Interesting little tidbit. How confidential can the origins of the macaroni be? If I know (as I have made my own for years) that pasta is wheat and either eggs or water and someone won’t tell me what they make theirs out of, why would I eat it?
We learn more from what they don’t or won’t tell us than we might have from anything else.
In contrast to the more than $15 billion in direct marketing spent in the U.S. to exhort children to buy food and non-food products, children often don’t get very far with the companies when they start asking questions. Olympia, Washington, teacher Michi Thacker assigned her elementary students to write food manufacturers to raise questions, such as where the macaroni comes from. Most larger companies like Kraft suddenly had little to say. Kraft told one student via email that “the information you are seeking is considered confidential.” Gatorade, Frito Lay, Campbell’s and Post had similar nonanswers. Nancy from Nancy’s Yogurt of Eugene, Oregon, on the other hand, responded personally to students with the names of the producing farms and the origins of ingredients. Rethinking Schools contains 13 articles about how children learn about food, including the costs of local and imported food, corporate food distribution networks, connecting food and heritage, and what an earthworm (in contrast to a PR firm) can teach you about eating right.
There are a couple of threads in there to pick out. One, that large food manufacturers do all kinds of things in their labs/production lines they would just as soon keep from us, and two, scale plays a role in this. I suspect Nancy has no interest in getting big like Kraft or Campbell’s: her bio makes her sound almost too good to be true (Ken Kesey‘s brother owns the creamery?!). I’m sure any number of people in a small business can say what goes in a given product, even if they don’t have a hand in every part of the process.
Even if the kids you know don’t watch much TV or read magazines (have you seen some of the kids magazines?), somehow that $15 billion is reaching some of them. Assuming I can read a table, it looks like there are 70 millions kids (19 and under). $214 per kid? That seems a little high, but who knows? Advertising/direct marketing takes many forms.