The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [55]
But the soda makers don’t deserve credit for the invention of supersizing. That distinction belongs to a man named David Wallerstein. Until his death in 1993, Wallerstein served on the board of directors at McDonald’s, but in the fifties and sixties he worked for a chain of movie theaters in Texas, where he labored to expand sales of soda and popcorn—the high-markup items that theaters depend on for their profitability. As the story is told in John Love’s official history of McDonald’s, Wallerstein tried everything he could think of to goose up sales—two-for-one deals, matinee specials—but found he simply could not induce customers to buy more than one soda and one bag of popcorn. He thought he knew why: Going for seconds makes people feel piggish.
Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda—a lot more—as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp, and, in time, the Big Mac and the jumbo fries, though Ray Kroc himself took some convincing. In 1968, Wallerstein went to work for McDonald’s, but try as he might, he couldn’t convince Kroc, the company’s founder, of supersizing’s magic powers.
“If people want more fries,” Kroc told him, “they can buy two bags.” Wallerstein patiently explained that McDonald’s customers did want more but were reluctant to buy a second bag. “They don’t want to look like gluttons.”
Kroc remained skeptical, so Wallerstein went looking for proof. He began staking out McDonald’s outlets in and around Chicago, observing how people ate. He saw customers noisily draining their sodas, and digging infinitesimal bits of salt and burnt spud out of their little bags of French fries. After Wallerstein presented his findings, Kroc relented and approved supersized portions, and the dramatic spike in sales confirmed the marketer’s hunch. Deep cultural taboos against gluttony—one of the seven deadly sins, after all—had been holding us back. Wallerstein’s dubious achievement was to devise the dietary equivalent of a papal dispensation: Supersize it! He had discovered the secret to expanding the (supposedly) fixed human stomach.
One might think that people would stop eating and drinking these gargantuan portions as soon as they felt full, but it turns out hunger doesn’t work that way. Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they would otherwise. Human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic, which makes excellent evolutionary sense: It behooved our hunter-gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine. Obesity researchers call this trait the “thrifty gene.” And while the gene represents a useful adaptation in an environment of food scarcity and unpredictability, it’s a disaster in an environment of fast-food abundance, when the opportunity to feast presents itself 24/7. Our bodies are storing reserves of fat against a famine that never comes.
But if evolution has left the modern omnivore vulnerable to the blandishments of supersizing, the particular nutrients he’s most likely to encounter in those supersized portions—lots of added sugar and fat—make the problem that much worse. Like most other warm-blooded creatures, humans have inherited a preference for energy-dense foods, a preference reflected in the sweet tooth shared by most mammals. Natural selection predisposed us to the taste of sugar and fat (its texture as well as taste) because sugars and fats offer the most energy (which is what a calorie is) per bite. Yet in nature—in whole foods—we seldom encounter these nutrients in the concentrations we now find them in in processed foods: You won’t find a fruit with anywhere near the amount of fructose in a soda, or a piece of animal flesh with quite as much fat as a chicken nugget.
You begin to see why processing foods is such a good strategy for getting