I have been challenged by my professor to go to the grocery store and make a list of items directly marketed towards me, to note their placement, promotion, displays, and other relavant information pertaining to the sale of said items; the problem I find is such: I am one of those social miscrients normally refered to as a nerd and unless a thing is shiny, beeps, or has a screen, there is a fair chance I don't care about it. That isn't to say that I am completely apathetic to the attemps, made by marketers to rob me of my money, but that my choices concering food are exceptionally whimsical. In that sense, I suppose,  I fall pray to the less direct form of marketing, that fact that I am even shopping to begin with and prices. As a student I obviously do not go around buying the top cuts of meats so pricing is rather relavant to my survival.




What if I was someone different? Would the effects impact me differently? There really is no denying that, racial identity, age, gender, any many other aspects of human life, play a central role in any decision one makes here on earth, but to me the illusion of choice plays the biggest role of all. As I age, I feel as if the deli, bakery, and produce section of grocery stores are getting smaller and smaller, while boxed, frozen, and bagged goods get larger. We are bombared with imagery to comfort and entice and I can think of no greater example than pancakes. Flour, baking soda, sugar, egg, milk, and a pinch of salt and, like most breakfast foods, pancakes are simple and easy, yet there they are, boxed, with an image begging to be bought. This is one of many products that shouldn't exist, but why.

Imagine you are a child, you've had a rough go at this thing called life, but you're getting there. Your parents weren't around, or maybe they were both working, like many Americans, and subsequently you've grown up on pre-made food, frozen or otherwise, without ever being taught how to cook. You've grown up now (that was fast right?) and you must take care of yourself, what do you do? The smart answer would be to probably buy a cook book, but today my generation is bombarded with tempting offers of nearly instant food and thus we become reliant on what they decide to provide. The illusion of choice. We then subsequently buy these products, that are often filled with corn or soy based fillers, alternating "flavor enhancers" (such as MSG), and other artificial flavors that are constantly swapped around to create "new" flavor based products for us to consume.

Now imagine you live in a predominated poor neighborhood of color, where statistically, you have access to far fewer market choices for purchase of your food to begin with. Let alone the opportunity to buy organic, or a wide range of produce, because of price. Maybe, you don't even have a car, so even it if were worth the drive to gain access (in terms of opportunity costs, gas, etc) you would still have to rely on the one store your neighborhood has to offer. In many cases that is the harsh reality facing much of our poor community. USDA - Food Deserts(as part of the First Lady's program mentioned in the video above) is a government run map based app that shows food deserts based on market availability of fresh, nutritious food, and census data for poverty. I looked up my old home town of Colorado Springs, CO just to see how their data portrays the area in comparison to my own knowledge, and I was quite surprised. Colorado Springs is an interesting place, at the northern side of the city is it truly hard to drive half a mile without hitting some form of food market. Kroger, one of the major grocery store companies in town, has 16 locations alone, Walmart has three super center locations, whole foods ( a really limited market in terms of cost) has sustained two locations in town. I could go on about the numbers of other companies (there are plenty), but the point here is, this place has food, and lots of it, yet according to the data on the website there are numerous deserts on the southern side of town. Which is understandable as that is the poor side of town. It is really awful to me that wages would dictate such a harsh truth. Especially when we consider the topic of the Los Angeles community garden and popular opinion that the people had no business growing food in a city. Yet they did, and many others do need that kind of access. Land is such a funny thing, we have so much of it in the US, yet we can't even use it responsibly to allow basic things like food access. This really ties into my other themes about ownership of the future and money.

I really don't understand why we allow such a small group of people to dictate the flow of culture and society. Let alone why we allow corporations to play us by bottle necking many neighborhoods and maximizing profit without competing. The whole ordeal begs to be probed for backdoor talks and market manipulation, much like the US internet issue why so many, even dense towns like Colorado Springs, only have one or two providers that really don't even have to compete with each other. I don't want to sound like a Marxist, but it really makes you wonder what would happen if we moved to a model where the worker owned their product, like farmer's markets.