Supermarket promotions, more junk food and pollution

Translated by Jennifer Di Giacomo

All of us, when we go to the supermarket, take a look at the promotions, those signs that invite us to buy more under the guise of saving us money, those 3x2 promotions that report fabulous discounts if we just buy more items than expected.

We try to do our best, we write our shopping list with everything we are missing and each time we promise ourselves to buy only what we really need, but punctually we arrive home full of things that then turn out to be useless in the end just because “it's on offer anyway.” Under the guise of deals, we buy food that then goes bad and produces huge food waste. We have spent our money unnecessarily; we pollute more and very often we find ourselves buying junk food.

In many cases the vast majority of the offers are really about junk food. According to a study carried out in France, “only 12% of the offers concern foods considered healthy, such as fruits, vegetables or whole grains, which should be the basis of a healthy diet and which the population often does not consume enough of.” Very often junk food is used by supermarket managers as a lure, a way to entice the general public to buy more and more while filling their carts with foods with little nutritional value.

There is too much junk food in supermarkets, unhealthy products are being passed off as miracle foods, useful to the body and convenient, capable of giving us more energy and more health. In reality, this is not the case, and we find ourselves consuming foods devoid of any nutritional quality and full of sugar, salt, and fat. Junk food is placed right where children and young people look. They are more inclined to buy ultra-processed, but very tasty foods such as French fries, hamburgers, hot dogs and so on.

In addition, too much food waste is created. We buy a lot of food, that will never be consumed. This is a food waste that in the long run impoverishes us and contributes significantly to pollution with all the problems it entails.

Moreover, according to the French study already mentioned, "Aldi, Auchan, Carrefour, Casino, Coopérative U, E. Leclerc, Intermarché, Lidl and Monoprix decide what to put on the shelves and at what price. However, their promotions encourage overconsumption of products that are harmful to health and environment. This is unacceptable." We return to reckoning with supermarket offers, which not even too covertly push us inexorably toward junk food, to the detriment of nature, environment and even our health.

In Wales, Great Britain, in 2023, it was planned to take action precisely by curbing supermarket offers and low prices of foods considered unhealthy, even preventing strategies such as “two at the price of one,” “3×2,” etc. on certain foods precisely to stop as much as possible the consumption of junk food. To prevent consumers, especially children and young people, from being driven to consume unhealthy food, it was decided not to promote certain ones at the end of the aisles or near the checkout counters, where usually younger people concentrate and find cheap foods such as potato chips, carbonated soft drinks and sauces that are harmful to health.

According to the Welsh government, the new legislation should help prevent diseases such as obesity and diabetes that are increasingly putting the frailest part of the population at risk. This is why the arrangement of food on the shelves can lead consumers to buy, even unknowingly junk food. It is more important than ever to aim for quality, healthy, unprocessed food and to build promotions and advertising campaigns focused on this type of food.

It is convenient for supermarkets to put junk food among the promotions as it is cheap and attracts consumers with false promises of healthy and environmentally friendly food, but in the end, we realize that this is not the case at all. With our choices we can change things and see healthy and ethical food among the promotions, we just have to want to.

In conclusion, we can say that the only way to stop the trap of supermarket offers and thus the purchase of junk food, is to reason with our heads, follow our shopping list, avoid being corrupted by offers and think well about what we are buying. Let us do our math well and reason before we buy something, because only in this way can we really decide if it is worth or not.

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