Michael Pollan: Supermarket Secrets

the supermarket is a very treacherous environment if you're trying to eat well or eat healthily it's a very sophisticated landscape that's been designed to extract as many dollars from your wallet as possible everything from the music the number of beats in the music you hear to the location of products on the shelves to the layout of the whole thing is designed to get you to buy as much as possible so for example the milk will always be the maximum number of paces from the door and the reason is that most people want to go get a quart of milk and they want them to pass as many other things on the way as possible so the path to the milk will have many many temptations along it the height of items in the supermarket the eye level is the most profitable items the highest markup lower profit items that might be better for you or at the bottom so you'll always see the highly processed cereals up here maybe the oatmeal less process less profitable down here in general the supermarket is laid out so Whole Foods are on the perimeter by Whole Foods I mean unprocessed real food whether it's produce milk fish meat and in the middle is the most profitable highly processed junk food so one way to navigate the food market if you're concerned about your health and you're trying to avoid eating a lot of junk is try to shop along the edges and try not to go into the middle or go into the middle as little as possible and you'll do a lot better you

Channel: NourishLife

Views: 364,289

Rating: 4.9210157 out of 5

Keywords: michael, pollan, supermarket, shopping, tips, grocery, store, food, community, nourish, health, organic, sustainable, education, educational, eating, youth, young people, sustainability, junk food, fast food, obesity, diabetes, diet, nutrition

Id: snP40-unO0A

Length: 1min 48sec (108 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Whenever I enter a large store, I turn left. The reason is that my natural inclination, and the natural inclination of most people (based on personal observation, esp. in first person shooters), is to turn right. By turning left, you take yourself on an alternate route where you are less likely to encounter items displayed to convince you that you want them. I don't know if this saves me money, but it certainly costs nothing, and you're at least ducking out of some ads.

Probably the reverse in countries that drive on the left side of the road.

[u/[deleted]]

Thought pollution.

[u/FallingUp123]

You should submit this to r/LifeProTips/ as well.

[u/[deleted]]

Never shop hungry and stick to your list. Allow for one or two extra impulse buys if you want. If you come across something you'll definately need in the future that's on sale (in my case, pads or tampons, stuff like that).

Big box stores where I live sell local products, just need to take the time to look for them.

edit: I have a major sweet tooth...I buy the ingrediants and just make everything from scratch.