Food Budgets

The human mind has always had a storing mentality, and at the first sign of shortage, people bulk buy for fear of starving. Fear of never having enough stems from earlier times when food was in short supply and poverty was rife. This fear response is built into the makeup of every human being and is hard to eradicate without fully understanding why this happens. Supermarkets psychologically play on these fears and know people have tendency to hoard.

Creating Internal Dramas When Spending on Food

Specialists work everyday creating new imaginary dramas in customer’s minds through direct and hypnotic advertising by triggering a person’s deepest fears of survival. Once you recognize you have been subtly hypnotized to overeat since the age you began to observe others, you can regain control of your life. The supermarket giants will no longer control you, and you will be free to buy just what you need. In the process you will spend and waste less. Hoarding, overeating and waste will be a thing of the past.

Lost Leaders are What Supermarket do to Entice Customers

Special offers are designed to create compulsive buying and encourage the avaricious part of human nature. This leads to addictions around food and drink. Most special offers are ‘lost leaders’ ploys and persuasion techniques to have you buying far more than you need. A lost leader is the hook to tease you over the threshold. The supermarkets make no profit on lost leaders, but they know you have no self-control therefore delight in their sales techniques working. Buying more means consuming more - that’s business and perfectly normal.

How to Stop Bulk Buying and Wasting Food

Eat before you go shopping. When hungry you are far more tempted to buy preferences rather than need. Always have a shopping list and stick to the list religiously. Never be tempted to buy special offers unless the food purchased will be used that week. Shop in one supermarket. Going around supermarkets means you tend to buy more than you need in each one. When you purchase too much food and drink you will invariably do one of two things. Eat all the food, or throw the food away. Both are unethical. Plan your meals daily, this way you will never buy more than you need. Take cash and a pocket calculator with you.

Food Preferences Over Need

There is an old adage, one in the pot and one in storage. Today many people have a dozen in storage. Unless you live in some isolated place you rarely need more than one or two extra items. Advertising has convinced people that they simply cannot live happily without a certain product, at a certain time or place. You have been hooked again and the supermarkets delight in your anger and frustrations. Supermarket gurus know you will rush around with your credit card the next opening hour and buy what you think you cannot live without.

The Sign of Wealth

 A sign of real wealth in the Victorian era was to be fat, because fatness meant you could afford good food, whilst thinness was a sign of poverty. With increasing industrialization and urbanization, people became more dependent on processed foods and became hooked into preferences rather than need. The relationship between health and consumption of good quality food and drink declined rapidly as the desire for progress and quantity became uppermost in everyone’s mind.

Rationing For the Good of Humankind

The Second World War introduced rationing in the UK. Everyone had the same food allowance throughout the war years and for ten years afterwards. In these years people were fitter and healthier than at any other time in the past and in the future. Food advertising was as rationed as food. A determined interest in health and the connection between food and drink consumption in relation to the body and mind has grown rapidly during the second half of the 20^th century and continues today amongst the socially aware. People are healthier and stronger emotionally, mentally and physically when lower sugar and fat is consumed. But the natural desire for sweet, salty and fatty foods increased to the point of addiction by the mid 20^th century.

Obesity is on the increase in the 21^st century

With obesity comes a high level of malnutrition as more people have sedentary lifestyles in front of computers and televisions. In the poor economic parts of the country processed foods, with the lower levels of nutrients are purchased and consumed in large amounts. Waste is greater today than in any period except in Roman times. People in the western world have in fact become physically lazy, but mentally faster with greater dexterity in multi-tasking. There will always be a high price for buying too much food and that is eating too much and waste.