Excerpt of Don't Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock
(Page 3 of 4)
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Still, a lot of people were skeptical about those lawsuits.
Are the big bad corporations with all their big bad money and big bad
mind-altering advertising really so powerful that we as individuals cannot think
for ourselves anymore? Are we really so easily swayed by the simplest of
pleasant images that we'll jump at the chance to share in some of that glorious,
spring-scented, new and improved, because-you-deserve-it goodness, without a
thought about what's best for us anymore?
You tell me. Every waking moment of our lives, we swim in an
ocean of advertising, all of it telling us the same thing: Consume. Consume. And
then consume some more.
In 2003, the auto industry spent $18.2 billion telling us we
needed a new car, more cars, bigger cars. Over the last twenty-five years, the
number of household vehicles in the United States has doubled. The rate of
increase in the number of cars, vans and SUVs for personal travel has been six
times the rate of population increase. In fact, according to the Department of
Transportation, there are now, for the first time in history, more cars than
drivers in America. That's ridiculous!
Did we suddenly need so many more vehicles? Or were we
sold the idea?
We drive everywhere now. Almost nine-tenths of our daily
travel takes place in a personal vehicle. Walking, actually using the legs and
feet God gave us, accounts for appallingly little of our day-to-day getting
around. Even on trips of under one mile, according to the Department of
Transportation, we walked only 24 percent of the time in 2001 (and rode a bike
under 2 percent). Walking declined by almost half in the two decades between
1980 and 2000. In Los Angeles, you can get arrested for walking. The cops figure
if you're not in a car you can't be up to any good. If you're not in a car,
you're a vagrant. Same goes for the suburbs, where so many of us now live.
And what do you put inside that SUV, minivan or pickup truck
you're driving everywhere, other than your kids? Well, lots of stuff,
that's what. In 2002, the retail industry in this country spent $13.5 billion
telling us what to buy, and we must have been listening, because in 2003 we
spent nearly $8 trillion on all kinds of crap. That's right, trillion.
How insane is that? We are the biggest consuming culture on the planet. We buy
almost twice as much crap as our nearest competitor, Japan. We spend more on
ourselves than the entire gross national product of any nation in the world.
And all that shopping—whew, has it made us hungry. Every
year, the food industry spends around $33 billion convincing us that we're
famished. So we all climb back into our giant vehicle filled with all our stuff
from Wal-Mart, and we cruise to the nearest fast-food joint. If not McDonald's
or Burger King or Taco Bell, then a "fast casual" restaurant like Outback
Steakhouse or TGI Friday's or the Olive Garden, where they serve us portions
larger than our smallest kid, with the calories to match.
What does all that consumption do for us? Does it make us
happy? You tell me. If we were all so happy, would we be on so many drugs?
Antidepressant use in the U.S. nearly tripled in the past decade. We've
got drugs in America we can take for anything: if we're feeling too bad, too
good, too skinny, too fat, too sleepy, too wide awake, too unmanly. We've got
drugs to counteract the disastrous health effects of all our overconsumption—diet
drugs, heart drugs, liver drugs, drugs to make our hair grow back and our
willies stiff. In 2003, we Americans spent $227 billion on medications. That's a
whole lot of drugs!
This is the power of advertising at work, of billions of
hooks that've been cast into our heads in the last thirty years, billions of
messages telling us what we want, what we need and what we should do to feel
happy. We all buy into it to some degree, because none of us is as young as we'd
like to be, or as thin, or as strong.
From Don't Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock. Copyright Morgan Spurlock 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher, Putnam Publishing.
