The fast food industry in America is both influential and persuasive in the ways that they attract their millions of daily customers. Their capability to serve food in a timely matter with cheap prices allows for convenience to many people. Restaurants such as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Arby’s, Subway, Wendy’s, and more withhold information about the way they make and serve their food. Companies advertise their products with imagery from natural environments, suggesting a “farm-to-table” aesthetic. In order to make their food long lasting and ready to serve quickly, many of these chains actually put artificial ingredients, preservatives, and other chemically modified elements in their products.

This manipulation seen in the food industry, however, is no new concept to the modern world. Infact, there is a term used to describe these type of tactics known as the “health halo”. A Health Halo is the common misconception that a food is healthy based off of a single advertised health claim. This affects consumers’ impressions of the product and its nutritional value. It can be seen in a variety of fast food advertisements, such as on screen commercials and window ads. Often times, this misconception of food can lead to significant damages in human health. Because people have this mentality that the food they are eating it healthier than it really is, this can lead to an issue of overconsumption. Consumers begin to feel less guilt about the food they consume, so they also think that it is justified to eat more of it. This health halo around the food industry can be tied back to much of the reason for overweight consumers and is one of, if not the strongest, method of advertisment for large companies.

In addition to being mentally manipulating in their advertisements, large food companies also hold nothing back in being visually manipulating in their methods of persuasion as well. It hard to deny the fact that a large part of the way we perceive specific aspects of our lives is based on appearance or the way they are visually represented. To be more specific, large food companies have made it almost unrealistic to find a certain type of food appetizing without a replica image of the item to let customers know exactly what to expect from the product. If you think about it, very rarely do you see restaurants advertise for their newest seasonal drink or “limited edition burger!” without the back up of a high quality image to make the product look nearly irresistible. Because this pattern has become so common in today’s society, the manipulation through advertising has become a much larger issue than what meets the eye. According to research from an organization called Brain line that studies behavior in the brain, research estimates that eighty to eighty-five percent of our perception, learning, cognition, and activities are mediated through vision. The main purpose, therefore, of our visual perception is to help us come to appropriate responses to certain situations. Results such as these help to better explain why the appearance of products has become so important to large companies. We live in a day of age where everything we read has pictures, where everything we hear has pictures, where everything essentially has pictures. Because the way something looks appears to have such large impacts on the way consumers weigh their priorities, the battle for recognition between food companies in their advertising has continued to spiral out of control.

In a video from the director of marketing for McDonald’s, for example, Hope Bagozzi visits a local McDonald’s and orders a Quarter Pounder with cheese straight from the restaurant. Bagozzi then proceeds to take this burger to their photo shop, a place where the merchandise and food products are typically photographed for advertisement purposes, to compare it side by side with a burger that food stylists are going to craft from scratch. Through the creation process, the stylist spends several hours manipulating the way the burger shows on screen by moving up ingredients on the burger, blow drying the cheese so that it would appear to be slightly melted on the patty, and even going as far as to debate the order in which the condiments should be shown. Once the photos have been taken in the perfect lighting with the perfect temperature, the images are passed along to an image specialist who uses photo shop to retouch any imperfections, such as holes in the bun, so that it appears, as Bagozzi states more appetizing, more convincing. When compared side by side with the real burger from the restaurant, the manipulated version appeared to be thicker with little to no imperfections, while the one that was not touched up by a food stylist appeared to be flattened and bland. This, therefore, just goes to show how easy it can be for large food companies to visually manipulate their products for consumers