Misleading Advertising & Packaging of Vegan Food

Description

This movie touches on the themes of deceptive marketing and misleading advertising, healthy eating and nutritionism, cultural constructs that shape food habits, and the obesity epidemic. This movie starts off with a meeting where two marketing supervisors for Green Ridge Foods brainstorm ideas together to discuss the labelling and packaging for a new “vegan salad dressing” product. One of the marketing associates proposes adding untrue facts on the label in order to appeal to certain consumers, a tactic called “healthwashing”. He suggests using words such as natural, local, organic, pure, and homemade, in order to attract consumers’ attention. This sneaky tactic has worked in the past for the company’s previous products, so they are confident it will work again. One naive customer, Angus, learns that although consumers are provided with a large list of nutritional information, labelling can still be misleading. This distancing effect causes a lack of awareness, which is very harmful for parents who give their children food without knowing the health and nutritional aspects of the product. Another consumer happens to be a vegan named Becky. A representative of Green Ridge Foods convinces Becky to buy the salad dressing, as she was under the impression that it was vegan. However, Becky quickly learns she was tricked and fooled by the false marketing through the help of her friends, Roman and Sasha. They offer her some advice about shopping for vegan products and tell her that she should visit a farmer’s market. Becky decides to take their advice and visits “R & R Farmer’s Market”. During her visit, at first Becky was very cautious about the labels and packaging and was paranoid that deceptive marketing would yet again fool her. Becky reaches out to Rosa, the owner of the farmer’s market, who educates her about the benefits of shopping at farmer’s markets compared to shopping at conventional grocery stores.