"[Anyone] who has gotten a toddler to eat broccoli by calling them 'dinosaur trees' knows, names are better," but are fun and crazy names teaming up with technology to make certain foods more appealing? Mary Beth Albright explains the correlation between iPads and expanding our horizons in "How iPads Change Your Palate," published by National Geographic. Before reading this essay, I never would have given a thought as to how technology influences what I eat. But after absorbing the first paragraph, it really is amazing to see how eating habits have been influenced with the development of technology.
Albright's primary example in the essay is a change made by a convenience store called Sheetz. Sheetz began selling espresso drinks that were not common in the area, and they weren't selling. So Sheetz turned to electronic marketing, and they presented the drinks "with descriptors to make the drinks seem more familiar and desirable" on an electronic ordering screen. They were able to see what descriptions and names were making their products popular and could easily change the ones that were not as successful.
In addition to better sales, Sheetz were able to find out which descriptors encouraged healthy eating. Brian Wansink, author of "Mindless Eating," conducted research in 2012 using tablets to market carrots to students. "When labeled as 'X-Ray Vision Carrots,' 66 percent of carrots were eaten, as compared with 32 percent when labeled as 'Food of the Day' and 35 percent when unnamed." I was amazed to read that in one school, consumption increased by 99 percent when vegetables were named. Never would I have thought that technology could so heavily influence what I eat.
