Photo by USACE Europe District.

In a previous post, Ali wrote about her journey from meal challenged mom to coauthor of the book that bridges the sustainable food world with that of real families. The following is an excerpt from chapter 2 of The Cleaner Plate Club, the book she co-wrote with Beth Bader (Storey Publishing, 2011).

First, understand that food marketers have a goal that is the opposite of your own.  While you hope to get in and out of the supermarket quickly, with healthful food that didn’t cost very much, food marketers are trying to get you to stay as long as possible and to buy as much as possible, without much regard to whether the items are healthful or not. If you ever hope to get in and out of the supermarket without ruining all hopes for good health, you should understand some of the strategies at work as you shop.

Some of the tactics are sensory, like the bakery-fresh smell that is piped into the store to attract your attention to the doughnuts, or the slow music that encourages shoppers to unconsciously linger in the aisles. Some tactics are about exposure, which is why food companies often pay hefty “slotting fees” for prime real estate, like the towering displays at the end of each aisle and eye-level space on the shelves. Then there is the layout of the store itself, of course — the way staples like milk and eggs are placed in the far rear corner of the store, so that you pass as many products as possible on your way to them, invariably putting some into your cart.

But the marketing strategies also operate at a much deeper level. Long before you stepped into the store, food companies hired sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and child development specialists with the sole purpose of identifying the triggers that make you and your children unconsciously reach for certain foods. These triggers involve naming, packaging, image licensing, advertising, and stealth marketing. They are even intended to exploit weaknesses in the parent-child relationship (known within the industry as “pester power”).

“Oh, come on,” you might think, offering up a healthy dose of skepticism.  “People are just not that gullible. These strategies can’t possibly work.” Amazingly, study upon study confirms that they do. That’s why 70 percent of shoppers bring lists into supermarkets, but a mere 10 percent stick to them. For every item on the list, shoppers pick up an average of two items they hadn’t planned to buy.

The research clearly indicates that just about everyone — including the “experts” who spend their lives studying these very food marketing strategies — are influenced by food marketing. What’s more remarkable is that nobody ever thinks it works.

Speaking personally, this is one of the reasons we prefer to visit farmers markets instead of supermarkets whenever possible. It’s a relief, we’ve found, not to have to steel ourselves to resist an environment that encourages us to buy, buy, buy. It’s nice not to have fight like David against a billion-dollar marketing Goliath.

However, it’s hardly practical to give up supermarkets altogether. After all, even if you are fortunate enough to be able to buy most of your staples directly from the farmer year-round, chances are you’ll need to stop by a supermarket for laundry detergent or light bulbs, at least once in a while.

Strategies for shopping healthfully and frugally

Shop the pantry at home first. Planning meals around the ingredients you have on hand helps keep the list short, and it also keeps your grocery bill lower than your mortgage payment.

Plan ahead, then stick to your list. Plan your meals in advance. If you begin planning meals while you’re in the grocery store, you’ll probably get overwhelmed. Knowing what you need before you enter the store is critical. But sticking to a list is even more important. It can also help to set a budget before you go, and then to keep a running tally on a calculator as you add items to your cart.

Don’t go hungry. If you enter the supermarket on an empty stomach, you’ll make more impulse purchases.

Never bring children who are hungry or tired. Trust us on this one: It is always a mistake. Fill them up with good food before you arrive. When in doubt, stop by the deli area for some sliced cheese that you can feed to your child as you go.

Stick to the outer aisles. The healthiest items in the store are almost always on the periphery — the produce, dairy, fish, and frozen sections. With few exceptions — dried beans and rice, olive oil, and seasonings among them — the center aisles are filled with highly processed, nutrition-poor alternatives.

Beware of anything making health claims. A health claim emblazoned on a box is, ironically, usually the telltale sign of something you probably don’t want to eat. Fresh broccoli doesn’t brag about its high iron and fiber content, and you’ll never find apples boasting about their calcium levels.

Bulk up. If you’re lucky enough to shop at a store with a bulk aisle, you’ll find delicious, healthful whole-food options, without the extra packaging, at a great price. From quinoa — an amino acid–rich seed that can be cooked like rice — to whole-grain flours, dried beans, and nuts, most bulk products are good for your health, your wallet, and the planet.

Explore the produce aisle. If there’s one place to get adventurous  or to make impulsive purchases, it’s the produce aisle. This section is a smorgasbord of health-boosting phytochemicals, vitamins, minerals, fiber, and great tastes.

Photo by Marco Bernardini.

About a month ago, I heard a story on NPR’s Morning Edition about a study on working mothers and multi-tasking. Moms, the study said, are on overdrive during the hours they’re with kids. Many described the hours between 5 and 8 p.m. as the “arsenic hours.” The result? Their pre-frontal cortex was overloaded, their brains frazzled, and their decision-making impaired.

“Yup,” I thought to myself. “Exactly.”

With that study in mind, I’d like to propose a change to how we think about parents and food: that rather than seeing parents’ constant reaching for convenience food as some sort of moral failing, let’s view it instead as a call for help — a form of crying “uncle” amidst a staggering number of stressors in our not-very-family-friendly society.

Here’s the thing: I am a Monsanto-hatin’, farmers-market-shoppin’, card-carrying CSA member. I believe small is beautiful, that local is groovy, that chemical-free beats chemical-laden. I know that food is a powerful way to change the world: Eating is the one thing, after all, that we all do every day — the lucky among us do it many times a day — so enormous systems have risen up to support what we consume, and how we consume it.

I love the sustainable food world. But there’s this other world I occupy, as well: that of the harried, working mom. In some ways, the two worlds overlap. After all, having children is a pretty profound motivation for saving the earth from annihilation, for fresh air and clean water and food that’s not doused with cancer-causing chemical crap. But as a parent, I have found that the two worlds don’t overlap nearly as much as they should.

Children aren’t easy. They have homework and sports practice and doctors’ appointments and medicines and sometimes a doozy of a tantrum. They desperately want their parents to read them the next chapter of Junie B. Jones, or that book about the animals that lived before the dinosaurs. They lose shoes, have 3 a.m. nightmares, resist cleaning the guinea pig cage, and demand endless attention. They are changing on a daily basis, which means that the moment you get one routine down, you already need to find another. And if your child has special needs, as so many kids do now, your life rapidly devolves into a series of therapy appointments and physicians’ visits, insurance negotiations and lines at the pharmacy counter.

And amid all of this, children are hungry. All of the time, or at least every couple of hours.

Just keeping up with it all — keeping them alive, safe, fed, their homework done, their clothes clean and shoes matching while emphasizing please and thank you, and don’t you dare call your sister a dummy — feels like a Herculean effort on many days.

The food manufacturers know this. They know that I’m constantly running, eternally late, that the kids are hangry (hungry + angry), in the back seat, and that multitasking is multi-stressful. The food companies know that whether or not our family owns a TV (we don’t), my children will learn the brand names of junk food as readily as they’ll learn the alphabet. They know there are moments — many of them throughout the day, frankly — when when I feel like I will do anything to make the noise stop.

But let’s not hand our children over to the likes of Frito-Lay so quickly. I still believe that even the most stressed out parent can go beyond a Con-Agra-processed frozen Flip N’ Dip pancake with sausage links in a plastic tray. To make that happen, however, we’re going to need to start from where parents actually are, rather than where we believe they should be.

Last year, I coauthored a book with Beth Bader, The Cleaner Plate Club: Raising Healthy Eaters One Meal at a Time. We began with the premise that most parents are trying pretty hard on behalf of their kids — food-wise, and in every way. But that even when healthy calories are affordable to parents — less and less the case, these days — they need a little help. Consider:

• Plenty of parents don’t actually know how to cook. Judge me if you will, but when I first started using whole foods, my intentions and abilities were wildly out of sync. My farmers market garlic turned brown and bitter in the pan, my lettuce wilted tragically in the refrigerator, my CSA green beans were stringy and inedible, my co-op beans chalky and half-cooked. Real food doesn’t come with directions, and for those of us who grew up eating mostly packaged foods with directions, it can be an uncomfortable transition.

• It’s bigger than recipes. Never before in the history of humanity has it been so easy to find a recipe. There are millions of recipes online, and some 100 million homes get the food channel. And yet cooking remains largely a spectator sport. Even when armed with a great recipe, chances are good that parents are missing other things – knife skills, or a sense of timing and rhythm, or the confidence to say, “I can have that made before my kids have melted into the floor.” If we can help parents master techniques — not just recipes — we can make home cooking more intuitive. And more likely.

• Good food isn’t about what happens in the kitchen. When my daughter was born, I realized I didn’t know anything about feeding her. How, for example, did her taste preferences form, and how should I respond when she pursed her tiny lips? Why was it that every time I stepped into a grocery store, I had to pry Barbie Froot Snacks from her fingers with a crowbar? How could I deal with her donut-wielding auntie? Which of the conflicting pieces of advice I received from fellow parents — Keep them from sugar! Withholding treats will only make them want it more!  — actually helps? And for heaven’s sake, was it really, truly necessary to play that goddamned airplane game at the dinner table?

The book's coauthors, Ali Benjamin and Beth Bader.

With the book, Beth and I want to help bridge the sustainable food world with the reality of exhausted parents who are trying to put food on the table. And, while the book itself isn’t likely to get every parent back into their kitchen for every meal, we see it as a piece of a bigger puzzle — one in which we really examine what family life looks like these days, recognize that contemporary parents are struggling, and that processed food is a symptom, not a sin. And one in which families are supported in all kinds of ways — through education, through family-friendly policy, through reshaping the environment so that the healthy choices are the easy ones, rather than the heroic ones.

In the meantime, we also know that some parents might need some hand-holding to take that next step into the world of good food. That’s why, over the next few days, a series of excerpts from The Cleaner Plate Club will be appearing here on Grist. If nothing else, we hope we can move together toward a society where parents’ cries of “uncle” are a little less frequent, and a little less desperate.

Next: Shopping for kids aisle-by-aisle: Stocking up without breaking down.