a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  2731 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Shake it up. Offer up one somewhat unpopular opinion that you hold.

    They sustain the narrative that they are superior nutritively without proof.

To add to that: they make people feel good - and that's a part we can't afford to discount when it comes to promoting something.

Making people feel good about shit they don't need has been the backbone of advertising ever since Freud's nephew started promoting cigarettes for women as "torches of freedom". We are emotional creatures and will gladly fall for anything that promotes feeling good about ourselves, even if it's detrimental for our health and other resources.

To make people feel good about products that are actually good for people is something we could learn from advertising. Facts don't work for people who don't seriously engage with those. Sure, GMOs might be the future - hell, they've always been the basis of farming - but when people are terrified into thinking they might be killing planet Earth by using them, there's no sheet of facts you can provide that would help alleviate that, let alone reverse the idea.

If you want to be in the same vein, make people worry about killing sustainable land with too many organic crops. If you want to do better, let them know that what we're doing now is just an advanced version of millenia-long practices (those pocket dogs didn't come from nowhere), as well as that now we have more control over what we eat than ever as well as some of the great side effects, like saving children from dying out of lack of vitamin A.