the time, you’ll find that you can accomplish it more easily with something simpler than the products that advertisers are putting in front of you. The bias in advertising is toward the most complicated, expensive ideas, but your tendency should be toward the quick, simple, cheap solutions that, most of the time, aren’t advertised at all.
Next month: Anti-Advertising
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