So, me and grocery stores are interested in two different things. The grocery store wants me to load up my cart and buy a lot of stuff. They give me a big grocery cart, because even if I only fill it 1/3 of the way, they stand to make a bunch of money off of me. They put giant ziploc bags near the bulk foods, because even if I I only fill a one-gallon bag 1/3 of the way, that is still more than I would buy if I were filling sandwich-size ziploc bags.
I think that my time in OA has made me very aware of binge eaters in our midst! In the big chain grocery stores, they sell 2-pound bags of candy that can be eaten by the handful. And there is a self-checkout lane for people who are totally ashamed of buying a 2-pound bag of candy, because you know that they are only minutes away from their binge.
It is telling that the Brian Wansink concepts work at all levels. People who buy from a humongous display of candy, can easily put two or three bags of candy in their cart, and not think they're overdoing it. As humans we are attuned to the fractions and percentages, but were are not well attuned to the baseline quantities of things. So when the forces of the universe set us up with humongous baseline quantities, we mostly go astray!
Side note, but in OA, people commonly tell the stories of their binge eating days. For example, kids who eat from a pillowcase-sized stash of assorted Halloween candy, can easily sit down and have twelve pieces of candy, and then come back for more in an hour, and do you notice how the pillowcase doesn't even look less full than when you started? That's the principle behind the Brian Wansink ideas. If we serve ourselves directly from a humongous blob of foodstuffs, then we fail. However, if the kid were to put six pieces of candy on a dinner plate, and then eat it, he woudn't overshoot the mark in nearly the same way as in the pillowcase scenario.
So, shopping at Walmart, where the candy aisle is bigger than your RV -- that in itself seems to prompt us to buy too much.
I honestly think that even going into the aisle of Whole Foods, where there are yards and yards of shelf space filled with cinnamon rolls -- I think that ALSO prompts us to go astray. Like, our lizard brain sees yards and yards of shelves filled with cinnamon rolls, and somehow assumes that buying one little package of cinnamon rolls isn't buying very much. I mean, "one little package" of cinnamon rolls, may in fact be six cinnamon rolls, and maybe the cinnamon rolls contain three days worth of sugar and fat in each one, but our brains don't work that well, and so "one little package" of cinnamon rolls seems reasonable if we are foolish enough to set foot in that aisle.
It is funny, because i like to shop at the organic market in town (which is the size of a Whole Foods), and some items are shelved in very small displays. Like, snap peas, at this time of year, are in a display basket of only three or four cups of snap peas. Because they are not very easily available, and they are costly. So, it would be weird for me to empty the whole amount into a produce bag and carry on my way. By contrast, there is a huge display of cabbage or potatoes, and I could easily throw a LOT into my cart and carry on my way.
Well, I am a natural conspiracy theorist, and I think that people are tricking us by displaying things as "fields of abundance" -- do you notice how sometimes the produce only runs one or two items deep, but the visible portion makes it seems like there are MOUNTAINS of the item. They like to trick your eye into making the shelves seem overflowing with abundance, because then I'll unconsciously buy more.
Well, that's a lot of words for one day! Done!