Social Presure

I feel like more and more I am being asked to eat things and it is getting hard. People aren't very simpathetic to my cause. I get offered food a lot more than I used to it seems, although that may just be because I notice it now. I get offered cookies, and sodas, and other foods that people share fairly casually. Just as I was getting a bit exausted from all of these offers though, one of my friends really helped me out and took me to a restaurant. Sometimes people can make this project worthwhile. I feel like the reason the only food being offered to me is packaged is one of the main reasons I only eat packaged foods. Why are they all we have?

Societal pressures explain why food packaging is generally inescapable but it does not really go into why packaging is so prevalent. Why do I have to buy all of my soda bottles with an extra paper sleeve around them? Surely this extra sleeve costs the company money to produce, and it obviously doesn’t add to my soda drinking experience. The only real reason to have excess amounts of packaging like this is to show off the brand. Brand names such as Coca Cola and Pepsi try to make their brands recognized so people are more likely to buy their things. But it is not just that, these flashy, instantly recognizable logos are also there to alert anyone to the fact that somebody around them is consuming this product. Much like in a PBS documentary about how advertisers are a high jacking teen culture and telling us what is cool, called “Merchants of Cool” where they examine how the Sprite brand rose to prominence by being associated with the hip-hop scene, in large part through sponsoring televised hip-hop parties on MTV. This shows why firms need to create recognizable logos that stand out, so that people can be shown what to buy for the examples of others, but this comes at a large cost, one that is felt by everyone that lives on the planet.